This marble fountain is one of four similar fountain depicting Triton with a Naiad. Here, in a work by sculptor Anton Schmidgruber, Triton is portrayed as an older bearded and naked man with a cloth flowing over his right thigh. He sits on a conch shell and holds a paddle while a seated naked Naiad offers him a strand of pearls. Water spouts out of the mouths of fish and a turtle at the base.
Triton, Wikipedia (
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"Triton... is a mythological Greek god, the messenger of the sea. He is the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, god and goddess of the sea respectively, and is herald for his father. He is usually represented as a merman, having the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish, "sea-hued", according to Ovid "his shoulders barnacled with sea-shells".
Like his father, Poseidon, he carried a trident. However, Triton's special attribute was a twisted conch shell, on which he blew like a trumpet to calm or raise the waves. Its sound was such a cacophony, that when loudly blown, it put the giants to flight, who imagined it to be the roar of a dark wild beast.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, Triton dwelt with his parents in a golden palace in the depths of the sea..."
And as to the Naiad, Wikipedia (
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"In Greek mythology, the Naiads ... were a type of nymph (female spirit) who presided over fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater.
They are distinct from river gods, who embodied rivers, and the very ancient spirits that inhabited the still waters of marshes, ponds and lagoon-lakes, such as pre-Mycenaean Lerna in the Argolid.
Naiads were associated with fresh water, as the Oceanids were with saltwater and the Nereids specifically with the Mediterranean, but because the Greeks thought of the world's waters as all one system, which percolated in from the sea in deep cavernous spaces within the earth, there was some overlap. Arethusa, the nymph of a spring, could make her way through subterranean flows from the Peloponnesus, to surface on the island of Sicily."
This website has a photo of all four fountains (
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"Tritons and Najad Fountain
Tritons and Najad Fountain ( Artist: Edmund Paul Andreas Hofmann of Aspern castle ) on the Maria Theresa square between the Natural History and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in the first Innere Stadt district of Vienna located next to the central Maria Theresa monument four Tritons and Najad Fountain
Architectural History
The Maria Theresa Square , sometimes referred to as Maria Theresa Park was created between the two former imperial museums and should be part of the Imperial Forum . The opening took place simultaneously with the unveiling of Maria Theresa monument in 1888. 1890 Rossebändiger groups were established and built the fence .
Today , the entire ensemble monument is a UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Vienna.
Artistic design
The four Tritons and Najad Fountain form the centers of the four large lawns , which are formed by the major pathways of the Maria Theresa Square. The wells were built in the years 1887 to 1890 , the year of its formation . they were unveiled in 1894.
They were made ??of
Anton Schmidgruber,
Hugo Haerdtl and
Edmund Paul Andreas Hofmann of Aspern castle.
Together they are the circular basin with central groups of figures in Carrara marble on stylized rock formations of conglomerate rock and the four diagonal gargoyles. Specified Thematically were wells with naiads and tritons or human figures in the form of children.
From Edmund Paul Andreas Hofmann of Aspern castle of the fountain at the Museum road comes at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Just as Anton Schmid Gruber with his two fountains on Burgring he solved the task in which he physically divided the Tritons and nymph figures and enriched with individual motifs . Hugo Härdtl gave his burlesque fountain figures on the road at the Museum of Natural History a slight erotic coloring."