Fontaine de Bordeaux
MonumentHidden Gem
Fontaine de Bordeaux, located in Bordeaux (Gironde), is a Renaissance château built in the 16th century. The monument is currently closed to visitors.
Key facts
- Type
- autre
- Period
- Renaissance (16th century)
- Location
- Bordeaux, Gironde, Nouvelle-Aquitaine
- Visit
- Closed to visitors
- GPS
- 44.8385, -0.5742
- Mérimée Reference
- PA00083181
At the heart of listed Bordeaux, an elegant eighteenth-century fountain stands as a stone witness to the Aquitanian golden age. A listed historic monument since 1908, it embodies the urban refinement of Bordeaux's Grand Siècle.
History
Bordeaux, a city inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List for its eighteenth-century urban ensembles, conceals within its streets and squares a series of ornamental fountains that punctuate the public realm with a thoroughly classical grace. Among them, this fountain — classified as a historic monument since 1908 — stands as a precious fragment of the triumphal urbanism that the royal intendants stamped upon the capital of Guyane during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Erected in the eighteenth century, at that exceptional moment when Bordeaux was enjoying an unprecedented commercial prosperity driven by Atlantic trade and its ties with the Antilles, the fountain played a full part in the beautification of the city championed by the intendant Tourny and his successors. It belongs to a vast programme of civic improvement that endowed the city with its gilded limestone façades, its monumental quays and its radiating squares, making Bordeaux one of the most beautiful cities in France. A visit offers a moment of quiet contemplation within the fabric of Bordeaux's urban landscape. The murmur of water, the precisely dressed stone from Périgord, the sculpted volutes and medallions so characteristic of the rocaille or neoclassical taste of the workshops that shaped it — everything invites one to slow one's pace and absorb the atmosphere of a city that, in the Age of Enlightenment, vied in magnificence with Paris itself. Photographers will delight in the harmony between the warm blonde stone and the golden light of the south-west, most particularly in the late afternoon. Understated in appearance though it may be, this fountain has traversed more than two centuries of Bordeaux's history, bearing witness to the city's transformations from the Revolution through the Belle Époque, until its official recognition as a historic monument at the dawn of the twentieth century. It remains to this day a touchstone of memory for the residents of the quartier and a point of discovery for those wanderers inclined to look beyond the grand Haussmannian perspectives in search of the finer details that give a city its soul.
Architecture
The fountain belongs to the tradition of French urban fountains of the eighteenth century, whose Parisian model — most notably the fontaines des Quatre-Saisons and the neighbourhood fountains of the capital — broadly disseminated its formal codes throughout the provinces. Built from the limestone of the Bordeaux region, that warm, blonde and golden stone which lends unity to the entirety of the city's historic fabric, it in all likelihood presents a vertical or monumental composition organised around a central basin or vasque, from which water springs forth or spills in slender streams. The sculpted ornamentation, characteristic of the Girondins ateliers of the eighteenth century, may encompass iconographic elements drawn from the world of water: dolphins, tritons, river masks, and marine conch shells. These aquatic motifs, inherited from classical antiquity and carried forward through the vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance, are commonplace on the public fountains of the period, and serve as so many stylistic markers by which the work may be dated and attributed. The treatment of the surfaces moves between the chiselled precision of the decorative details and the serene amplitude of the architectural volumes. Modest in scale when measured against the great monumental fountains — such as those gracing the place de la Bourse — the ensemble nonetheless commands a quiet but assured presence within the public realm. The quality of the stone cutting, the restraint of the composition, and the harmonious integration of the fountain into the listed urban fabric of Bordeaux make it a representative example of the care lavished upon even the smallest details of civic design during the age of the Enlightenment.
Related Figures
Louis Urbain Aubert de Tourny — intendant de Guyenne (1743-1757), principal artisan de la métamorphose urbaine de Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècleClaude Boucher d'Orsay — intendant de Guyenne, prédécesseur de Tourny, initiateur des premiers grands travaux d'embellissementJacques Gabriel — premier architecte du roi, dont les plans directeurs ont influencé l'architecture bordelaise du siècleVictor Louis — architecte du Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux (1780), figure centrale de l'architecture néoclassique localeRichard de Ruffey — intendant de Guyenne après Tourny, poursuivant la politique d'embellissement urbainBaron Haussmann — préfet de la Gironde (1851) avant Paris, dont les travaux ont reconfiguré une partie du tissu urbain bordelais
Tags
Nearby castles
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Fontaine de Bordeaux located?
Fontaine de Bordeaux is located in Bordeaux, Gironde department, Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, France.
When was Fontaine de Bordeaux built?
Fontaine de Bordeaux dates back to a period built during the Renaissance (16th century).
Is Fontaine de Bordeaux open to visitors?
Fontaine de Bordeaux is currently closed to visitors.
