Antonio Rossetti

Alfonso Panzetta, Dizionario Degli Scultori Italiani Dell'Ottocento E Del Primo Novecento, Turin, 1994, vol. II, p. 158, no. 704 (a related example)

Milanese-born Rossetti studied and worked in Rome at the Academy. As an apprentice he was often charged with preparing blocks of marble by using the multi-point technique, in which reference points were taken from a smaller plaster or bronze model and translated onto a block of marble. The young Rossetti would then carve out the waste areas--providing the more advanced artists with a block already carved with an outline of the figure. This early training made him particularly skilled in fine carving--as demonstrated in the present work, remarkable in its intricate detail of foliage, architecture, and the modeling of the female form. Here the goddess Venus, her robe slipping slightly from her body, is poised on a fountain, water pouring from a spout in the form of a satyr's mouth, as playing putti emerge from the pool below.  Such allegorical goddess figures were common in fountain decoration of the period, and Venus (or Aphrodite), in particular, was often linked with water.  Rossetti's fountain reveals the goddess of love proffering a shell, a symbol of her birth from sea foam on a scallop shell.  Fellow sculptors and artists from Bouguereau to the Pre-Raphaelites often depicted a young woman or goddess-figure to suggest the alluring possibilities of magical waters.  Certainly, Rossetti's figure promises to quench the thirst of all who may desire her.