Who doesn't have a goofball picture of the mosaic fountain at the Getty Villa? This features my dear friend Pol, mugging it up with one of the two Heracles masks that adorn the fountain.
The fountain--including the masks--is an exact replica of one excavated in Pompeii from the House of the Great Fountain (nice name!) It sits in the East Garden of the Villa, and is one of the few things I actually remember from the Villa in the 1980s.
The picture to the right shows the original fountain in Pompeii, from a site called Pompeii.org.uk, which sounds official but really isn't. It's a rental agency, in fact.
In Italian, of course the House of the Great Fountain is actually the Casa Fontana Grande.
My handy-dandy Getty Guidebook is a bit sparse on information about this fountain, so here's a description of the original from PompeiOnline.net: "A niche completely covered with polychrome tesserae...embellished with a bronze statue and theatrical masks. These nymphaea, made of glass paste stones, are rare examples of non-floor mosaics."
Here's a picture showing the East Garden from Flicker, which insists on this attribution:
And finally, also from Flickr, here's a close up of the mosaic of Heracles hisself.
1 comment:
Hello Vickey,
You asked about a photo on my blog from the Getty Villa. You may use it if you give me credit for taking the photo. How fun to have a hitorical blog like this one...
Blessings...
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