Fountain of the Naiads

The example of Gemito, like the influence of the contemporary and highly prolific school of painting, which practised a bright and glowing colourism, strongly conditioned art in the South until the First World War and still feeds a rather showy strand of Italian sculpture today: “virtuosity”, for better or worse, enjoys great credit. Unfortunately, a genuine inner involvement that might have justified the sketch-like skill was almost always lacking. Perhaps the most interesting document of this Gemitian legacy is the fountain that the Sicilian Rutelli composed in front of the ancient Baths of Diocletian at the very beginning of the new century. The iconographic and formal references to Bernini's fantastic inventions are explicit, even though what is missing here is the pantheistic fusion of all beings that took place in the great whirl of the Fountain of the Four Rivers; the tangles of bodies beneath the cascades of water in fact evoke an exasperated decorative elegance that does not shy away from a languid, skin-deep sensuality.