The Netherlands gets its first Bernini

The Rijksmuseum has been given a permanent loan of a sculpture of Triton by 17th century sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini from a private collector. This is the only sculpture by the Italian Baroque master in the Netherlands. The sculpture is 28 inches high and made of terracotta. It depicts the mythological son of Poseidon standing on a conch shell. A dolphin with a wide-open mouth emerges from between his legs while Triton holds its tail.

It was created by Bernini in 1653 as a scale study for the fountain on the south end of Piazza Navona in Rome, known as the Fontana del Moro. Triton turns towards the central fountain, the Fountain of the Four Rivers. The Fountain of the Four Rivers was designed by Bernini in 1651, a new centerpiece of the piazza that had once been Domitian’s chariot-racing stadium.

Pope Innocent X Pamphili later commissioned him to modernize the fountains at the north and south ends as well, and the Fontana del Moro was located right across from the Pope’s Pamphili family palace. Bernini’s Triton brought dynamic movement and a thematic connection from the Pamphili Palace’s end of the piazza to the focal point in the center by positioning the sea deity as if he’s being swept by the wind towards the Four Rivers. Bernini created the study and his assistant Giovanni Antonio Mari then sculpted the actual marble statue in the fountain using the study as his model.

The original Triton study was overlooked for centuries. It was in the private collection of the Chigi family for generations, but its high quality was obscured by a thick layer of dark overpaint. A restoration in 2018 removed the layers of paint, revealing Bernini’s exceptional grasp of detail and expression.

There is a second terracotta model of this figure by Bernini that is in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It’s a more finely detailed version (albeit missing an arm), and scholars believe Bernini made it as a gift for the pope after the completion of the fountain. The original study model was a work product used for reference by Bernini’s assistant, not a glamorous presentation piece. Bernini even charged the Pope for it, listing a “modello fatto da me” (“model made by me”) in the invoice for the Fontana del Moro in 1655.