Marriage Carousel Fountain - Nuremberg, Germany
The Marriage Carousel created by Prof. Jurgen Weber,
according to a poem by Hans Sachs in 1541: "Bitter-Sweet Married Life.
Location: Bayern, Germany
The Marriage Merry-Go-Round (Carousel) fountain is an
interesting and controversial work. Situated in a pedestrian shopping area next
to the White Tower, it was built in 1984 at a high cost.
The large fountain, a
dramatic portrayal of married life from courtship to death, was part of the
storm wrought by the design.
The sculpture attempts to describe the sweetness and
tribulations of married life that Sachs describes in his poem. The couple
progress through life as beautiful happy young people, change into older people
with attitudes, and finally turn into skeletons.
Hans Sachs described the various stages of marriage from
ardent love through exhausting struggles, ending with the death bed. The
fountain's sculptures reflect this text in all its beauty and horror, while
Hans Sachs is depicted dancing above a goat and a virginal beauty.
This sculpture seems to specialize in the horrors of marriage with
couples strangling each other; couples where one is huge and stuffing her face,
while the other is starving and skeletal; couples surrounded by demanding
children; couples where one wants to be quiet and the other is blowing a
trumpet in her face.
The
text of the poem can be found within the fountain, it is incised on the granite
heart that points towards the tower. Hans Sachs describes the ups and downs of marriage;
his wife is sometimes the angel, sometimes the devil to him.
Weber selected six scenes from Sachs's long list. He
designed a roundabout with six carriages, each in the shape of an animal that
matches the scene:
- the loving young couple in the swan bed
- the older man holding his wife in chains, tearing off
her dress, seemingly ready to take her by force
- eternal fighting of an old, almost skeleton-like couple
on a giant lizard
- the caring mother feeding her children in a pelican
who, referring to an ancient Christian legend, tears open her breast to feed
her offspring with her blood
- the fat woman devouring cake after cake and her
desperate skinny husband, carried by a wolverine (in German:
"Vielfraß")
- the young beauty, rising from a shell like Aphrodite,
and the admiring trumpeter and the billy-goat that represents the lust
On top of the sweet corn cob, Hans Sachs the poet is
shown dancing. The nymph of the fountain is kneeling in the water basin below.
The rose column on the opposite side shows the names of
the artist and his second wife.
Life, emotions, sex and violence are omnipresent topics. The fountain
caused quite some controversies and criticism in the city at first. Considering
Weber's sculptures are weird, demonic, choleric and ugly and him as self-righteous
personality.
Cavorting couples, chained women, crazed men, strangled
swans and giant fish monsters poured all over each other like a surrealists
paintings. Love it - or hate it, you absolutely can't miss it.
