House & Garden 
THE ORNAMENTAL MOVEMENT 
OF WATER IN CITY STREETS. 1 —II. 
T HREE factors chiefly determine the 
design of a public fountain in a city street 
or square. These are the amount of money 
to be spent; the space, its character, extent 
and surroundings ; and the water, the 
quantity obtainable and the function selected 
for it, whether purely decorative or also 
useful. Cost varies with locality, material 
and the personal equations of architects and 
civic committees, so it need not be discussed 
herein detail. Yet it may be of interest to 
francs, 72 centimes. If the sum appear 
modest, let the reader remember that money 
was worth more in exchange in 1828, when 
Charles X. was reigning, than it is to-day. 
Much more expensive were Visconti’s other 
Paris fountains. That of Louvois cost 
115,286 francs. For the Fontaine Moliere, 
(1 844), with two stories and attic in Visconti’s 
suave Bourbon manner, the expenditure was 
195,000 francs, which was topped by the 
250,518 francs and 50 centimes paid for 
that of St. Sulpice. 
If the appropriation for a street fountain 
be large, the architect will have difficulty, 
I 
I 
r 
1 
f 
1 
1 
THE FONTE GAIA AT SIENNA 
By Jacopo della Quercia. Restored in 1868. 
quote the pedantically exact figures triumph¬ 
antly included by the amiable Ludovic 
Visconti in his folio volume depicting 
fountains erected by him in Paris, nearly 
three generations ago. His Fontaine 
Gaillon, a high Renaissance portal, its attic 
surmounted by urns, with its water issuing 
from a dolphin’s mouth, in a niche between 
Corinthian columns, its child and trident, 
and its two basins, cost precisely 32,786 
perhaps, in preserving simplicity of effect, 
and in keeping to a moderate scale of size. 
Each is desirable, under the ordinary con¬ 
ditions of city streets, though each has been 
ignored by foreign designers with occasional 
success and frequent failure. The American 
architect will also do well to scan sharply the 
projects of ambitious sculptors for his 
fountain’s adornment, for there are few 
1 Begun in the April number of House and Garden. 
205 
