The subject is probably a Crenaea, a nymph of wells and fountains, to which the title most probably alludes. Like all the water nymphs, the Crenaeae originated in both Graeco- Roman and northern theogony. 

Known in the sources as Fontanina, this bronze was commissioned from Eugenio Baroni in the early 1930s almost certainly by Lorenzo Valerio Bona to decorate a fountain in his villa at Carignano (now Palazzo Provana del Sabbione). One of the first references to the work (an article of 1933 by Calcaprina on the plaster model used for casting and exhibited the same year in the IV Mostra d’Arte del Sindacato Interprovinciale Fascista delle Belle Arti di Genova) mentions a version in bronze cast for “a well-known Turinese industrialist” and shown at the 1932 Venice Biennale. The Bona family was in fact one of the most influential in the textile sector in northwest Italy and Lorenzo Valerio Bona is known to have been actively involved in the arts and in particular with Ettore Cozzani’s magazine L’Eroica, sharing the same cultural milieu as Baroni. Bona was a friend and client of the Ligurian sculptor and played a key part in the decision to award the commission for the monument to Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy-Aosta (Turin, Piazza Castello) to him in the final round of the competition rather than Arturo Martini. The work, Baroni’s last, was left in an advanced stage of completion and finished off by Publio Morbiducci under Bona’s supervision. 

The Fontanina remained at Villa Bona until sometime before 1983, when it was sold to Francesco Federico Cerruti, possibly through the poet and writer Gian Piero Bona, the son of Lorenzo Valerio. The plaster model was instead donated by the Alpini Association to the Accademia Ligustica, its present home, in 1984. 

Eugenio Baroni is known above all as the author of the Monumento ai Mille (Monument to the Thousand, 1915) in Quarto, where it is possible to detect an independent and innovative rereading of the legacy of Leonardo Bistolfi, the leading sculptor of the period. He was also one of the few Italians capable of developing an original interpretation of Rodin’s art, absorbing its more experimental aspects and combining them with other sources of inspiration from beyond the Alps, including the crisp linearity of George Minne, the heroism of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle and even the central European monumentalism of the Croat Ivan Meštrović. All these elements remain clearly evident in the sculptor’s works, especially those for cemeteries, until after World War I and the emergence of a drive for an archaic and hieratic style that was to underpin many of the works of the 1920s, including the planned but never created monument to an infantryman. 

In this perspective, the Fontanina constitutes a unique case in Baroni’s work of the period, which consisted mostly of monuments of a commemorative or funereal character, as well as some of the marble sculptures adorning the Mussolini Forum, now renamed the Foro Italico. 

The subject is probably a Crenaea, a nymph of wells and fountains, to which the title most probably alludes. Like all the water nymphs, the Crenaeae originated in both Graeco- Roman and northern theogony. Although the nymph has also been identified as Arethusa, the Nereid after whom the famous spring of Ortygia near Syracuse is named, the page-boy hairstyle, the sharply defined and almost pointed ears, the slanted eyes and the close-fitting, hooded garment appear to correspond to northern figures like the elves and spirits of the Nibelungen saga. Moreover, this interpretation would accord perfectly with the tastes of Bona, who chose northern subjects inspired by the Wagnerian cycles for the decorations of the villa in Carignano painted by Aldalberto and Viero Migliorati. Undines play a leading part as the Rhinemaidens in Wagner’s Rheingold, the first of the four parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a probable source of inspiration. The image of the nymph with her arms crossed over her breast, her hands on her shoulders and her head bent beneath cascading water is also typical in representations of these water sprites, as are the dolphins encircling the base on which her feet firmly rest. 

The work presents original elements also in stylistic terms with respect to Baroni’s normal production of the period. While Rossana Bossaglia has indeed compared its greater softness and sweetness to Art Deco,¹ on closer examination it proves to lack both the tendency towards concise, unadorned linearity and above all the dynamism and Modernism typical of the “Roaring Twenties”. Baroni appears instead to look back to similar column-like figures featured in works for the Staglieno monumental cemetery in Genoa such as the Molinari tomb (known as La Lampada [The Lamp], 1918-20, fig. 1) and the Berthe Grosso Bonnin tomb (1921). As in these cases, the difference with respect to heroic sculpture lies in the softness with which the nymph and her features are rendered, as though dissolving in water the element of rigid linearity still present in the sculpture of the 1920s. In this sense, the rippling drapery on the back, typical of a wet garment clinging to the body, and the almost ribbing-like vertical creases accompany and evoke the flow of water. 

Matteo Piccioni 

¹ R. Bossaglia, “Baroni. Lo stile degli anni Venti”, in Sborgi 1990, p. 10.