Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
FOUNTAINS OF PAPAL ROME
FOUNTAINS
OF PAPAL ROME
BY
MRS. CHARLES MAC VEAGH
ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN
AND ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY
RUDOLPH RUZICKA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published October, 1915
[Illustration]
TO THE MEMORY OF
A FATHER AND DAUGHTER
CONTENTS
ST. PETER’S 1
SCOSSA CAVALLI 19
PIAZZA PIA 33
CAMPIDOGLIO 41
FARNESE 61
VILLA GIULIA 81
COLONNA 105
QUATTRO FONTANE 117
TARTARUGHE 133
FONTANA DEL MOSÈ 143
THE LATERAN 153
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI 167
VILLA BORGHESE, NOW VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO 179
LA BARCACCIA 195
TRITON 205
NAVONA 213
TREVI 227
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO 239
PINCIAN 257
FONTANA PAOLA 267
MONTE CAVALLO 285
APPENDIX 303
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF AQUEDUCTS MENTIONED, ANCIENT AND MODERN 307
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF POPES MENTIONED 308
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, AND
ENGRAVERS MENTIONED 310
LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
View of Fountains and Obelisk of St. Peter’s from beneath
Bernini’s Colonnade 9
Upper Basin of the Fountain in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli 25
View of the Piazza del Campidoglio from the Left Side of the
Cordonata 47
One of the Fountains in the Piazza Farnese 71
Fountain of the Virgins 91
Fountain of the Tartarughe 137
The Fountain of the Sea-Horses 183
The Fountain of the Amorini 191
The Fountain of the Triton 209
The Fountain of the Four Rivers 217
Figure of “Neptune” in the Fountain of Trevi 233
Piazza del Popolo from the West 247
Mostra of the “Fontanone” 279
The Fountain of Monte Cavallo 291
ERRATA
Page 170, line 18, for London read Westminster.
Page 221, line 25, for Leo X read Innocent X.
Page 232, line 22, for Tre-vii read Trevie.
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTION
Rome has been called the most religious city in the world because of
the number of her churches. With equal propriety, and perhaps with
greater justice, she might be called the cleanest city in the world
because of the number of her fountains. Pagan emperors and Christian
popes alike have found both profit and pleasure in adding another
fountain or in making or repairing one more aqueduct to give a still
greater supply of water to the Roman populace. No other people, with
the possible exception of the Spanish Moors, have so appreciated the
value and the beauty of abundant water.
There are few squares, even in the Rome of to-day, where, at least
in the silence of the night, the sound of splashing water may not be
heard. The tiny fountain, often fern-fringed, with its ceaseless,
slender stream of water, is the one priceless possession in hundreds of
old courtyards, where it fills a damp and lonely silence with charm,
or redeems by its indestructible quality of beauty the meanness of
the squalid life about it. It is impossible to think of Rome without
her fountains. Yet, after a few weeks, the eye is hardly aware of
their presence. It is as if by their very beauty and omnipresence
they had acquired the divine attributes of sunlight; and it requires
the silence, as with the sunlight it requires the cloud, to rouse our
consciousness to their existence. They take their place among the
elemental causes of happiness, since the pain we feel at their loss is
the only adequate measure of the pleasure they give us.
It is difficult for the man of to-day to picture to himself the
abundance and splendor of the fountains in imperial Rome. Some idea
of their character may be obtained from the description gathered from
various sources of Nero’s fountain on the Cælian. The mingled waters
of the Claudian and the Anio Novus aqueducts were brought thither over
the Neronian arches. A wall fifty feet in height, faced with rare
marbles and decorated by hemicycles and statues, formed the background
of the first cascade. At the foot of this wall a huge basin received
the stream, which then fell into another basin ten feet below the
first, and thence flowed into the great artificial lake, described by
Suetonius as like unto a sea, which filled all that space now occupied
by the Coliseum. Of great magnificence also was the fountain of
Severus Alexander on the Esquiline which served to introduce the Acqua
Alexandrina, the eleventh and last water-supply of imperial Rome. A
coin of the period gives a representation of this fountain, and in it
can be traced a certain resemblance to the Fontana Paola which stands
at the present day on the Janiculum, and which in its size and quantity
of water reproduces faintly the fountains of the past.
That fine phrase, “la nostalgie de la civilisation,” nowhere finds a
more perfect illustration than in the attitude of the Western world
toward Rome. Some homing instinct of the human heart has for centuries
carried thither men of every nation and of every sort of belief or
unbelief; and the conviction that it will bring them thither in the
future as in the past is implied in that other name by which we know
her. She is the Eternal City. Every one can feel but no one can explain
the charm which she has over the spirits of men. Here the psychic
forces of the world’s great past are stored in imperishable memories.
Here each individual finds spiritual influences which seem to have
been waiting through the ages for his own peculiar appropriation.
King Theodoric, in the sixth century, spoke not only for himself but
for all succeeding generations of Northmen when he said that Rome
was indifferent to none because foreign to none. It seems as if the
feeling for Rome were an instinct congenital with our appetites and our
passions. It requires no justification and it admits of no substitute.
