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Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Fountains
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the greatest and most influential sculptor of his age. Endlessly inventive and gifted with extraordinary skill, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that perfectly expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama ... characterize his remarkable portraits and his world-famous Roman fountains.
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini played an important role in the creation of some of Italy's finest sculpture, fountains, and architecture. He lived from 1598-1680 and was the son of a sculptor, Pietro Bernini. Gian Lorenzo was born in Naples, but his family moved to Rome while he was still a child. In his early 20s, Bernini was already producing notable fountains for his first patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese and he was to receive papal patronage for much of his career, resulting in contributions to the design of some of Rome's finest religious buildings and fountains, including St. Peter's Basilica.
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When he was less than twenty years old, Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved this marble boy with a dragon for the palace of Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII. Even at this young age, Bernini was such a skilled marble sculptor that he could differentiate the textures of pudgy flesh, soft hair, waves of water, and dragon scales. A hole in the dragon's mouth shows that the sculpture was used as a fountain.
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Bernini's first fountain was the Barcaccia, a beautiful fountain built at the base of the Trinita dei Monti in Piaza di Spagna. To this day, this area is filled with Roman citizens and visiting tourists who enjoy conversation and each other's company by the falling water. Bernini himself would undoubtedly be pleasantly surprised by the streets surrounding his fountain which now houses some of the cities most stylish boutiques. This first fountain of Bernini's career dates from about 1630 and was originally commissioned by Pope Ubano VIII. the concept of this fountain is based on an enormous ship, slowly sinking into the Mediterranean. Writings from the period suggest it is a memorial to those citizens whom lost their lives in the great flood of the Tevere, which covered the entire area in a blanket of water near the end of the 16th century.
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For Pope Urban VIII Bernini created the Triton Fountain (1642-1643) in the square where the Barberini had their palace. Its design is sheer fantasy. Four sinuous dolphins turn up their tails to support a giant two-sided sea-shell on which is seated a triton blowing a conch. Though the fountain is architectural in scale, it remains sculptural in concept. Throughout the whole mass there is not a straight line or a right angle. There is no division between the parts that are organic and those that are inorganic: all are equally undulant, equally alive.
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According to the Kimball, the 32-inch high sculpture was almost certainly made as a presentation model for Pope Innocent X Pamphili, who in 1651 commissioned Bernini to design a new centerpiece for the fountain at the south end of Piazza Navona. A few years earlier, in 1648-51, Bernini had designed the Fountain of the Four Rivers, topped by a monumental obelisk, as the focal point of the refurbished piazza. Bernini's first two designs for the south fountain, consisting of a shell and fish, and tritons and dolphins, were rejected by the Pope, who in 1653 gave the instruction instead to "decorate more adequately the old fountain of Piazza Navona … with some other figure which by its height and size will match the surrounding ones with greater nobility." The result was the now famous Fountain of the "Moor" (a nickname it acquired in the 18th century). These fountains, together with the new façade of the Pamphili family palace and the church of Sant'Agnese by Francesco Borromini constructed around the same time, transformed Piazza Navona into one of the grandest sculptural and architectural expressions of the Roman Baroque. It remains today one of the most visited tourist destinations in Italy.
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