The "Godfather" of Fountain Design
Three Additional Fountains by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
The originality of the Barcaccia meant that the 16th century concept of a public fountain, in which the architecture was totally divorced from the water, was now at an end. The idea of a "lifeless" artifact had been replaced by one in which the artist had successfully instilled a quality of movement into the shape of the pool. The "cold" geometrical lines that had so far been the norm was replaced by a more fluid form. This resulted in a perfect amalgam of content and container, of water and stone.
Other attempts to achieve such a synthesis had already been made early in the 15th century with the so-called "rustic fountains." These fountains were built for the enormous "villas" (country or suburban estates) belonging to the nobility of Rome. Here the artist was able to give his imagination free rein and create a great heap of rocks, usually at the far end of an avenue, where the water falling from a height was in itself enough to enliven every inch of the precipice whose nooks and crannies were almost always dotted with statues of rivers or sea monsters. Nevertheless, although these fountains gave the water a far more important part to play against the background of a highly imaginative "natural" stage, the role allotted to statues and sculptures was still negligible, as the artist continued to see them as purely decorative.
The unlimited scope for invention that these rustic fountains offered to the architect formed the stock on which Gian Lorenzo Bernini's forceful and wildly imaginative personality was grafted. At times we may catch Bernini making exact copies of other people's work or repeating his own until we are almost bored to death with it; indeed, this happens so often that we could even speak of the "lively monotony" of his themes. In spite of this, here we have an architect who was to seek a more perfect harmony by turning the relationship between architecture and sculpture upside down. In the typical rustic fountain, architecture had been all important; the sculptures were only there as ornamentation. Bernini was to integrate his figures of humans and animals into the scene by making it their function to produce the water, though the scene he set gave only the slightest hint of a natural world that was more or less real.
With this formal balance, in which architecture and sculpture function equally, Gian Lorenzo is expressing what I believe to be his conception of a "fountain": water that springs from a "live" creature, the creature itself rising, but not completely leaving, the naturalistic underworld; or to put it the other way around, formless brutal nature rising into the life-giving element, water, in the shape of a creature that is half man, half beast.