It is dateless and universal. The Gothic king of the past finds a
spiritual brother in the schoolboy of to-day who caught his mother’s
arm on the Terrace at Frascati to say, with an uncontrollable tremor
in his voice: “See there; that little spot over there! That is Rome,
and she was once the whole world!” King and schoolboy might have met
familiarly in some sunny portico of the classic city. Both were members
of the great freemasonry of the lovers of Rome, which stretches its
network far and wide over our civilization.
In this company there are not a few who find themselves in Rome, yet
not able to see Rome--to see it, that is, as the historians, artists,
archæologists, and their own minds call upon them to see it. Their
right to tread the Roman streets depends upon their obedience to
some law compelling an existence lived entirely in the open air and
in the broad sunshine. To such the gates of Paradise seem closed. To
be forbidden the galleries and churches and catacombs and the hidden
recesses of the old ruins appears an intolerable fate. Yet even to
these, who have made the great acceptance and are living upon the
half-loaf of life--even to these, Rome is kind. Little by little, in
easy periods, they can get back into the days of the Renaissance,
of the Counter-Reformation, of the Napoleonic Era, and of the great
Risorgimento. This can be done under the conditions of open air and
sunshine; for it is in such surroundings that we find the fountains,
and the fountains of Rome are in themselves title-pages to Roman
history.
ST. PETER’S
[Illustration]
ST. PETER’S
“Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late
Renaissance,” and those which stand on either side of the great Square
of St. Peter’s show that Symonds’s statement should be enlarged so as
to include the century which followed that period. Mr. John Evelyn,
the accomplished English traveller of the seventeenth century, saw the
fountain of Paul V soon after its completion and describes it in his
diary as the “goodliest I ever saw”. Since his day the twin fountains
both of Trafalgar Square and of the Place de la Concorde have been
erected, but Evelyn could still give the superlative praise to the
great Roman model. Although the two fountains in the Square of St.
Peter’s are exactly alike they are not of precisely the same date. The
conception of the design belongs to Carlo Maderno, who executed the
fountain on the right of the approach to the basilica for Pope Paul V
(Borghese, 1605–1621), while the fountain to the left was copied from
this for Pope Clement X (Altieri, 1670–1676), some sixty years later.
Clement’s courtiers had observed that whenever His Holiness walked in
the direction of Paul V’s great fountain his eyes continually turned
toward it. At length Clement ordered his architect, Carlo Fontana,
nephew of Carlo Maderno, to make an exact copy of Maderno’s work and
to erect it on the south side of the obelisk. The double fountain not
only enhances the magnificence of the entire scene, but so changes it
by introducing the additional element of balance that Clement X’s order
for the second fountain was in reality an order for a new composition.
The coat of arms cut upon the octagonal support of the upper basins and
half hidden and obliterated by the falling water is, on the right-hand
fountain, that of the Borghese family (the crowned eagle above the
dragon); and on the left-hand fountain, that of the Altieri family,
an inverted pyramid of six stars. The latter fountain looks as if it
were the older, for, as it is situated in the southeast corner of the
wide piazza, it is exposed to the full sweep of the Tramontana, or
north wind, which has fretted and worn in no small degree the surface
of the travertine. It may have been the more sheltered position of the
northeast corner which determined the location of Paul V’s fountain,
the earlier of the two. In the spring the Altieri fountain is the more
beautiful because at that time that portion of the Colonnade which
forms its background reveals vistas of foliage, while the moss web
woven about the crown of the shaft is of a more brilliant green and the
lower basin is full of the same aquatic growth swaying with the motion
of the water.
The Acqua Paola, which feeds these fountains, comes, in the last
instance, from the summit of the Janiculum, and therefore their central
jets are flung upward to a height of sixty-four feet, far above
the balustrade crowning Bernini’s lofty colonnades, which form the
background of the piazza. This height exceeds by from twenty-four to
thirty-four feet the height of the English and French fountains; and
whereas in the fountains of London and Paris the supply and force of
the water varies with the season of the year and the time of day (the
Trafalgar Square fountains in summer play thirteen hours out of the
twenty-four and in winter only seven), the abundance and power of the
water in these great Roman fountains is unfailing and unchanging. At
midnight, at high noon, in summer, in winter, they are always flowing,
and the splash and wash of the water makes them akin to the cascades of
Nature.
This perpetual flow has been a characteristic of the Roman fountains
since the days of the Emperors. Frontinus, writing in the reign of
Trajan, says that all the great fountains were constructed with two
receiving-tanks, each from a separate aqueduct, so that no accident
or emergency should diminish or stop the supply of water. The later
popes were also careful to preserve this uninterrupted flow, and since
the close of the Cinque Cento their fountains have played unceasingly.
