Monkey fountain

Description

The elegant fountain, placed in the center of the Knight's garden until the very recent restoration, is never explicitly mentioned in the eighteenth-century sources, but it must have been located there since reference is generically made to a "nursery" in front of the mansion. The first attention to the work is due to Berta Wiles, who recognized in it the assemblage of pieces, indicating in the figures of the monkeys the parts dismembered from the fountain of 'Samson and the Philistine' that Giambologna executed for the Casino di San Marco on the orders of Francis I, dismembered around 1601 to make a gift to the King of Spain. In drawings now in the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet, four monkeys placed in the base of the fountain, now in Spain, were recognized by Kriegbaum. Subsequent critics later refuted its belonging to that complex because of the rotated pose of the animals' bodies, which ill suited the frontal space set up in the base, shifting its attribution to Pietro Tacca. The simple shafted pilot would be said to be coeval with the beautiful 'putto' in the center of the basin, ascribed to Pierino da Vinci by Wiles. It is uncertain whether the fountain was so composed around the mid-17th century when Cardinal Leopold ordered an initial arrangement of this area of the 'Cavaliere' , or came from elsewhere in the garden if not from other Medici villas The beautiful marble of the 'putto' in the center of the basin, first approached to Pierino da Vinci by Wiles , was reconsidered as a work by Tribolo by Carlo Del Bravo, on strictly stylistic grounds. The fullness and tenderness of the flesh refer in fact to the coeval pictorial modes of Correggio, instead more elongated and nervous in his pupil Pierino, comparable with the putti of the Castello fountain and with the bronze satyr documented to 1549 now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. It remains to be considered, however, that Vasari, well informed about Tribolo's activity, records that he gave the very young Pierino "un