• Automata

In the Renaissance, scientists created automata worked by hydraulic systems to adorn gardens: e.g. nymphs moving across a grotto

• Hydraulics and the vacuum

In the 17th century in Florence, in an attempt to raise water for the gardens by means of pumps, the existence of the vacuum was discovered: a scientifically surprising fact, philosophically difficult to admit - nothingness as having a kind of being. It was the study of liquids that led to the discovery.

In the same period, there were poems in praise of 'nothing': a Baroque theme.

see Torricelli's experiment on the vacuum on the website of the Museum of the History of Science in Florence

• Fountain sculpture

  an ambivalent sculpture, both focusing on its own material of stone covered with water, and on its representative function - representing an emblematic human figure alluding to the forces of nature:a visual paradox.

• Statues of mountain personifications above fountains

They were made of rough stone which retained the texture of rocks and torrents while representing a giant with shaggy hair and beard seated in the pyramidal form of a mountain, reflected in the pond

a present-day photograph of the statue of the Appennino by Giambologna above the lake in the Medici villa at Pratolino (1579) on the hill north of Florence

• Statues of river gods

They were sculpted so as to evoke flowing drops of water in the motionless medium of stone

a present-day photograph of the fountain at Heidelberg, by Salomon de Caus for the daughter of James I (early 17th century)

• The winding streams

The 'English garden' of the Enlightenment has the serpentine line as its guiding principle , materialised by winding paths and by streams.

on Stowe (Buckinghamshire) see a website on a tour of Stowe.