The lowest basins of both fountains (twenty-six feet in diameter) are
of travertine with a rim of Carrara marble. The middle basins (fifteen
feet in diameter) are of granite. That in the right-hand fountain is
of red Oriental granite, and that in the left-hand fountain of gray
granite. The inverted basins at the summit, on which the water falls,
are of travertine, as are also the massive shafts, which, however,
Maderno adorned with a slight moulding of Carrara marble just above the
water-line in the lowest basins. The entire structures have been so
transformed in color by three hundred years’ deposit of the Acqua Paola
that they have the appearance of bronze. The water in each fountain
rises in a crowded mass of separate jets from the summit of the central
and single shaft, and falls at first on an inverted basin covered by
deep carving, the richness of which gains in beauty from the green web
woven about its curves and angles by the fall of the water. This upper
carving seems to be a part of the fantastic action of the wind-tossed
spray. The lower basins which receive the water are severely plain,
the design following Nature’s scheme of development, from a fretted
and turbulent source to the broad surfaces of the full stream. But
the architectural values of these fountains are incalculably affected
by the wonderful play of the water. It leaps upward as if to meet the
sun; it falls back in tumult and foam; it drenches all about with
its far-flung spray and wasteful overflow. It is the very triumph of
vitality and joy.
The fountains of St. Peter’s might be said to bear toward the vast
piazza of which they are a part the same relation as that of the eye to
the human countenance: without them the noble spaces would seem cold
and inanimate. This gleaming, tossing water endlessly at play with
the wind and the sun, instinct with a power and a beauty not of man’s
making--this it is which gives to the world-famous scene the touch of
life.
Pope Paul V has not only the honor of having erected the first of
these two modern fountains, but he has also that of having himself
discovered the original manuscript of a poem in which mention is made
of the first fountain connected with the Church of St. Peter. This
poem dates from the fourth century and was written by Pope Damasus
(366–384). This pontiff was, like the Emperor Hadrian, a Spaniard; and,
like Hadrian, he was not only a ruler of men, but gifted with many and
varied talents. He was an archæologist, a civil engineer, theologian,
and poet. He presided over that Ecumenical Council by which the second
great heresy threatening the church was condemned, as the first had
been at the Council of Nicæa.
St. Jerome, after years of friendship, became secretary to the then
care-worn and ailing pontiff, among whose many labors had been the
restoration of the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, and other tombs of the
early Christians and martyrs, some of which he marked with metrical
inscriptions of his own composition. It must have been while engaged
upon this pious work of reconstruction in the Vatican Hill that he came
upon those springs that, for lack of a proper channel, had damaged
the tombs upon the hillside and were threatening to undermine his
great basilica (the first Church of St. Peter) within less than fifty
years of its erection by Constantine. He drained the ground in the
vicinity, building a small aqueduct, “neatly in the old Roman style
of masonry,” to lead these unshepherded waters to definite localities
where they could be a benefit and not a danger to their surroundings.
The water thus collected is called the Acqua Damasiana, and to this
day the private apartments of the Pope are supplied from this source.
The feeding springs of this water are located at Sant’ Antonio, to the
west of the church, and the aqueduct of Pope Damasus lies at a depth
of ninety-eight feet. Pope Damasus himself describes this in the poem
which was discovered in 1607, more than twelve hundred years later, by
Pope Paul V.
Pope Damasus says: “The Hill” (Vatican Hill) “was abundant in springs,
and the water found its way to the very graves of the saints. Pope
Damasus determined to check the evil. He caused a large portion of the
Vatican Hill to be cut away, and by excavating channels and boring
_cuniculi_ he drained the springs so as to make the basilica dry and
also to provide it with a steady fountain of excellent water.” Of this
steady fountain there is no description, and therefore the fountain of
Pope Symmachus (498–514) becomes the first fountain recorded in the
history of St. Peter’s.
[Illustration: View of fountains and obelisk of St. Peter’s from
beneath Bernini’s Colonnade.]
Pope Symmachus was a Corsican. He evidently had a passion for building
every kind of structure connected with water as a cleanser and as a
beautifier of man’s civic life. His fountain, built at a time when
civilization and art in Rome were at a low ebb, was a quaint and
exquisite structure, composed of a square tabernacle supported by eight
columns of red porphyry with a dome of gilt bronze. Peacocks, dolphins,
and flowers, also of gilt bronze, were placed on the four architraves,
from which jets of water flowed into the basin below. The border of the
basin was made of ancient marble bas-reliefs, representing panoplies,
griffins, and other graceful devices. On the top of the structure were
semicircular bronze ornaments worked “à jour,” that is, in open relief,
without background, and crowned by the monogram of Christ. In the
centre of the tabernacle and under the dome stood a bronze pine-cone.
This fountain stood, not in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, but in the
atrium, or the square portico, which stood in front and on the right
hand of the old basilica.
The history of the construction and destruction of this beautiful
fountain of the dark ages is an excellent example of the artistic and
architectural methods of those times. Arts and crafts had already sunk
to so low a depth that there were no longer any men in Rome capable
of casting or carving statues like those of former days, and marble
had ceased to be imported into the city. Consequently all monuments or
other artistic structures were made up of figures in marble or bronze,
panels, columns, friezes, and similar decorations, stolen from the
productions of the great days of the Empire. The Arch of Constantine,
erected in 315, is composed to such an extent of columns and sculpture
from a Triumphal Arch of Trajan that it was surnamed “Æsop’s Crow”; and
the Column of Phocas (608), the last triumphal monument to be erected
in imperial Rome, consists of a shaft and capital surmounted by a
bronze figure, all taken from earlier as well as different structures.
