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January 20-April 21 |
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Second Royal Pleasure-Fountain (Zweyter Konigl. Lust-Bronnen)
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1799
Blasts of Wind (Soplones), plate 48 of Los Caprichos, 1799
Venus Rising from the Sea, 1772
Nyctimene is transformed into an Owl, 1767
JOHANN
DANIEL HERZ, German, 1693–1754
Second Royal Pleasure-Fountain
(Zweyter Konigl. Lust- Bronnen)
etching
The William A. Whitaker Foundation Art Fund, 80.42.4
This work revels in the monstrous and grotesque. As a type of decorative art, the grotesque is often characterized as a distorted array of animals, humans and plants where head, limb, and body intertwine or fuse together into composites. The result is a playful, continuous mixture of heterogeneous elements. Water serpents emerge from the lower tiered pools while entwined fantastic creatures, as well as a jaguar, lion, and bear rear up on hind legs and spit water upwards at heroic figures from Greco-Roman mythology. Grottos are evoked in the shells and coral encrusting a central archway, with a satyr-like rocaille face at its base.
This multifarious whole recalls the materialist view of Nature expressed by the philosopher Denis Diderot. Diderot’s belief in a dynamic continuum of generation and interspecies possibilities resonates in the fountain’s twisting and mutating forms that seem to have neither beginning nor end. The fermentation of matter, a sense of becoming, is especially inferred in the fountain’s melding of reptilian and mammalian parts into magnificent, awesome beasts.