page_title: Fountains in France
section_title: French Baroque fountains
hierarchical_section_title: Fountains in France / French Baroque fountains
context_page_description: Fountains in France provided drinking water to the inhabitants of the ancient Roman cities of France, and to French monasteries and villages during the Middle Ages. Later, they were symbols of royal power and grandeur in the gardens of the kings of France. Today, though they no longer provide drinking water, they decorate the squares and parks of French cities and towns.
context_section_description: In 1662,  King Louis XIV of France began to build a new kind of garden, the Garden à la française, or French formal garden, at the Palace of Versailles.  In this garden, the fountain played a central role. He used fountains to demonstrate the power of man over nature, and to illustrate the grandeur of his rule. In the Gardens of Versailles, instead of  falling naturally into a basin, water was shot into the sky, or formed into the shape of a fan or bouquet.  Dancing water was combined with music and fireworks to form a grand spectacle.  These fountains were the work of the descendants of Tommaso Francini, the Italian hydraulic engineer who had come to France during the time of Henry IV and built the Medici Fountain and the Fountain of Diana at Fontainebleau.
  Two fountains were the centerpieces of the Gardens of Versailles, both taken from the myths about Apollo, the sun god, the emblem of Louis XIV, and both symbolizing his power.  The Fontaine Latone (1668–70) designed by André Le Nôtre and sculpted byGaspard and Balthazar Marsy, represents the story of how the peasants of Lycia tormented Latona and her children, Diana and Apollo, and were punished by being turned into frogs.  This was a reminder of how French peasants had abused Louis's mother, Anne of Austria, during the uprising called the Fronde in the 1650s.  When the fountain is turned on, sprays of water pour down on the peasants, who are frenzied as they are transformed into creatures.
  The other centerpiece of the Gardens, at the intersection of the main axes of the Gardens of Versailles, is the Bassin d'Apollon (1668–71), designed by Charles Le Brun and sculpted by Jean Baptiste Tuby.  This statue shows a theme also depicted in the painted decoration in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles: Apollo in his chariot about to rise from the water, announced by Tritons with seashell trumpets.  Historians Mary Anne Conelli and Marilyn Symmes wrote, "Designed for dramatic effect and to flatter the king, the fountain is oriented so that the Sun God rises from the west and travels east toward the chateau, in contradiction to nature." 
  Besides these two monumental fountains, the Gardens over the years contained dozens of other fountains, including thirty-nine animal fountains in the labyrinth depicting the fables of Jean de La Fontaine.
  There were so many fountains at Versailles that it was impossible to have them all running at once; when Louis XIV made his promenades, his fountain-tenders turned on the fountains ahead of him and turned off those behind him.  Louis built an enormous pumping station, the Machine de Marly, with fourteen water wheels and 253 pumps to raise the water three hundred feet from the River Seine,  and even attempted to divert the River Eure to provide water for his fountains, but the water supply was never enough.
  (See Gardens of Versailles)
caption: The Bassin d'Apollon at Versailles as it appeared in 1714
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