Pope Symmachus was only following the established methods when, to
ornament his porphyry columns (themselves probably part of some classic
temple), he took four of the golden peacocks which had been originally
cast for a decoration to the railing of the walk surrounding the
Tomb of Hadrian, and, furthermore, placed as the centrepiece a great
pine-cone taken from the Baths of Agrippa. These pine-cones were a
customary feature of the classic fountain, as the scales of the cone
present natural and graceful outlets for the falling water. Symmachus’s
fountain was one of the beauties of Rome in the days when the great
Gothic King Theodoric ruled and loved the city. Three hundred years
later it captivated the fancy of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in St.
Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800; and the fountain afterward erected
before his great cathedral at Aix is ornamented with a huge pine-cone
like the one which he and his Franks had seen in the exquisite fountain
of St. Peter’s.
Three other fountains were placed before the church as the years went
by. They are described by Pope Celestinus II (1143–1144), while he
was Canon of St. Peter’s, and are set down in his “Ordo Romanus,” or
Itinerary, or Guide. They were situated, not in the atrium, where
stood the fountain of Symmachus, but below, in that small square or
_cortile_ at the foot of the steps of St. Peter’s. One fountain was of
porphyry and two of white marble. They would seem to have disappeared
quite early. The fountain of Symmachus was described in 1190 by Censius
Camerarius, afterward Pope Honorius III, and it stood through more than
eleven centuries of the confused and turbulent history of the city.
It survived the siege and capture of Rome by Vitiges in 537. It came
unscathed through the sack of the city by the Saracens in 886, and
that of the Normans in 1084; and stranger still, it was not wrecked
by the terrible Lanzknechts of the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. Only
when the ages of violence and pillage were passed, did this historic
fountain of the early church succumb to a fate similar to that of the
Pagan monuments, out of which it had itself been formed. When in 1607
the work on the new Church of St. Peter, which was begun in 1506 at
the rear of the old sanctuary and brought forward through the century,
had reached the atrium, this “gem of the art of the dark ages” was
deliberately demolished by Pope Paul V, who melted the gilded bronze
to make the figure of the Virgin now surmounting the Column of Santa
Maria Maggiore. Perhaps the metal thus obtained was more than he
needed; possibly some artistic or antiquarian compunction visited the
pontiff--for two of the peacocks and the great bronze cone were spared.
They found their way to the Vatican Gardens, and now they stand in the
Giardino della Pigna waiting for the next turn of Fortune’s wheel.
Yet another fountain was once associated with the basilica of St.
Peter. It was erected in the old square while the fountain of Symmachus
still stood in the atrium to the right of the main entrance to the
church. About the year 1492, Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibo)
gathered the waters from springs on the Vatican Hill and from the
practically ruined Aqueduct of Trajan into this fountain, which was
finished by his successor, Alexander VI (Borgia). The design was
greatly admired in its day. It consisted of golden bulls, from whose
mouths the water fell into a granite basin, and the bull was the emblem
of the Borgia family. During the crowded years of the famous Cinque
Cento, or until the pontificate of Gregory XIII, this fountain of
Innocent VIII, and the old fountain of Trevi (restored by Sixtus IV)
supplied Rome with what the present day would call its pure drinking
water. They contained the only water brought into the city from distant
springs, for mediæval Rome had lost all but two of her great aqueducts,
and these were constantly falling into disuse; and all the pontiffs,
painters, poets, and architects, as well as the populace of that
dramatic period drank the doubtful water of wells and of the Tiber.
This fountain of Innocent VIII was destroyed when the modern Piazza
of St. Peter’s replaced the very much smaller one of earlier days.
Probably the golden bulls were melted down into other shapes, and the
great red granite basin was used by Carlo Maderno for the upper basin
of the magnificent new fountain which he designed and executed at that
period for Paul V, and which is the northern one of the two fountains
of the present day in the Piazza of St. Peter’s.
Standing between the fountains of St. Peter’s is an obelisk, the
surpassing interest of whose history adds not a little to the
importance of the fountains themselves, and indeed of the entire
square. It is, according to Lanciani, undoubtedly the obelisk at the
foot of which St. Peter was crucified. Formerly the place of his
martyrdom was located on the Janiculum Hill, on the spot where San
Pietro in Montorio was built by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of
Castile to commemorate the event. Lately this location of the site of
St. Peter’s crucifixion has been discredited, but it is easy to see how
that mistake occurred.
Caligula had brought the obelisk from Heliopolis some time during the
four short years of his reign and placed it in the circus he began to
build in those gardens of his mother, the noble Agrippina the elder,
which lay along the northern side of the plain between the Janiculum
and Mons Vaticanus. There it stood on the centre of the _spina_, the
long, straight line stretching down the middle of the arena from the
two opposite goals at either end. Caligula was assassinated before he
could finish the circus and it was completed some thirteen years later
by Nero, under whom it became the scene of those atrocities against
the Christians which have rendered his reign infamous. St. Peter was
crucified one year before the death of Nero. His cross was raised
on the _spina_ of the circus at an exact distance between the two
goals--_metas_--built at either end of the amphitheatre, and therefore,
at the foot of the obelisk which stood on that spot.
