The Tacca Fountain

Excerpt from Cosmos Club Legacies: The Land and Townsend Decorative Arts
by Laurence J. Aurbach
Published by the Cosmos Club January 31, 2013

The most prominent feature in the East Garden is the Tacca Fountain. the image below shows the original fountain in Florence which can be seen from the Garden Bar next to the door to the East Garden. According to Paul Miller, “The wonderful bronze fountain was copied from a pair in the Piazza della Santissima Annuziata in Florence by Pietro Tacca, dated 1629 and executed with the collaboration of his students Bernardino Radi and Francesco Maria Bandini; the Townsend version was probably the work of the Chiurazzi Foundry, Naples,(est. 1870) which particularly at the turn of the century produced copies of museum works and civic monuments throughout Italy. Beaux-Arts residences of the Gilded Age, although heavily French-inspired, were frequently surrounded by ‘classical’ gardens which were in essence Italianate; thus the Italian references of the Townsend garden sculpture program, spanning the early medieval or Romanesque to the Baroque, constitute in spirit, an amazingly intact urban
example of its age.”