The Ship of Fools fountain is a fountain sculpture on Plobenhofstrasse. It is the work of the sculptor Jürgen Weber, who died in 2007. It is set up dry; no water flows over the fountain. The sculpture takes up the pictorial representations of Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts for Sebastian Brant's moral satire Ship of Fools from 1497.
The fountain sculpture was created in 1984-87. It was cast in two copies by the art foundry Lenz. The first cast is in Hamelin. The second copy was shown in 1987 on the occasion of an art exhibition in Nuremberg. The patron Kurt Klutentreter (1910-2000) made the purchase possible. In 1988 the sculpture was placed dry on the (nameless) square between Museumsbrücke, Spitalgasse and Plobenhofgasse. The sculpture in question met with a mixed response and was criticized at the time for its "neo-baroque" character. In this respect, this linked to the earlier criticism of the Hans Sachs fountain, also by Weber, which was erected in 1984 in front of the White Tower.
In 1990 there were efforts to complete the sculpture as a fountain in the spirit of the artist ("the ship should have overflowed like a fountain bowl and water should have bubbled out of the galleon figures, the crow and the wine glass". The assumption of the costs estimated at 300,000 DM for a Klutentreter had agreed to a higher cone, a paved basin and the water supply. The culture committee of the city council, advised by the advisory board for fine arts, rejected the donation and the completion of the fountain. To this day, the fountain sculpture stands dry on a cobblestone hump in the pedestrian zone.
…..
The fountain sculpture takes up the pictorial representations of Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts for the moral satire The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant (1497). The 3.60 m high bronze sculpture shows a little boat as a metaphor for the world threatened with destruction. The – typical for Weber – expressively plastically shaped and as if in motion figures show, for example, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, Adam and his murderer son Cain as a child, the allegory of violence and other scenes from the book of Brants. The two banners running around the fountain refer to the present as an appeal against environmental destruction, war and violence.
(Excerpt from Wikipedia)