Christian tradition handed down the description of the place “between
the two goals” (inter duas metas). Now _meta_ was a name afterward
given to tombs of pyramidal shape, two of which existed in mediæval
Rome--one, that of Caius Cestius, still standing next to the present
Protestant Cemetery, and the other in the Borgo Vecchio, destroyed
later by Alexander VI. A straight line drawn from one of these
tombs to the other has its centre in a point on the Janiculum, and
therefore this spot was thought to be the exact location of St. Peter’s
martyrdom. Even to-day visitors to the exquisite Tempietto of Bramante,
erected in the cloister of the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, are
shown below its pavement the very stone in which the cross of St. Peter
was fixed. The legend of this location for the crucifixion of St. Peter
grew up during the Middle Ages, a period in which all knowledge of
the authentic site was entirely lost. Modern archæology has recently
succeeded in locating this position and its topography can now be
easily understood.
When the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity,
determined to build a basilica in honor of St. Peter, he planned to
erect the edifice so that its centre should rise directly over the
tomb of St. Peter, who, according to historical documents, was buried
not far from the scene of his martyrdom. To do this, he found himself
obliged to build so near the Circus of Caligula and Nero that the
southern wall of his edifice corresponded exactly to the northern
wall of the Circus. He therefore used this wall of the Circus as the
southern foundation wall of his church. This naturally brought the
southern side of the old St. Peter’s within a very short distance of
the _spina_ of the Circus, on which stood the obelisk, with a chapel
before it called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. The Chapel disappeared
seven or eight centuries ago, but not before its true significance
had been quite forgotten, and men supposed the name to refer not to
the crucifixion of St. Peter but to the Crucifixion of Our Lord. An
old engraving by Bonanni, antedating the reign of Sixtus V, shows
the old Church of St. Peter on its southern side, with the obelisk,
still tipped by its Pagan ball, standing in close proximity. When the
plan for the new Church of St. Peter was accepted it was seen that
the southern side of the great edifice would extend so far beyond the
limits of the original church that it must entirely cover the spot on
which the obelisk was standing; and as the connection of the obelisk
with the martyrdom of St. Peter had long since been forgotten, Pope
Sixtus V conceived the idea of moving the obelisk to a more conspicuous
and important position.
Thus it came about that the obelisk now forms the central feature in
the piazza before the Cathedral of Christendom; while the place of
St. Peter’s crucifixion, that site of transcendent interest to all
Christians, remains unidentified, buried beneath the masses of masonry
composing the Baptistery on the southern side of the vast structure
which bears St. Peter’s name.
SCOSSA CAVALLI
[Illustration]
SCOSSA CAVALLI
This work of Carlo Maderno belongs to that group of fountains which
owe their origin to the introduction into Rome of the Acqua Paola. The
lower basin stands about three feet above the level of the pavement. It
is oblong in shape, the oval broken at both ends by graceful variations
in the curve. The secondary basin is much smaller, round and quite
shallow. From its centre rises a richly carved cup much resembling
a Corinthian capital, this cup being the apex of the central shaft,
upon which rests the second basin, and the main stream of water spouts
upward from its leaflike convolutions. The proportions of the fountain
are excellent. It is neither too low nor too high, and the lower basin
is large enough to catch and retain the water which pours over the rim
of the upper basin, so that it does not wash over as does the water
in Maderno’s much more magnificent fountain in the Square of St.
Peter’s. The central shaft of the Scossa Cavalli fountain has a Doric
massiveness which gives a background of strength to the whole design
and makes all the more delicate the play of the four slender jets of
water, about five feet in height, which, rising at equal intervals
from the lower basin, form an arch around the upper basin into whose
shallow water they fling their spray. The crowned eagle and griffin of
the Borghese are still to be discerned on the half-obliterated carving
of the central shaft. The kind of travertine out of which this fountain
is made is so susceptible to erosion, and has become so blackened by
the deposit of the water, that the whole structure appears far older
than it is. In reality it has stood here little more than three hundred
years, as the Acqua Paola was not brought to Rome until the time of
Pope Paul V. This splendor-loving pontiff determined, on his accession
in 1605, to emulate and, if possible, surpass Pope Sixtus V, whose
brilliant pontificate antedated his own by less than a score of years.
Sixtus V had built the first great aqueduct of modern Rome. Paul V
determined to build the second. Sixtus V had christened after himself
the water which he had brought to Rome, and Paul V gave his name to the
stream which, partly by using the all but ruined Aqueduct of Trajan,
he had brought from Bracciano and its hills. Domenico Fontana had
built for Sixtus V, as the chief outlet for the Acqua Felice, the fine
Fountain of the Moses on the Viminal Hill. Giovanni Fontana, brother
of Domenico, should design for the Acqua Paola on the opposite slope
of the Janiculum a yet more glorious fountain which should dispense
five times the amount of water given out by the fountain of Sixtus V.
