Drawings for the great fountains of Rome and Paris

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Marilyn Symmes

Urban fountains embodying symbolic, artistic, and cultural ideas attest to the ability of designers to transform solid monuments into vibrantly changeable works of art. In some fountains, architecture and sculpture visually dominate the decorative sprays, jets, flows, or cascades of water. In others, the action of water is paramount.

Writing about the sensual pleasures and visual marvels of the then-novel fountains in Roman gardens, the humanist Claudio Tolomei wrote in a letter dated July 26, 1543:

But what pleases me more in these new fountains is the variety of ways with which they guide, divide, turn, lead, break, and at one movement cause water to descend and at another time to rise.

In the same letter he also remarked on

the ingenious skill newly rediscovered to make fountains, in which mixing art with nature, one can't judge if it [the fountain] is the work of the former or the latter; thus, one appears a natural artefact and another, man-made nature. Thus they strive nowadays to assemble a fountain that appears to be made by nature, not by accident but with masterful art.(1)

Tolomei's perceptions about fountain design are still true today.

Since the Renaissance, and even in our own age of computer design, artists and designers have used drawings to develop aesthetic possibilities. Thus surviving drawings for the Triton [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] and Trevi (Pl. VI) Fountains in Rome, completed in 1643 and 1762, respectively, and the Fontaine des Quatre Saisons and the fountains in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, completed in 1745 and 1840, respectively (see frontispiece, Pl. IX, and [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 5, 6 OMITTED], reveal much about the evolution of these fountains.

The inventive genius of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the outstanding Italian sculptor of the seventeenth century, is revealed in his drawings. The sole surviving drawing for a fountain that can be firmly attributed to Bernini's own hand suggests the powerful torso he envisioned for the Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. It is a vital clue to Bernini's intention to create a liberating sense of movement in the figure. Built for his patron, Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini; 1568-1644), the Triton Fountain transformed what had been an everyday fountain into the eloquent glorification of a sea god and of papal rule. While the Triton was often an ornamental feature of fountains, Bernini infused a convincing vigor into the mythological creature, half man, half fish, whom Neptune summoned to blow the conch so mightily that even the most distant storm-tossed waves would hear the command to subside. Perched on a scallop shell held aloft by the tails of four dolphins, the kneeling Triton blows a forceful jet upward - a hydraulic visualization of the colossal sound. At a maximum of sixteen feet, the jet was the highest in Rome in its day [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Viewers are still impressed by the jet of water shooting up before collapsing onto the Triton's magnificent torso, then running over the scallop shell that shields the papal tiara and the Barberini bees on the crest nestled between the dolphins.

The legacy of fountain design includes drawings for fountains that were proposed but never built and others that were purely imaginary conceptions. One such unrealized fountain design is part of an album of drawings by the French architect Gilles Marie Oppenord, whose inventive designs defined the French Regency style [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. An avid draftsman, he made many drawings of the antique, Renaissance, and baroque art and architecture he found in Rome while studying there in the 1690s. The drawing illustrated combines naturalism and traditional fountain design in a delightfully fresh way. Two engaging dogs, each standing on its hind legs to reach the shell supported on dolphins' tails, offer small jets of water from the sticks they hold to augment the central jet, and, below, water also gushes from the dolphins' mouths.

In 1746 Carlo Marchionni, a Roman architect, engineer, sculptor, and designer of figurative and other ornament, received a commission for his first major grand project - the design of a villa and garden embellishments for his patron, Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779). The villa was intended as a showcase for the cardinal's splendid collection of classical antiquities. Among Marchionni's accomplished designs for Albani is the drawing for a fountain that simulates a naturalistic landscape with a statue of Pegasus, a hoof raised, standing on a rocky arch over a stream (Pl. III). According to classical mythology the winged Pegasus created the first fountain by tapping his hoof and uncovering a hidden spring, which burst forth as a jet of water. The allusion to the origin of fountains would have been appreciated by Marchionni's learned patron.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome has been the most celebrated of all fountains since its completion in 1762. The water has been renowned for its purity since the aqueduct called the Aqua Virgo was first established on the site in A. D. 19 by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.(2) The location was originally at the intersection of three streets (trivium in Latin; tre vie in Italian), which probably gave the fountain its name. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the Aqua Virgo fell into disrepair, but it was restored during the ambitious building projects initiated by Nicholas V, who was pope between 1447 and 1455. As an unpretentious basin collecting water from three spouts, its modest appearance belied its importance as the city's only fountain until the completion of the Acqua Felice in 1588.(3) In 1640, at the request of Pope Urban VIII, the fountain at the Aqua Virgo aqueduct was razed, along with many surrounding houses, to make way for a new design by Bernini. However, that project, and many later ones, failed to materialize.