Garden Wall Fountains Decorated with Columns and Sculpture
From Vasari's description of the common garden wall fountains, we know that they were decorated with columns and sculpture. A letter written by Tanai de' Medici when Ammannati was too ill to see Duke Francesco concerning the figures is more specific. There were six marble statues in all, two of which were to be placed in niches on either side of a "door", the Florence with flowers in her girdle, holding arrows aloft, now in the Boboli Garden, and a male figure of Prudence, with an anchor and a dolphin, in the courtyard of the Bargello. Within the central arch reclined the river god Arno and a female figure personifying Hippocrene, the wall fountain of the Muses, both now in the Boboli Garden; and between them stood a figure of Ceres pressing her breast, now in the courtyard of the Bargello.
Above the arch sat two garden wall fountains, now lost, featuring a relief of Juno, flanked by her peacocks. Perhaps the latter were the bronze statues mentioned by Vasari. In brief, the whole signified that from the earth (Ceres), aided by the air (Juno), arose the rivers and the springs. We are reminded of the allegory in the Garden Wall Fountains of the Labyrinth at Castello, or of the contemporary murals in the Sala degli Elemen! in the Palazzo Vecchio. The iconographies of the Arno are traditional garden wall fountains, and the attributes of the Hippocrene are similar to those of the figures of Hippocrene upon Francesco Camilliani's garden wall fountain in the Piazza della Pretoria at Palermo. The placing of the bird baths between the legs recalls Tribolo's earlier river god birdbath at the Villa Corsini at Castello.
Apparently these garden wall fountains belonged to the elaborate, triple niche type with which Ammannati had already experimented in his public garden wall fountains for Julius III, but it is difficult to reconstruct the arrangement of the four figures within the arch or rainbow containing the river gods and the figure of Ceres in a rectangular division of a classical facade. The portion of the arch which still adheres to the statues of the river gods is certainly not part of a perfect circle. Perhaps it belonged to a lyre-shaped figure, resembling in general contour the bronze knockers with standing figures in the center, which are common in collections of Venetian bronzes and garden wall fountains of the time. One of these, in the collection of the Schlossmuseum in Berlin.
This conjecture seems to me to agree with the silhouette of the garden wall fountain as set up on the terrace, seen in a detail from the Boboli lunette of 1599. Another problem is the treatment of the water. The nostrils of the dolphin and the breasts of the Ceres both show borings for pipes; but the urns of the river gods are not pierced, although Ammannati had probably originally so designed them. Did the artist plan to have the water conveyed from the level of one of the central figures to the others in some way, thus paralleling the allegory, as Tribolo had done at Castello? Such ponderings as to the general designof the garden wall fountains lead nowhere; and meanwhile we have before us the five statues.
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