All this was done, and from the heights of the Janiculum the great
stream descended in various channels, and was widely spread over the
Trastevere or that portion of the city lying on the western side of
the Tiber. One channel found another fine outlet in the fountain which
Carlo Maderno, nephew of Fontana, also built for Paul V on the northern
side of the Square of St. Peter’s. From thence the water was conducted
down the Via Alessandrina (now the Borgo Nuovo) to this small piazza
of the Scossa Cavalli where Maderno constructed for it this second and
very properly less splendid fountain. Thus it will be seen that the
water as well as the architectural part of this fountain belongs to
the beginning of the seventeenth century; but the interest attaching
to the buildings surrounding the square in which it stands dates back
farther than that, dates back in fact to the crowded days of the High
Renaissance, when this prosaic little piazza was a centre of ardent and
vivid life.
The long, plain, yet dignified building to the south, now called the
Ora Penitenzieri, was built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, who
was one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV and brother to Pope Julius
II, the friend and patron of Michelangelo. To the west, and on the
corner made by the square and the street of the Borgo Nuovo, stands
the house built by Bramante, and purchased by Raphael. The atelier of
the “divine painter” is the corner room on the second floor. Against
the wall behind those gloomy windows stood his last picture, “The
Transfiguration,” unfinished; and on a bed placed at the foot of that
picture, Raphael died.
Another death agony is connected with the history of the square, for
in the gardens behind the palace to the north, now called Palazzo
Giraud-Torlonia, was held that fatal supper where the Borgias, father
and son, fell victims to the poison which they had prepared for the
cardinal who was their host and the owner of the palace. Even the
legends of classic Rome seem somewhat colorless compared with the
memories which haunt this dull little square. Nothing could be more
prosaic than its present-day appearance. It is truly “empty, swept,
and garnished,” but the devils which have gone out of it have seldom
had their equal; its memories belong to a more splendid and to a more
shameful past than is the heritage of any other city of our modern
world.
In 1492, when Columbus had discovered the Western Hemisphere and
Copernicus was revolutionizing the mediæval view of the universe, Rome
was still emerging from the shadow under which she had lain while
the popes resided at Avignon. In 1471 Sixtus IV began to restore
and embellish the city, and with him the Holy See entered upon that
long period of secularization which reached its acme of infamy,
of magnificence, and of territorial possessions in the respective
pontificates of the Borgia, Medici, and Barberini popes. Each of these
pontiffs left his mark on some particular quarter of the city; and
although in the years following the times of Alexander VI efforts were
made to obliterate the memory of the Borgias, the Borgo Nuovo remains
forever bound up with their history.
[Illustration: Upper basin of the fountain in the Piazza Scossa
Cavalli.]
Throughout the Middle Ages the only thoroughfare from the Bridge of
St. Angelo to the Square of St. Peter’s was the Borgo Vecchio. It was
a narrow and tortuous street and quite inadequate to the traffic and
processions and pilgrimages which continually passed between its rows
of crowded old houses.
Alexander VI formed the new Borgo by cutting a street through the
orchards, gardens, and slums of this quarter, and by granting special
privileges to the property owners who, within a specified time would
build on it houses not less than forty feet high. The Pope was greatly
interested in his new street and christened it for himself, the Via
Alessandrina. He was fortunate in having in Rome at that time Bramante
of Urbino, who was just launched on that career of popular favor which
was only to be surpassed in length of days or in exaggerated estimation
by the career of Bernini a century later.
A sure way to please the Pope was to employ some great architect and
to erect a noble house upon the new thoroughfare. Raphael, who was
amusing himself with architecture, is said to have worked with Bramante
in the construction of the palace afterward owned by him, next door to
the palace owned by the Queen of Cyprus,[A] and the great room on the
_piano nobile_, the beautiful wooden ceiling of which had been designed
by Bramante, was a stately studio. The room is now divided into two
apartments; but it is easy in imagination to sweep away the modern
alterations and to see this most beautiful, gracious, and best-loved of
all Italian artists at work here among his pupils, or receiving with an
exquisite sweetness and modesty the greatest princes of the Church and
State.
Rome was at this period the finest marble quarry in the world. It was
still a century before the time of Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana;
the Farnese had not yet built their great palace from the spoils of
the Baths of Caracalla and other noble ruins; the last sack of Rome
was still thirty years in the future; and very little building of
any importance had been carried on through the long period of the
popes’ absence in Avignon. Bramante found the richest marbles ready
to his hand, and he built the façade of the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia
out of materials taken from the Basilica Giulia and the Temple of
Janus. However, already in Sixtus IV’s time the rage had begun for
the destruction of old monuments, and in order to build the Via
Alessandrina, the Pope had demolished a Pagan tomb which had once been
a landmark in the Borgo. During the Middle Ages it was called the Tomb
of Romulus, and Raphael has painted it in his “Vision of Constantine.”
It was of pyramidal form, like the tomb called the Pyramid of Cestius,
which is still standing near the Protestant Cemetery on the road to
St. Paul’s Beyond the Walls. Doubtless, its massive blocks went into
the construction of the new palaces surrounding the little square,
which now took the place of the old tomb as the central point in that
quarter of the city. In this square the two chief palaces are connected
with two of the greatest of the Pope’s cardinals, each of whom had
found it to his advantage to hold a post in foreign lands.
