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| Giovanni Antonio Licinio (il Pordenone) Design for a Fountain ca. 1522-29 drawing British Museum |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Triton with Fish before 1642 terracotta modello for fountain Detroit Institute of Arts |
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| Jean Lepautre Design for a Fountain for a Banqueting Hall ca. 1670 etching British Museum |
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| attributed to Martin Desjardins Design for a Fountain with Hercules and Antaeus ca. 1680 drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Francesco di Maria Neptune (Study for a Fountain) before 1690 drawing Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation) |
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| Anonymous Italian Artist Design for a Fountain 17th century drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous Printmaker Fountain with Giambologna's Statue of Mercury flanked by Pastiches of Classical Statues 17th century etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Étienne-Maurice Falconet Project for a Fountain ca. 1740-50 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous French Artist The Fountain 18th century drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Fratelli Alinari Neptune Fountain, Boboli Gardens, Fountain ca. 1855 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| James Anderson Fountain of the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome ca. 1865 albumen silver print National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
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| Thomas Packer The Frozen Fountain before 1897 chromolithograph (sheet music cover) British Museum |
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| Paul B. Haviland Lighted Fountain ca. 1915 gum bichromate print Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Rudolph Ruzicka Fountain, Piazza di S. Pietro in Vaticano 1915 woodcut Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Lorado Taft The Thatcher Memorial Fountain, Denver, Colorado 1917 bronze figures on stone bases Library of Congress, Washington DC |
Fire!
Poor Phlogiston – deconstructed
By new paradigms, inductive
Inquiries and Occam's razor
Into what is just a case of
Very rapid oxidation.
Still, we stare into the open
Fire (Gaston Bachelard
Wrote so well of that), and still we
(Playing with fire?) ply old tropes of
Heat and Light and all those tradeoffs
(Feeling? Knowledge?) that we keep on
Making in our double-dealings
With ourselves, and somehow making
Sense thereby of how we live.
Instrumental bits of flame that,
Melting welding sterilizing
Cauterizing and annealing,
Help us with our busy, heavy
Handiwork – and not to speak of
One last immolating pyre:
Ashes crumbling into dust . . .
Not to speak of all the wanting,
All the trembling Sappho said was
Freezing-burning both together;
Five-alarm or less heroic
Nonetheless it can so fiercely
Turn attention into madness,
Knowledge into ignorance . . .
Not to speak of ancient ardor,
(For God, Country, and etc.)
Nor of Fire! shouted in a
Now proverbial crowded theater,
Nor indeed in some bare courtyard,
Chill and empty now of all save
You and your own rifle-squad . . .
Nor indeed of those two burnings,
Hunger and its brother Anger;
Not as with us now, but ever
Nibbling at – until consuming
Finally – all of one another,
Each of them, though, fanning very
Noisily the other's flames.
– John Hollander (1997)