Fontana dei puttini

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Fontana dei puttini (Putti fountain) by Mario Moschi, 1952
Piazza Vasari
Florence, December 2021

“A garden here, raised above the level of the tracks, is remarkable for one single feature: a fountain in which the putti are not the chubby-cheeked and curly-haired cherubs usually found in Florentine paintings. This bronze sculpture depicts four toddlers shown on their hands and knees, one on top of the other, forming a sort of human pyramid on top of the unperturbed tortoise that forms the pedestal for this very unusual column. The back of the topmost child supports a large basin from which water trickles. The 2008 work financed by the City Council and carried out by the Opifico della Pietre Dure (Workshop of Semiprecious Stones) restored the fountain’s water jet. Is there perhaps some esoteric significance behind this very unusual composition? The fountain is the work of sculptor Mario Moschi (1896–1971), who belonged to the Gruppo Donatello and in his youth (1925) produced the Monument to the Dead of Rifredi which now stands in Piazza Dalmazia. This putti composition dates from 1952 and seems to reveal a real sea change in the artist’s temperament over the intervening decades. These figures of children had actually been modelled ten years before the erection of the fountain, but their affectionate and ironic view of childhood makes it clear that the artist had drawn direct inspiration from his own private life. There is, however, no mysterious symbolism here, just a celebration of Mario Moschi’s granddaughter, a girl ‘as lively as four little children together’, who used to crawl around the house on all fours – that is, when she wasn’t happily playing with the family tortoise.” (A unique Putti fountain, Florence Is You)