Fontaine Bartholdi Fontaine Bartholdi The Fontaine Bartholdi is a fountain sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and realised in 1889 by Gaget & Gautier. It was erected at the Place des Terreaux, in the 1st arrondissement of Lyon, in September 1892. On 20 April 1857, the Bordeaux city council decided to hold a competition to create a fountain for Place Quinconces. Frédéric Bartholdi, then aged 23, won the contest. However, the city hall of Bordeaux decided not to carry out his project. After Bartholdi had made the Statue of Liberty in New York in 1886, the mayor of Bordeaux contacted him, but his
Statue of Liberty classical contours and applied simplified modeling, reflecting the huge scale of the project and its solemn purpose. Bartholdi wrote of his technique: Bartholdi made alterations in the design as the project evolved. Bartholdi considered having Liberty hold a broken chain, but decided this would be too divisive in the days after the Civil War. The erected statue does stride over a broken chain, half-hidden by her robes and difficult to see from the ground. Bartholdi was initially uncertain of what to place in Liberty's left hand; he settled on a "tabula ansata", used to evoke the concept of law. Though