The fountain in the garden is one of the most traditional prefigurations of Mary's nature, yet it has been studied relatively little. Even though it became one of the symbols that cluster around the figure of the Virgin Immaculate, it is rarely studied independently as a Marian prefiguration. Still fewer scholars examine how poets prefigure the Virgin through the fountain. One of the poets to do so is Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, with his metaphor of the ‘fontana de salvación’. As I examine this and other images of the Virgin-fountain in the oft-maligned verse of late medieval poets, I determine whether they become devalued because of unthinking repetition or whether poets have something fresh to offer on how the fountain is a prefiguration of the Virgin.

Before I begin, I contextualize late medieval fountains from those in illustrations in miniatures and altarpieces. I then map this architecture of fountains on to poets’ characterization of the Virgin-fountain.

Fountains in Miniature

It is important to define medieval people's perception of fountain architecture, particularly from illustrations in secular and religious texts. Secular examples of objects that could signify divine concepts produced a crossover from the secular to the realm of the sacred, as discussed by Barbara Newman in her study of how to read the secular against the sacred. By the period in question, one of the best-known depictions of a ‘fontaine’ is in manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose. Copies of the Roman, a French poem about a lover breaking down his lady's resistance, making his way into an arbour, and plucking a rose, were read and became part of people's library collections in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.

In the first part of the Roman, Guillaume de Lorris writes of a spring where the lover gazes, Narcissus-like, seeing his own beauty. Some illuminators depict an enclosed space around the spring. The fountain-mirror is a motif at the heart of this French medieval text. In another Roman manuscript, the lover bends over the water to drink, and there he sees ‘biauté’ in the shape of a face. The miniaturist depicts the ‘fontaine’ like a small limpid pool in a wild forest glade, even though the Roman does not give any details about the fountain or its situation.