Unique in the Netherlands: Rijksmuseum receives naked water god by Italian artist Bernini

A stone statue that seems to move miraculously over a water surface: it is typically an idea of ​​the thousand artist of the Italian Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). He invented it for a fountain in Piazza Navona in Rome, for which he sculpted a model in terracotta in 1653. This 72 centimeter high statue of the water god Triton can be seen from Wednesday in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as a permanent loan from a private individual, installed in the room dedicated to 17th-century Dutch painters who traveled to Italy. Except for two drawings recently attributed to him in Teylers Museum in Haarlem and one drawing in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen that may be by Bernini, there are no works by Bernini in Dutch public collections. With the Triton, the Rijksmuseum now shows the only sculpture by this artist in the Netherlands.

The model beautifully shows how Bernini envisioned a small-scale, yet to be executed, larger-than-life marble statue of a naked man in a moving pose. Triton stands with both feet on a large bell horn, his upturned face with chubby cheeks, pronounced lips and long sideburns is surrounded by a thick head of hair that seems to be blown forward by the wind. His body is twisted because with both hands to the left of his body he is holding the tail of a large fish whose large, monstrous head emerges from behind through the man’s legs. The animal’s mouth was intended for the water flow of the fountain.

The artist was able to experiment in the soft (later baked) clay with the complex composition and the different textures of the skin of humans and fish, and the surfaces of shell and rock, in which spatulas and, it seems, even fingerprints here and there to be recognised. Bernini must have made many more such models, but not all of them have been preserved.

Main artist

Bernini is undisputedly the most important artist of 17th-century Rome. As an architect and sculptor commissioned by popes and aristocrats, he left his mark on the city with palaces and churches, statues and fountains that still determines its appearance. One of his major projects is the decoration of Piazza Navona, an oval square that follows the shape of the Imperial Stadium of Domitian. In the center, Bernini created the famous Four Rivers Fountain (1651) for Pope Innocent

At the two ends of the square there were already two water basins with relatively modest sculpture decoration. Over time, both would be equipped with a large, central figure. Bernini was called in again for the fountain on the south side. His design for Triton standing on a shell, wrestling with a fish, would eventually be executed in marble by assistant Giovanni Antonio Mari. Because of the figure’s supposedly African or ‘Moorish’ facial features, the fountain soon came to be known as ‘Fontana del Moro’. The fountain on the north side would only have a statue of Neptune in the 19th century.

In 2002, a model by Bernini’s hand for this figure emerged, an 80 cm high terracotta statue that is now in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. It is probably a copy that Bernini made of the completed image, as a gift to his clients. The slightly smaller model that is now on display in Amsterdam appears less finished and therefore looser, more dynamic and expressive. It therefore probably represents an earlier stage in the work process. For a long time, the work was overlooked by Bernini specialists because it was in the private collection of the Roman Chigi family and was also covered with a bronze-colored overpaint. After the work was restored, it was shown to a larger audience for the first time five years ago in the Rijksmuseum exhibition Caravaggio-Bernini. Baroque in Rome.

The rare terracotta model, now on permanent loan to the museum, will have formed the basis for a plaster cast that was later used to make the much larger marble statue. As on special occasions the whole Piazza Navona under water was placed, in a theatrical baroque spectacle, it would have seemed as if Triton was actually gliding over the water.

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