Tommaso and Alessandro Francini

The main feature there was a great fountain, from which water was channeled and conducted in siphon tubes to the reservoir in the vaulted area that supported the terrace.

From there, through a series of secondary tubes, the water had sufficient head to operate grotto fountains and animate the elaborate automata that were a prized feature of Francini jeux d'eau.

The only trace of these features, whose high maintenance requirements cut their careers short when the court moved permanently to Fontainebleau, are in some engravings by Abraham Bosse, apparently derived from Francini drawings.

[4] The waterworks and automata at Saint-Germain-en-Laye were the most elaborate such things that had been seen in France up to that time, and Alexandre Francini's engravings of the brothers' works[5] served to mark a distinct stage in the importation and transformation of Italian features in the creation of the French formal garden (Adams 1979:46) and far beyond: cast-iron versions of Francini's two-basin Fontaine rustique, dripping with stony icicles, were familiar features again in Victorian gardens.

He was the designer of a revolving stage-set for an elaborately produced pageant, Le ballet de la délivrance de Renaud, presented in January 1617 at the Palais du Louvre; several contemporaries remarked on the impressive innovation, which was reinvented in the late nineteenth century, at the Residenztheater, Munich[6] but no one was more impressed than the poet Giovanni Battista Marino, who was present and recreated the illusion in his directions for L'Adone with its elaborately staged intermezzi.