Ioannes Donatus registered as a Rialto Trader in 1090 and set sail for the Near East to import marvellous Byzantine fabrics. Ioannes was an ancestor of the Venetian Donà dalle Rose family which, since their origins around the year 1000, was immensely active in fervent trading with the magical Orient.
Today, his descendants have decided to bring out of the paintings the décors which enchant us most, “sampling” this classical vocabulary with the camp intention to make "art by yards", to create contemporary fabrics that have textures and patinas of the old ones, but without their fatal fragility, inspired by Paolo Veneziano, Vivarini, Beato Angelico, Bellini, and, more specifically, the painted robes of Venetian dignitaries and Doges. The CINQUECENTO Collection is presented at the Paris BIENNALE des EDITEURS with a pattern directly drawn from our archives, and sampled on linen sergés and silk velvets.
Pomegranates and golden lilies, entangled bunches of grapes, precious stones and painted tiaras discovered on the attire of primitive Madonnas. Celestial figures, clouds and gold flames, ornamental mysteries magically superimposed upon shadowy backgrounds. Symbols and colours courageously painted in old palazzoes relive again magically .
Introduction to an ancient story in which royal eagles and tempestuous lagoons intersect, reverberating water courses, runic symbols, glittering diamond mounts, the BYZANTINE Collection is characterised by a rigorous selection of decorative forms and the use of premium quality raw fabrics - some of which specially weaved - sourced from Flanders, Egypt and the distant hills of Transylvania. The exclusive printing processes confer the particular patina proper to oil-painting and organic glues, as if hand-painted and already consumed by time although preserving a unique texture and chromatic tonality.
This is indeed how Donatus expresses constant innovation, incorporating ideas from a creative collaboration with avant-garde guest artists responding to an irresistible urge to surprise, create and transform the world with instinctive visions. The “skin fabrics” ®, for example, were inspired by scientific progress in the field of human skin repair, and the digitals prints of blown up tattoes on silk also give a contemporary dimension to ancient archaic signs and representative symbols of ancestral emotions
The careful research carried out by Donatus Venetian Fabrics over years of study and experimentation imparts the fabrics in the collections with an original and abstract beauty coherent with contemporary concepts of interior design and an innate need for home decoration. This passion is born out of a natural desire to develop aesthetic solutions that nourish body and spirit; from a vision of pure and eternal beauty, still a fundamental necessity, even on the eve of the third millennium.
DONATUS.VENETIAN.FABRICS . PALAZZO DONA’. 5101 FONDAMENTE NOVE . 30131 VENEZIA