The fiery and forceful Giulio della Rovere, who gave his name to the
palace built by his brother Domenico and now known as the Penitenzieri,
had been the chief rival of Rodrigo Borgia in the papal election of
1492, and, thereafter, the open enemy of Alexander VI. It is possible
he might never have become that Pope’s successor had he not put himself
under the protection of Charles VIII of France. On the other hand,
Cardinal Adriano Corneto, who built the palace now the Giraud-Torlonia,
stood high in the Pope’s good graces. Alexander made him collector of
the papal revenues in England, where he was already known as the papal
peacemaker between Henry VII and the ill-starred James IV of Scotland.
There he made a valuable friend in no less a personage than King Henry
VII himself. The Tudor King was not lavish of his money, but, for some
reason, he gave large sums to Cardinal Corneto as a personal gift.
England proved a safe and agreeable asylum for the accomplished
cardinal, and when he was finally recalled he must have returned to
Rome with some misgivings. He found the Curia, as well as the city,
living under that spell of terror which the Borgias, father and
son, had woven about them. Strange stories, horrible suspicions,
and mysterious crimes were the order of the day; and the cardinal,
returning from his bishopric of Bath and Wells and the frankness and
simplicity of the English court, must have found the change little to
his liking. Very probably it was to secure the Pope’s friendship that
he engaged the services of Bramante and began to build a magnificent
palace on the Pope’s new thoroughfare. But while Alexander VI loved
splendor, he also coveted money. The new palace was slow in building,
and before it was completed, the Pope could see that all the gold which
the cardinal had collected in England had not gone into the papal
coffers. In short, he comprehended the fact that his Cardinal Adriano
Corneto was a very rich man; and in the summer of 1503 he sent him a
message that His Holiness and the Duke of Valentino (Cesare Borgia)
would honor him by taking supper with him on the night of August 12.
It is easy to understand the consternation with which the message
was received, the look of frozen horror on the cardinal’s face as
he already saw himself dying in sudden convulsions or fading slowly
away with a fatal and mysterious malady. No time was to be lost, and
a large share of the cardinal’s English gold bought over the Pope’s
majordomo to his side. Possibly some of the deadly work had already
begun before the bargain was struck. Possibly the majordomo thought it
best to appear to have obeyed the Pope’s orders, even at the risk of a
little torture to the cardinal, for although Cardinal Corneto survived
that fatal supper, it was said that the skin fell from him in strips.
The Pope died within ten days, the monstrous appearance of the corpse
terrifying all who beheld it. Only Cesare Borgia’s almost superhuman
vitality saved him from a like fate.
Years after, when he had been shut out forever from Rome, Cesare told
his friend and admirer Machiavelli that the results of this supper in
the gardens of the cardinal’s palace had frustrated all his plans.
Cesare had fully determined that his father’s successor should not
humiliate and despoil him as his father had despoiled and humiliated
the nephews of his predecessor, Pope Sixtus IV. He had made every
arrangement to make himself master of Rome as soon as his father should
die. He had, so he told the author of “Il Principe,” foreseen and
provided for every possible difficulty. The one thing he had not been
able to foresee was that he himself should be too ill to leave his bed.
The Borgias passed away from Rome. Cardinal della Rovere was made Pope,
and men set about to obliterate all memories of that brood whose crimes
had made Rome a stench in the nostrils of Christendom. Gradually, but
effectively, the work was accomplished. Alexander VI’s tomb was built
without any monument. The Fountain of the Gilded Bulls, the emblem
of the Borgias, which stood before St. Peter’s was destroyed. The
Borgia apartments in the Vatican were walled up, and remained so for
centuries. The nude figure of the beautiful Giulia Farnese on the tomb
of her brother Pope Paul III in St. Peter’s was covered with painted
metal draperies. Even the Via Alessandrina became the Borgo Nuovo.
Cardinal Adriano Corneto lived through the pontificate of Pope Julius
II and into that of Pope Leo X; but the fame of his riches did at
last work his undoing. Leo X, who needed money as much as Alexander
VI, insisted that the cardinal was privy to a conspiracy against his
life. Corneto was deprived of his cardinalate, even degraded from the
priesthood, and was obliged to make his escape from Rome. He died in
obscurity, leaving his beautiful palace, still unfinished, to his
benefactor King Henry VII, who made it the residence of the English
ambassador.
A century later, when Maderno built the fountain of the Scossa Cavalli
for Pope Paul V, Cardinal Corneto’s palace had again passed into the
hands of the Romans, where it has remained. The Reformation had swept
over England, and there was no longer an English ambassador to the
Papal See.
PIAZZA PIA
[Illustration]
PIAZZA PIA
No one can walk the Roman streets without perceiving, and almost at
once, that here time is of no importance. It is, in fact, an absolutely
negligible quantity. Buildings and monuments dating from widely diverse
periods stand side by side, and it is in no wise incongruous from the
Roman standpoint to find at the head of the Borgo (the ancient Leonine
city) one of the very latest fountains of papal Rome. It is a charming
little creation, quite consciously harking back to the great days of
the papacy and rebuking by its sober, yet imaginative sculpture those
geometrical designs or extravagant ebullitions of fancy--the fountains
of the present régime. It stands in the Piazza Pia, against that
narrow façade which blunts the point of the long angle or wedge-shaped
block of buildings lying between the Borgo Vecchio and the Borgo Nuovo.
