Modern Garden Decor: Outdoor Fountains and their Beginnings
Modern Garden Decor: Outdoor Fountains and their Beginnings
The incredible construction of a fountain allows it to provide clean water or shoot water high into air for dramatic effect and it can also serve as an excellent design feature to enhance your home. The main purpose of a fountain was originally strictly functional. Inhabitants of urban areas, townships and small towns used them as a source of drinking water and a place to wash, which meant that fountains had to be linked to nearby aqueduct or spring. Until the late nineteenth, century most water fountains functioned using the force of gravity to allow water to flow or jet into the air, therefore, they needed a source of water such as a reservoir or aqueduct located higher than the fountain. Fountains were an optimal source of water, and also served to decorate living areas and memorialize the artist. Animals or heroes made of bronze or stone masks were often utilized by Romans to beautify their fountains. During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Moorish garden designers included fountains in their designs to re-create the gardens of paradise. The fountains found in the Gardens of Versailles were supposed to show the power over nature held by King Louis XIV of France. The Romans of the 17th and 18th centuries created baroque decorative fountains to glorify the Popes who commissioned them as well as to mark the spot where the restored Roman aqueducts entered the city.
Urban fountains created at the end of the nineteenth functioned only as decorative and celebratory adornments since indoor plumbing provided the essential drinking water. Fountains using mechanical pumps instead of gravity helped fountains to deliver recycled water into living spaces as well as create special water effects.
Modern-day fountains serve mostly as decoration for open spaces, to honor individuals or events, and enhance entertainment and recreational events.
Anglo-Saxon Grounds at the Time of the Norman Conquest
Anglo-Saxon Grounds at the Time of the Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxons experienced extraordinary adjustments to their daily lives in the latter half of the eleventh century due to the accession of the Normans. The Normans were better than the Anglo-Saxons at architecture and horticulture when they came into power. But the Normans had to pacify the overall territory before they could focus on home life, domestic architecture, and decoration.
Because of this, castles were cruder constructions than monasteries: Monasteries were often immense stone buildings located in the biggest and most fertile valleys, while castles were erected on windy crests where their residents devoted time and space to tasks for offense and defense. The calm method of gardening was impractical in these bleak bastions. The best example of the early Anglo-Norman style of architecture existent today is Berkeley Castle. It is said that the keep was created during William the Conqueror's time. A significant terrace serves as a discouraging factor to intruders who would try to mine the walls of the building. On one of these parapets is a picturesque bowling green covered in grass and enclosed by an aged hedge of yew that has been designed into coarse battlements.
The Source of Today's Outdoor Fountains
The Source of Today's Outdoor Fountains Pope Nicholas V, himself a learned man, ruled the Roman Catholic Church from 1397 to 1455 during which time he commissioned many translations of old classical Greek documents into Latin.
In order to make Rome deserving of being the capital of the Christian world, the Pope resolved to enhance the beauty of the city. In 1453 the Pope commissioned the repairing of the Aqua Vergine, an ancient Roman aqueduct which had carried fresh drinking water into the city from eight miles away. Building a mostra, a grandiose celebratory fountain built by ancient Romans to memorialize the entry point of an aqueduct, was a custom revived by Nicholas V. The Trevi Fountain now occupies the area previously filled with a wall fountain built by Leon Battista Albert, an architect employed by the Pope. The aqueduct he had refurbished included modifications and extensions which eventually enabled it to supply water to the Trevi Fountain as well as the famed baroque fountains in the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza Navona.