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Evelyn Waugh carried satire into the background and landscape to add vivid reality to his stories. He highlights a few important architectural or sculptural elements and allows the reader to enlarge the scene. In Brideshead Revisited^ Waugh envisioned a great country house and gardens and a fountain. The fountain is described in detail and is used as a focal point for parts of the novel, it is also a satirical commentary on Waugh's world. The fountain is stripped of the ornament common to fountains of the period and perhaps represents a world of men reduced to animals ratherthan the power of man as represented by Bernini's fountain in Rome.
Donald Greene recalls that Waugh told Christopher Sykes, Waugh's biographer, that the "details were taken from the great fountain [by Bernini] in the Piazza Navona in Rome" (EWN Autumn 1989, 4). There are elements of the Brideshead fountain that clearly come from the Bernini fountain and other elements that perhaps come from other sources, e.g., the fountain at Blosover Castle in Derbyshire, England. When Evelyn Waugh envisioned his fountain in Sn he eliminated the human figures used as symbols of the secular concerns characteristic of the Renaissance used by both Bernini and the designer of the fountain at Bolsover Castle.
Three of the elements shared by the fountain at Brideshead and the one by Bernini in Rome are the pile of rocks in the basin, the animals, and the obelisks. The fountain at Brideshead Castle has "an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; [and] on the rocks to the height of...