There is, perhaps no more solid , stable, and material art than architecture, and no more ethereal, evanescent, and volatile element than water. When the two combine, it is often for effects of singular magnificence and mystery. Water is spirit; feminine quicksilver to masculine sobriety. Fountains, cascades, channels, and pools are the supreme aesthetic grand geste that has traditionally completed the greatest building schemes of every age.
—Engraving, fountain
Villa Aldobrandini
Frascati , Lazio, Italy
Della Porta, Giacomo more
1598-1603
Photograph
Negative number: 718/63/23A
Copyright: © Courtauld Institute of Art Read More:http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/e85dda6b.html
Whether it takes the form of an extravagant baroque torrent or a serene Asian pool, the character of water is primarily sensuous, and its pleasures are visual and auditory. It adds extra dimensions, to the customarily static three dimensions of building. It is a performance and a show. Its playful, changeable range runs from the breathtakingly theatrical to the mysteriously subtle. It is capable of broad jokes and tenuous elegancies. Above all, it is an unparalleled instrument of grandeur and romance.
—Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700–1777).
The Cascade at the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati
Pen and brown and black ink, brown wash, black and red chalk, heightened with white, on light brown paper, 1762
As Director of the French Academy in Rome from 1751 to 1775, Charles-Joseph Natoire required his pupils to go outdoors to draw landscapes, despite their preference for the more prestigious subjects of history painting. Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert were among those inspired by his enthusiasm for open-air sketches of ruins and gardens. Natoire gave this drawing to the Marquis de Marigny, Surintendant of Buildings, Arts, Gardens, and Industries of France. It typifies the spontaneity of many of Natoire’s drawings, in which varied staffage and ordinary action deformalize the magnificence of an earlier era.
Read More:http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collectionsEnlarge.asp?id=590
Because it is often non-functional, water is the one design element with which the architect can be singularly free. A pretty pond, or a cleverly incorporated stream, may be a bonus and even radically alter the architect’s scheme, but they must bring them into existence to make them qualify as examples of this highly arbitrary and artificial art. The deeper implications suggest evanescent joys, cleansing of the spirit, the transience of perfection, the insubstantiality of dreams, the flowing continuity of life, and a consummate fleeting beauty- impermanent, like all great romantic beauties, and therefore more beautiful than the tangible and real.
The central fountain, Fontana dei Quatro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) was sculpted by the famous Baroque artist Bernini in 1651. It represents the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges and the Plata – mayor rivers of the four continents that were known at the time.
There’s also meaning to the way the fountain is sculpted. For example, the figure representing the Nile has a hand shielding his eyes. This is reference to the fact that at this time the source of the Nile was still undiscovered.—The Fountain of Four Rivers at Piazza Navona.
Photo by Bruce_of_Oz via Flickr.—Read More:http://www.romecitytrip.com/sights/piazza-navona
In its greatest expressions, water transcends and transforms architecture. The Piazza Navona in Rome did not become a classic example of a great urban architectural space until the open plaza and all of its buildings were given scale, focus and meaning, by Bernini’s magnificently exuberant Fountain of the Four Rivers in the seventeenth-century, and until the statuary and basins of the two side fountains were completed in the following years.
—Vue de Salle de Bal ou Bosquet des Rocailles dans les jardins de Versailles
Jean Cotelle (le Jeune)— Read More:http://www.marlymachine.org/mfountain1.htm
At Versailles there is a bosquet, or clump of trees, arranged as an open air ballroom; an architectural space hollowed out of nature, its stepped walls were defined originally by cascades, with dry tiers of seats for musicians and observers and a marble dance floor at its base for the king and his court.
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