Its Fontanesque mostra is composed of two beautiful white Carrara
columns with Corinthian capitals supporting a pediment and entablature
on which is an inscription to the effect that the fountain was erected
by Pius IX in the sixteenth year of his pontificate, which would make
it the year 1862. The sculptural part of the fountain bears a certain
resemblance to the work of Luigi Amici and Bitta Zappalà, the artists
who not many years later executed the modern figures in the side
fountains of the Piazza Navona.
The Piazza Pia fountain might also be ascribed to Tenerani, a
distinguished sculptor of Pius IX’s pontificate, who, in his devotion
to the Pope, did not disdain to design some of the triumphal devices
with which Rome welcomed back Pio Nono after Gaeta. But Tenerani’s bust
is among the “Silent Company of the Pincio,” and if the little fountain
were indeed his work, the fact would be known. As it is, the sculptor’s
name seems, for the present, at least, to have been forgotten in the
confusion attendant upon the transformation of papal into Italian Rome.
The fountain originally held Paola water, and the charming little vase
and dolphins composed of white Carrara have become through the deposits
of this water so black that the beauty of the fountain is distinctly
marred. This fountain takes the place of an earlier one executed by
Carlo Maderno and called the Mask of the Borgo. The design was a large
mask from which water flowed into a pilgrim shell over which perched
the Borghese eagle, while two lions’ heads on either side spouted
additional streams. As this first fountain was in travertine it had in
all probability succumbed to the disastrous effects of the Paola water,
which seems to disintegrate as well as to discolor some varieties of
that stone.
There is in the Piazza Mastai another fountain erected by Pius IX. And
he also instituted several washing troughs in the Trastevere among the
poor, for whom he had always a sincere and profound sympathy. Those
who would render justice to this last “Papa Re” should drive up the
magnificent approach to the Quirinal Palace. This modern driveway and
masonry were erected, as can be seen from the tablet on the sustaining
wall of the terrace, for Pius IX by his great architect and engineer
Virginio Vespignani. They give the finishing touch of magnificence to
the Piazza of the Quirinal, originally laid out on its present grade
and in its fine proportions by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V (some
two hundred and eighty years earlier). This approach to the Quirinal
and the great buttress walls of the Coliseum might easily be enough
to prove Pius IX’s care for the city; but, as with those of his
predecessors who had the welfare of their people most at heart, his
chief claim upon the memory of the Romans lies in the interest which
he took in the city’s water supply. Pius IX gave his permission to
an English company to introduce into Rome the rediscovered springs
of the Marcian water. These springs had been first brought to Rome
by the Marcian aqueduct in the years 144–140 B. C. This aqueduct was
the first of the true high-level aqueducts, and covered its path of
fifty-eight miles on great arches which brought it to Rome at the Porta
Maggiore one hundred and ninety-five feet above sea-level. The two
aqueducts which antedated it--the Appian and the Anio Vetus--ran most
of the distance underground, the Anio Vetus appearing above ground
for only eleven hundred feet, while the Appian (the first of all the
Roman aqueducts) was carried overground on low arches for three hundred
feet, and actually entered the city fifty feet below the surface of the
earth. The springs of the Marcia are now called the Second and Third
Serena and are situated in the Valley of the Anio above Tivoli, on the
north side of the stream, near Agosta. The original Marcian aqueduct
had been destroyed by Fontana when he was collecting material to build
the Acquedotto Felice. A portion, however, of the ancient masonry
remains, and although to-day the Marcian water comes to Rome chiefly
through modern iron pipes, some parts of its passage lead through the
old stone channels. The water now enters Rome through the Porta Pia
at an altitude of two hundred feet; thus it ranks next to the Paola,
which is two hundred and three feet above the sea-level. The Marcia
ranks next to the Virgo in abundance, and at present supplies most of
the dwelling houses in Rome. Its history is embodied in its full name,
Acqua Marcia Pia.
Pius IX made his last public appearance as sovereign pontiff when this
water was introduced into Rome. This occurred on September 18, 1870,
just two days before the famous “Venti Settembre,” when the Italian
troops entered Rome through a breach in the Porta Pia. The fountain
which was destined to be the last fountain of papal Rome stood in the
Piazza delle Terme,--not where the present one stands, but off to one
side, for the city was still papal Rome and the great Villa Negroni
(formerly Montalto) of Pope Sixtus V then covered the site now occupied
by the present railway station. Within the gardens of that villa many
of the original Acqua Felice fountains were still flowing, and one
latter-day inhabitant of the villa tells how, as a child, she often
looked down at night from her nursery windows upon an old fountain
about which stood a circle of little Campagna foxes drinking from its
cypress-guarded waters. The Pope drove to the inauguration of his
Marcia Pia amid a vast concourse of people who strewed flowers and
shouted: “King, King!” There were, however, few distinguished people
at the ceremony. He drank a cup of the water, praised its purity and
freshness and thanked the magistrates for giving it his name. It was
the last public act of his sovereign pontificate, and derives both
significance and dignity from that long list of popes who, since the
time of Hadrian I had constituted themselves guardians and builders of
Roman aqueducts.