Resumen de La vasca del "Sansone" del Giambologna e il "Tritone" di Battista Lorenzi in un'inedita storia di duplicati: (con una nota sul "Miseno" di Stoldo per la villa dei Corsi)
This article aims to study some problems regarding two different Cinquecento Florentine fountains, whose destinies unexpectedly crossed each other in seventeenth-century Spain. During the 1560s Giambologna executed the renowned marble "Fountain of Samson and the Philistine" for the prince Francesco de Medici's Casino di San Marco. Roughly in the same decade, Battista Lorenzi sculpted a "Fountain of a Triton playing a trumpet", which was shipped to Palermo and placed in the gardens of the Viceroyal Palace. For this reason, my article also discusses the origin of the "Trumpet" player theme in the Florentine Mannerist sculpture, bringing to light the marble "Misenus" playing a trumpet, sculpted by Stoldo Lorenzi for the villa of the Corsi family in Sesto Fiorentino. In 1601 the Giambologna's fountain was sent to Spain, as a diplomatic gift for the Duke of Lerma, and displayed in the villa of Ribera in Valladolid. In 1623 only the "Samson" group was donated by Philip IV to Prince Charles Stuart and sent to England, while the basin remained in Spain. The statue is today preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum of London. It seems that in 1644 the viceroy of Sicily Juan Alonso Enríquez de Cabrera, returning to Sapin, took possession of the Palermo "Triton", and perhaps commissioned a replacement copy, which should be the statue currently preserved in the Museo Archeologico of Palermo. The Battista Lorenzi's original, instead, should have entered into the Spanish royal collections, probably as a gift. Between 1654 and 1656 it was placed on the Giambologna's basin: from this artistic "marriage" a new "Fountain of Triton" was created and displayed in front of the equestrian statue of Philip IV in the Buen Retiro "Jardín de la Reina". During the 1660s, the Earl of Sandwich saw this fountain there and ordered a drawing of it for his personal journal; and in that place an anonymous artist depicted it, as we can see in a drawing of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. At the same time a copy of the Giambologna's basin was commissioned in order to put on it the Jongelinck's bronze "Bacchus", in the wave of the new decorative works for the Arajuez "Jardín de la Isla"; and it still is there. The Giambologna's basin and Battista Lorenzi's "Triton" lived together in this "accrochage" at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The napoleonic Wars, and the resulting destruction of the Buen Retiro, caused the dispersion of this fountain. Only the statue of Lorenzi reappears in Casa de Campo gardens, as we can see in an illustrative engraving in an early twentieth century booklet; after that we have no information about it. Ironically enough, both the seventeenth century copies of the "Triton" and of the basin survive respectively in Aranjuez and in Palermo. These copies are the only evidence -together with the drawings- of the lost originals. As an appendix of the article, I analyze the English story of the Giambologna's "Samson", which still remains somehow unclear, and I suggest a cautious interpretation of the problematic transfers of the statue's property during the seventeenth century.
