Now and Then

Then: what Nathaniel saw

Now: it has changed a bit, I agree.

The discrepancy between these two images is not due to Nathaniel's bad drawing skills: the fountain apparently did look different back then.  It had clearly been in the wars, in every sense. According to Nathaniel, when he saw it you couldn't even tell what those four fragmented, beaten-up Cupids were meant to be riding on.

Looking at the modern photo we can see the basin and central column rising from it aren't much altered, but the Cupids and their dolphins(?) have been heavily restored, and there has clearly been a significant rebuild at the top.  Even in Nathaniel's day, when the little statue surmounting the fountain was so damaged the Christ child had vanished altogether, there was  a visible difference in colour between the lower part of the fountain and the upper: so it seems the lower part is much older. The original design is perhaps impossible to guess.  Would an earlier age have chosen to place the vaguely erotic symbols of Cupids and Melusines beneath a statue of the Virgin?   I can't say.  Anyway, as Nathaniel described it:

"This little antique monument charms, by the quaint symmetry of its design and proportions, and perhaps even by the terribly mutilated state of the four fragments of Cupids, which, riding on the necks of the same number of animals so maltreated as to render impossible the discovery of their race, form projecting angles, and support the basin on their shoulders. Four mermaids, holding up their tails, so as not to interfere with the operations of the Cupids, ornament the sides of the basin, which are provided with small apertures for the escape of the water; the top being covered by a flat circular stone, carved around its edge. This stone,—a small, elegantly shaped pedestal, which surmounts it,—and the other portions already described, are nearly black, probably from antiquity; but on the pedestal stands a little marble virgin, as white as snow. This antique figure harmonises by its mutilation with the rest, although injured in a smaller degree; and at the same time adds to the charm of the whole, by the contrast of its dazzling whiteness with the dark mass on which it is supported. The whole is balanced on the capital of a pillar, of a most original form, which appears immediately above the surface of a sheet of water enclosed in a large octagonal basin."