Travel reflections from Treviso

Two tourists stopped in front of the fountain, cast a brief glance at it, and began speaking with that pleasant sense of security that seems to overcome people the moment they believe their surroundings do not understand them. One of them referred to it as the “tit fountain,” followed by a remark about its supposed obscenity. One is almost tempted to thank them. Few things reveal the condition of our present more precisely than a casually thrown remark in front of a work that has stood unchanged in its place for centuries and yet today is understood in an entirely different way, evoking entirely different associations.

For the fountain itself has not changed. What has changed is the gaze.

The Fontana delle Tette in Treviso is not a product of modern provocation, not a calculated breaking of taboos, and certainly not a frivolous joke of more recent times. It dates from the sixteenth century and was originally a symbol of abundance, provision, and civic prosperity. On special occasions, wine even flowed from it — white from one breast, red from the other — as a sign of public generosity and communal life. What some people today spontaneously experience as obscene was originally an image of nourishment. Not eroticism, but abundance. Not voyeurism, but the symbolism of life itself.

It is precisely here that the true fascination of this place lies: it does not merely present a historical sculpture, but lays bare the sediment layers of our perception. Earlier societies were by no means automatically freer or more “innocent.” But they often possessed a different symbolic literacy. The body was not readable exclusively through the lens of sexuality. Breasts could signify nourishment, fertility, grace, prosperity, or motherhood. Public space was rich in allegories, in signs, in images open to multiple meanings.

Today, this capacity for reading seems often to have been replaced by a reflexive short circuit. Where meaning was once read, stimulus is now often seen first.

Between switching on the computer and the almost liturgical deletion of browser history two hours later, the average person has probably seen more naked bodies than their grandfather did in an entire lifetime. And yet, to this day, a classical nude, a historical statue, or a fountain such as the one in Treviso is enough to trigger precisely those reflexes one might have assumed would long since have dissolved within digital oversaturation.

For me, including from the perspective of my own artistic work, this is the true paradox of our present. Never has nakedness been so available. And yet the real body rarely seems to have been so surrounded by insecurity, comparison, and projection as it is today.

The omnipresent availability of body images has not automatically led to greater freedom. Quite the opposite. The real body today often appears more heavily burdened by expectation, comparison, and uncertainty than in many earlier epochs. Perhaps this explains that peculiar new prudery that can increasingly be observed, especially among younger people: not classical morality in the old sense, but rather a mixture of overstimulation, normative pressure, and the fear of reading — or being read — incorrectly.

In this sense, the fountain in Treviso becomes almost unwillingly a mirror. It reveals less about itself than about those who stand before it.

Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why this theme continues to occupy me in my own work. The naked body in art is never merely body. It is form, bearer of light, symbol, projection surface, and not infrequently a kind of test image for the viewer’s gaze.

An old joke about the Rorschach test inevitably comes to mind. A subject recognises a naked woman in every single image and, when confronted about it, finally defends himself by saying that people should stop showing him such obscene things.

That is precisely the core of it. Not every image reveals something about the work. Some images reveal above all something about the gaze that falls upon them.

Perhaps this is true of art more generally. And perhaps that is precisely why an old fountain in Treviso is far more than a picturesque sight.

It is a silent work of stone commentary on perception, morality, and the astonishing human ability to recognise in a symbol nothing but one’s own reflex.