Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  The Fountain of Latona: Louis XIV, Charles Le Brun, and the Gardens of Versailles (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)

Ovid tells the story of Latona, the mother by Jupiter of Apollo and Diana. In her flight from the jealous Juno, she arrives faint and parched on the coast of Asia Minor. Kneeling to sip from a pond, Latona is met by the local peasants, who not only deny her effort but muddy the water in pure malice. Enraged, Latona calls a curse down upon the stingy peasants, turning them to frogs. In his masterful study, Thomas F. Hedin reveals how and why a fountain of this strange legend was installed in the heart of Versailles in the 1660s, the inaugural decade of Louis XIVs patronage there. The natural supply of water was scarce and unwieldy, and it took the genius of the kings hydraulic engineers, working in partnership with the landscape architect Andr Le Ntre, to exploit it. If Ovids peasants were punished for their stubborn denial of water, so too the obstacles of coarse nature at Versailles were conquered the aquatic iconography of the fountain was equivalent to the aquatic reality of the gardens. Read more