LAURETI, Tommaso

(b. ~1530 Palermo, d. 1602 Roma)

Italian painter, designer and engineer. A pupil of Sebastiano del Piombo, he spent his formative years in Bologna in the circle of Ignazio Danti. He was working there between 1563, if not earlier, and 1582, though he was recorded as working in 1579 for Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. He was closely involved in redesigning the Piazza Nettuno in Bologna, providing the designs and the hydraulic engineering for fountains, one of which - the Fountain of Neptune (1566) - was adorned with bronze sculptures by Giambologna, while the Fonte Vecchia (1565) was undertaken by Laureti in collaboration with Giacomo della Porta.

Fountain of Neptune

Three years after the competition for the Fountain of Neptune in Florence, the authorities in Bologna approached Giambologna to make a statue of Neptune and many subsidiary figures and ornaments for a fountain designed by Tommaso Laureti that they were erecting in the centre of their city. The young sculptor’s full powers seem to have been released in the making of this Fountain of Neptune (completed 1566).

At the feet of Neptune are four boys struggling with dolphins, which spout water, interspersed with grotesquely puffing heads of childlike wind-gods, also spouting water. At the four corners of the pedestal below are four sensuous figures of Sirens, with bulbous curving fishy tails for legs, expressing water from their full breasts into the basin below. In between are many grotesque masks and shells articulating the several smaller basins.

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Triumph of Christianity

In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII commissioned this fresco decoration in the Vatican Palace. The allegorical fresco represents the triumph of Christianity (in the form of Christ’s Cross) over paganism (in the form of a destroyed statue).

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