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Every object needs to be put into its proper context in order to understand the meaning that it is trying to convey. Take the fountain of which houses an image of the Nile found at the Museum of Fine Arts; the fountain’s relatively simple architecture and decoration expresses a wealth of meaning about its uses and Roman views of foreign religions, while its possible location puts it into conversation with artwork from some of the finest villas in the empire. This fountain demonstrates that “Roman” was more broadly applied than only things from the city itself or even from all of Italy, and that there were many different forms of elite decoration.
The roofs of the niches indicate sacred space because of their tiled roofs and pediments. This type of sacred architecture fits with tone of the statuary inside; the remaining statue is a river god, the Nile, while the niches possibly held statuettes of the daughters of the Nile. It would be appropriate that they would be housed within a structure which evoked a temple. Even the niches themselves are references to the sacred because they evoke the same style as a lararium. It would seem strange that the maker of the fountain mixed an architectural feature that referenced shrines of Roman household gods and a deity of Egyptian origin but this type of blending wasn’t looked down upon in the empire. A household could haves a lararium and a separate shrine to Isis or even include a figurine of the goddess in their lararium because the Isis cult was very common. It wouldn’t be a stretch to include a river deity, a common figure in Roman fountains, from Egypt into a fountain that contained more standard religious imagery for the Romans. It should also be noted that since Romans didn’t sepa...

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...ame extent as the grander statue groups found in the imperial villas. Compared to those statues the fountain can’t compete, but compared to other fountains of a similar quality it is able to seen as a good piece of art, and actually gains more status for its connection to the imperial artwork.
The Nile fountain found at the MFA receives its meaning from its architecture, its decoration, its location, and even from the other works of art that it was referencing. This particular fountain’s mixture of Egyptian themes and Roman religious architecture shows both how foreign cult was an accepted part of Roman life as well as how fluid the ideas of the sacred and the profane were within Roman society. While the fact that it tries to emulate the very highest end of, artwork within imperial villas, demonstrates the many stages of elite status that were present in Roman art.