A quickening of tempo appears in the figures of the four river gods created by Bernini on the fountain in the center of the Piazza Navona when compared with Giovanni Bologna’s figures on the Fountain of Oceanus in the Boboli Garden. In Tribolo’s river god at the Villa Corsini, Bernini had an even closer possible prototype for his sprawling figures, representing the four continents of the world thrown into attitudes of wonder at beholding the obelisk erected by the munificence of Innocent X. In this instance, the figures are of white marble, contrasting with their rocky setting, as in Montorsoli’s rustic fountain of the triton at Genoa. The allegory of the four river gods follows a long Florentine tradition, which commenced in 1536 with the temporary figures erected at the Ponte Santa Trinita in honor of Charles V, and was continued by Montorsoli and Francesco Camilliani.
For the triton he modeled in 1633 for the center of a fountain erected in the late sixteenth century at one end of the great Piazza Navona, Bernini
chose the old motif of a figure with a spouting dolphin. The standing central figure dominating lesser creatures of the sea, present in so many Tuscan fountains, is here brought to perfection, not only in the naturalism and impetuous motion of the statue but also in its fitness, through the torsion of the body as the central ornament to a freestanding fountain. The skillful use of contrapposto, the intensity of the facial expression, and the tossing of the tousled locks reinforce the impression of impassioned movement.
The pathos and agitation of baroque sculpture, like that of Scopas in antiquity, seem particularly adapted to the representation of the restless creatures of the sea. At first glance, it may seem a far cry from the Neptunes of Ammannati and Giovanni Bologna, with their hard modeling, to the freedom and verve of this figure. Still, Bernini’s triumph would have been impossible without the long and arduous research of the Florentine sculptors of the previous century in the problems presented by a figure placed at the center of a freestanding fountain.
Two of Bernini’s isolated fountains are decorated with central figures of tritons spouting upward through a conch shell — the lost fountain of the Villa Mattei, constructed about 1629, known only from an etching in Falda, and the famous Fontana del Tritone, erected in the Piazza Barberini in 1640. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the motif of the triton spouting upward was known to Florentine sculptors in the Cinquecento, and was even utilized as the central motif over freestanding fountains.
In his later and more monumental triton fountain, Bernini rejected the plurifacial treatment of his Tuscan prototypes for a simpler frontal conception more in keeping with the colossal proportions of his figure. His use of travertine as a medium is particularly happy. Darkened by the water and overgrown with moss till it seems a part of nature, this stone dissolves into the surrounding atmosphere more readily than the white marble commonly used at Florence.
