Plate LVI - Garden and portico
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The inner court, or garden, of the house of the second or little fountain, is here represented ; but as it is impossible for a stranger to understand what he sees when on the spot, because the area, which ought to be left open, has now been new-roofed, and the portico, which should have been covered, is left open, by a strange perversity of judgment ; the author has taken the liberty of putting a ceiling to the colonnade, by way of explaining its original state. All the rest is precisely as it now remains, in the year 1829, even to the marble table which was found on the spot. |
The figure sitting on the fountain is that of a fisherman,
of bronze, found here, and not at the last described fountain
of shells, for the accounts of the Custodi differ : it is now
in the Museum.
A cupid of bronze, carrying a goose in his arms, stood upon
the pillar in the centre of the piscina, and spouted
water.
On the nearest brink of the piscina was a Caryattis, or
rather a Venus Proserpine, according to the dissertation of
Gherard, and, near it, was a sleeping fisherman with his
baskets and a vase - and these two last were of marble. A
mask in the centre of the curve seems also to have thrown out
water. It is pretended that Agrippa first made fountains at
Rome. The bronze fisherman on the left brink of the fountain
is now in the Museum at Naples, and the bronze has acquired a
very curious and beautiful patina, different from that
usually observed. It is probable that he held a cane by way
of fishing-rod in his hand. He sits upon a rock also of
bronze.