Fountain of the Labyrinth

At his mother’s villa, where Grand Duke Cosimo had spent his youth, the Villa di Castello at Rifredi near Florence, Cosimo entrusted Tribolo from 1536 with the layout of a garden that was to illustrate, with an elaborate iconological program worked out by one of Cosimo’s court humanists: the beneficent influence of the recently-ennobled Medici, watering Tuscany as a source of water fertilizes a garden. With the aid of hydraulic engineer Piero da San Casciano, Tribolo engineered a sequence of terraces with fountains that began at the upper end in the “wild” garden - where the civilizing Medici touch had not yet been felt - with a sculpture of The Apennines by Ammanati; once in the formal terraces the tamed water passed in formal canals to two sculptural fountains placed on the central axis. The marble bases of both were sculpted by Tribolo and his assistant Pierino da Vinci. The figure of Fiorenza was executed by Giambologna.

The fountains were the earliest fully sculptural fountain complexes set at the centre of garden spaces, and they set the example for the seamless development of fountains as major settings for figure sculpture, in a sequence that extended unbroken into the early 20th century.

As taste changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fashion grew up for moving fountains about, and as a result of this the smaller and earlier of the Castello fountains, the Fountain of the Labyrinth (Fontana di Fiorenza), was moved to the terrace of the Medici villa of Petraia only a short walk away.