A baroque fountain in the second most important square in the city of Brno has as its subject matter order. Order over chaos is the metaphorical meaning of the entangled sculptural group that monumentalizes the fountain. Adopting and adapting a Roman model, a mythologically built order is recreated from water, intended as the source of life. This is the Parnassus Fountain.

This monumental fountain, designed by the Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723) in 1690 and realised by the sculptors Tobias Kracker (1658–1736) and Antonín Riga (1660?–1728?) in the following years, it became one of Brno’s landmarks, located in the Zelný trh square.

The sculptural composition, named after Mount Parnassus – a mountain range near Delphi, Greece, believed to be the home of the Muses and sacred to Apollo – consists of a large pyramidal rocky cliff. Inside, around and above, a forest of sculptures climbs up the cliff, forming a grotto in the centre, open on three sides. Inside the grotto, Hercules, wielding the club and wearing the skin of a Nemean lion, leads in chain Cerberus. The three female allegorical figures are sitting on the cliff’s rocks, symbolising the three ancient empires of Greece, Babylonia, and Persia. The whole composition is then crowned at the top by the triumphant allegory of Europa as a symbol of Christianity, hence, order.

The sculptural group heroically emerges from a monumental star-shaped water tank. The plan of the water basin is formed by the central intersection of an equilateral triangle and a trilobite, thus creating a star where sharp points and hemicycles alternate.

The Parnassus Fountain may also be seen as a reinterpretation of a Roman model: the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, designed in 1651 by the architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Piazza Navona in Rome. Studying the migration of this sculptural model from Rome to Brno can help one better understand its relevance and value.

In reinterpreting the Roman model, Fischer von Erlach creates an exceptional baroque fountain, a work as monumental as that of Piazza Navona, but here perfectly adapted and so integrated into the urban landscape of the centre of Brno. Even though the original buildings that once faced the fountain around the square are no longer visible, it can still be seen how the fountain blends in perfectly with the sloping ground level of the square. In this work, the citation can be considered double: the inspiration from the already mentioned Bernini’s fountain and the adoption of Borromini’s floor plan of the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza church in Rome as the shape of the water basin. The plan of this basin is also adopted as the outline of the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) logo you can see on this website.

However, this process of double referencing should not be relegated to a denigrating accusation of copying but rather represents the force and distinctly European charge of the architectural phenomenon of which Fischer von Erlach is a perfect exponent: the Imperial Baroque style in Central Europe.

As the article’s introduction notes, this fountain’s main subject is the victory of order over chaos. It is, therefore, essential to study this work in-depth to investigate at least three aspects of this subject: how and why Fischer von Erlach chose to reinterpret Roman models to address such a theme and how it enters and fits into the mythological figurative tradition. The dual referencing of Roman prototypes – both in the pyramidal compositional structure of the sculptural group and in the plan of the water basin – responds to the desire to evoke Rome, the quintessential Baroque centre. Beyond aesthetics, this reference carries symbolic weight. This is because there is an identity of symbolic meanings between the Roman fountain and the one in Brno: both celebrate the universality of Christianity and the order brought and guaranteed by it. The allegorical construction – also taken from Bernini’s fountain – is here performed by the three allegorical statues of three seated female allegorical figures. This character selection responds to that allegorical process mentioned above, creating at the first level of the fountain an ideal world that converges at the peak with the allegory of Europa, who governs and guarantees the order of this world.

The fountain blends perfectly with the city thanks to the reinterpretation of the Roman models that the architect implemented. As noted earlier, urban and architectural integration is thus achieved, but the adaptation process also leads to cultural and political integration. By embracing Roman Baroque elements, Fischer von Erlach translated their visual language into Central European culture while reshaping their semantic meaning. The shift in the meaning is substantiated from the Roman fountain to one celebrating the Habsburg  Empire. Only then can one understand how and why the Parnassus Fountain has as its subject matter order the order brought and guaranteed by the Empire, which is a symbol of Christianity it defends.

The Parnassus Fountain is a work that magisterially fuses and unites: it fuses sculpture and architecture into an organic whole, it adopts and adapts the languages of the Roman Baroque, and brings together under a mythological sign of the values represented by the Empire.

The Parnassus Fountain by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach is the clearest and yet baroque example that shows that by celebrating the order, greatness and strength of a unified empire, one must acknowledge, accept and also celebrate the migrations of people, ideas, artistic languages and symbolic meanings.

Photo:

Emilio Zanzi

Bibliography:

Jan Burian, Baroko v Čechách a na Moravě, Praha 1993.

Marcello Fagiolo (ed.), Centri e periferie del barocco. Il barocco romano e l’Europa, Roma 1992.

Vittorio Franchetti Pardo, Un importante capitolo nella storia dell’architettura europea: la cultura rinascimentale manierista e barocca tra l’Italia e Praga, La nuova rivista italiana di Praga 7 (2002), N. 1, pp. 6–27.

Miloš Stehlík, Originál, faksimile. Barokní sochařství na Moravě, Brno 1987.

Miloš Stehlík, Kašna Parnas od Johanna Bernharda Fischera z Erlachu, Brno 1996.

Herbert Karner, Sebastian Schütze and Werner Telesko (eds.), Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723) und die Baukunst des europäischen Barock, München 2022.