Neptune and Triton
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 to 1680) · 1622 to 1623
The sea god Neptune stands with his legs braced, cloak whipping around him, and thrusts his trident downwards at the water, while beneath him the merman Triton blows a conch shell. The trident is lost but the gesture is clear: Neptune is commanding the waves. Bernini carved the group in 1622 and 1623, when he was in his mid twenties and already the most brilliant sculptor in Rome, as the centrepiece of a fountain in the garden of the Villa Montalto, where it stood above a large fishpond. It is the only major early Bernini marble in a British collection.
Bernini's subject is movement caught in stone. Look at the weight thrown on to Neptune's back leg, the twist of the torso, the beard blown to one side and the drapery that seems to rise in a gust rather than hang. The face, with its furrowed brow and open mouth, was meant to be read from a distance with water pouring around it, so the features are cut deep. Triton below is a lively counterweight, cheeks puffed out to sound the shell from which water originally jetted. The marble has weathered from centuries outdoors, but the drilling in the hair and the sharpness of the fingers still show the young sculptor's confidence.
The group was bought in 1786 by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who kept it in his London garden, and after his death it passed through the hands of collectors before the museum acquired it in 1950. Scholars have argued about the story it tells: Neptune calming the storm in Virgil's Aeneid, or ordering the flood in Ovid. Either way, the pool beneath him is now the gallery floor, and you see the god as Reynolds did, without the roar of water.
Did You Know? Sir Joshua Reynolds bought the group for his garden, and it stood outdoors in London for over a century before coming indoors.
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