Where did Fountains Originate from?
Where did Fountains Originate from? The amazing or decorative effect of a fountain is just one of the purposes it fulfills, in addition to delivering drinking water and adding a decorative touch to your property.The central purpose of a fountain was originally strictly practical. People in cities, towns and villages received their drinking water, as well as water to bathe and wash, via aqueducts or springs in the area. Up to the late nineteenth century, water fountains had to be near an aqueduct or reservoir and more elevated than the fountain so that gravity could make the water flow downwards or jet high into the air. Acting as an element of adornment and celebration, fountains also supplied clean, fresh drinking water. The main materials used by the Romans to build their fountains were bronze or stone masks, mostly depicting animals or heroes. During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Moorish garden designers included fountains in their designs to mimic the gardens of paradise. The fountains seen in the Gardens of Versailles were meant to show the power over nature held by King Louis XIV of France. The Romans of the 17th and 18th centuries created baroque decorative fountains to glorify the Popes who commissioned them as well as to mark the location where the restored Roman aqueducts entered the city.
Urban fountains built at the end of the nineteenth served only as decorative and celebratory ornaments since indoor plumbing provided the necessary drinking water. Fountains using mechanical pumps instead of gravity helped fountains to deliver recycled water into living spaces as well as create unique water effects.
Embellishing city parks, honoring people or events and entertaining, are some of the functions of modern-day fountains.
The First Modern Outdoor Wall Fountains
The First Modern Outdoor Wall Fountains The translation of hundreds of classic Greek documents into Latin was commissioned by the scholarly Pope Nicholas V who led the Church in Rome from 1397 until 1455. He undertook the embellishment of Rome to turn it into the model seat of the Christian world.
In 1453 the Pope commissioned the reconstruction of the Aqua Vergine, an ancient Roman aqueduct which had carried clean drinking water into the city from eight miles away. The ancient Roman tradition of marking the arrival point of an aqueduct with an magnificent celebratory fountain, also known as a mostra, was restored by Nicholas V. The present-day site of the Trevi Fountain was formerly occupied by a wall fountain commissioned by the Pope and built by the architect Leon Battista Alberti. The water which eventually provided the Trevi Fountain as well as the renown baroque fountains in the Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Navona came from the modified aqueduct which he had renovated.