Group from a Fountain

Among Bernini’s best-known creations are two fountains on the Piazza Navona in Rome: the Fountain of the Four Rivers with the obelisk, in the middle of the square, and the Fontana del Moro on the south side. The latter was constructed on the site of a fountain that had been built there in 1574–1576. In place of the “Moro”, Bernini originally planned a Triton group for the centre of the basin. The clay model in Berlin, which survives as a fragment, gives a sense of what it would have looked like. A design drawing preserved at Windsor Castle shows that the temperamentally agitated bodies of the two mythic hybrid sea creatures were each to have been borne up by two dolphins, from whose mouths the water would have flowed. Despite its fragmentary state, the sheer vividness of the Berlin bozzetto makes Bernini’s mastery in modelling and in physiognomic characterization fully apparent.