AND ANOTHER THING
Let us have more fountains to raise our parched spirits!
PAUL JOHNSON
Ihave been painting a lot of fountains recently and the experience has revivified my passion for this most ancient, spiritual and delightful of aquatic toys. Just outside my hotel in Buenos Aires, on the Avenida 9 Julio, the world's widest street, with 20 traf- fic lanes and two garden strips, I found a tremendous bronze thing spouting 30 lively jets. I painted this beauty surrounded by jacaranda trees which were in full bloom and, thanks be to God, made a success of it. I also succeeded with an endearing little fountain I found in the Generalife Gardens in Granada last month, in which masses of water appears to gush from the solid rock, over a cheeky boy riding a dolphin. And I had pleasure, last week, in presenting Mau- rice Saatchi with a framed watercolour I did in the summer of a charming fountain which adorns the gardens of his country house in Sussex.
The boy-and-dolphin fountain in the Generalife is, of course, later than Moorish times. Islam did not go in for busy, tumul- tuous fountains. The Muslim architects of the Middle Ages designed water-gardens to make the point that the display of water, a precious liquid in short supply, was an attribute of power. In the Alhambra, the jets are minimal, and keep the water flow- ing so stealthily that the pools it feeds are mirrors to the light, including moonlight, in the courts where they are set. In the late 14th century, Mohammed V built one of the finest of all fountains, with a scheme symbolising the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. In the middle is a vast basin, about 14 feet in diameter, supported by 12 lions in greyish marble, and fed by innumerable small jets. As an example of the placid fountain type, there is nothing better in the world, and as I watched it last month I gradually became mesmerised by its trickles and gurgles and almost invisible move- ments, so that I quite forgot to paint it until it was time to go. It is a melancholy fact that no fountain can ever be drawn from memory.
Personally, I like a busy fountain, prefer- ably a big one, with monumental sculpture and a resounding architectural background. By this criterion, you cannot beat the Trevi in Rome, which Nicola Salvi built in the 1730s. This has an enormous nine-bay backdrop, as well as impressive figures, and the water cascades, foams, gushes and storms. But it lacks charm. I prefer the big Bernini Four Riyers fountains in the Piazza Navona, my favourite Roman square — or oblong — built over an old Roman hippo- drome. The jets are full-throated and tumultuous, and the sculpture is wonderful- ly self-confident — Bernini, that jovial mas- ter of Baroque exuberance, at his best. But the trouble with the Piazza Navona is that it attracts horrible people. Disgusting pop concerts are held there and make the night hideous. A friend, who had a flat with a spectacular view over it, had to get out because she was unable to sleep. Young thugs congregate and swarm over the foun- tains. The last time I was there, one of them knocked a chunk off the sculpture with his boots, an outrage which nobody seemed to care about. No doubt if this kind of thing continues, the originals will be replaced by glass-fibre replicas, and then the magic of an ancient haunt of beauty will be gone.
Years ago, I painted a fine fountain in Perugia, that hilly town where they make the best chocolates in Europe. It was designed by Pisano and is late 13th-century, with little carved figures and columns in statuesque array, but there are not enough jets and the water lacks force, as it usually does with fountains of mediaeval origin. More energetic is the Fountain of Joy in Siena, the work of the learned Jacopo della Quercia, one of my favourite early Renais- sance sculptors. It pays tribute to the Vir- gin, who emerges from the storm-tossed waters flanked by Virtues. I painted this too, but have lost or given away the result.
When I first went to Italy, in 1948, there were many more fountains than now, including innumerable little wayside ones, of no architectural or sculptural impor- tance, designed simply to refresh travellers and thirsty horses with their copious flow, but often memorable in their rustic simplic- ity. Many have been carelessly swept away by road improvements, the Italians being great destroyers as well as creators of beau- ty. Rome itself, the fountain-capital of the world, has lost much of its matchless collec- tion over the centuries. Mussolini disliked them, believing they encouraged idleness and interfered with his programme to velo- cizzare l'Italia I read in that wonderful compendium of aesthetic information, Grove's Dictionary of Art, that Agrippa, in charge of Rome's waterworks in the 1st century BC, not only built marvellous aqueducts to get the water supply to Rome but added 500 fountains and 700 basins and pools to distribute it. Where are these fountains now? In classi- cal works, such as Pausanias's Guide to Greece, over 1,000 fountains are separately identified, of which only a handful still exist. A few have been replaced but the vast majority are gone for ever, replaced by invisible underground pipes which leak horribly, are no more hygienic and are no fun at all.
If I were a really rich man, I would design a huge, torrential fountain, with bronze sculptures by my two favourite artists in this genre, Gerald Laing and Leonie Gibbs — the theme would be 'St Michael and his Angels Put to Flight the Darwinian Fundamentalists' — and present it to the citizens of London. It would go very well in a site I know not far from the sinister Serpentine Gallery, where the police sometimes have to cover up the win- dows so that children cannot peer in and be shocked. My fountain would show the little ones how dramatic real-action sculpture can be when animated by living waters, and there would be a basin of softly flowing eddies where they could sail their paper boats.
London lacks fountains. Come, ye big cheeses of the City, endow some more! Give us nozzles and spouts, sprinklers and spargers, spurtles and sprays, jets, gushers and squirts, showering with sparkling waters armies of Neptunes and nymphs, Juturnas and Egerias, Holy Virgins, laugh- ing devils and libidinous satyrs, to delight our parched senses and raise our spirits!
In the meantime, I am looking for a table-fountain to astonish our dinner guests. A friend of mine in Cockermouth — a good name for a fountain town, come to think of it — discovered locally an elaborate speci- men from the early electrical age, 1890s or thereabouts. It was dismantled but nonethe- less complete. She despaired of getting it in working order again until she happened upon an electrician of genius, who rose to the challenge and soon had this marvellous contraption lit up and playing merrily. How I envy her! Does any reader know where such a thing is to be had today?
Previous page
