Fonticine Tabernacle

Giovanni della Robbia made this glazed terracotta shrine in 1522 for the festive association called Reame di Beliemme, a name derived from Bethlehem. At the centre of the grand composition are the enthroned Madonna and Child, the young St John and four saints, with God the Father, the Holy Spirit and adoring angels above. More saints’ heads emerge from the floral frame. The shrine’s name, Little Fountains, comes from the jets issuing from the marble slab at its base, decorated with angels’ heads, into the basin below. It originally stood in nearby Via Santa Caterina d’Alessandria. During the mid-nineteenth-century widening of Via Nazionale it was dismantled and moved here, along the garden wall of the suppressed Fuligno convent.