room for the present bronze affair. But the Acqua Marcia Pia now flows
in the Pope’s pretty fountain of Piazza Pia, so that here in the Borgo,
the ancient “Porch of St. Peter’s,” we find the last water and, with
the exception of the fountain in the Piazza Mastai, the last fountain,
of papal Rome.
CAMPIDOGLIO
[Illustration]
CAMPIDOGLIO
The three fountains of the Campidoglio have one fundamental
characteristic in common--that of being a part of Rome from a period of
great antiquity. Like those families who “were there when the Conqueror
came,” the sculptures which adorn these fountains have been in Rome
since Christian Rome began. All the statues have occupied their present
positions a comparatively short time, and have passed through many
vicissitudes before reaching the places they now hold. In fact, each
fountain of the Campidoglio is a fountain with a past. The sculptural
part of each is a survival of some artistic design or idea antedating
to a remote period the time of its conversion into the fountain of
to-day.
The general view of the Campidoglio comprises the stairway called “La
Cordonata,” the piazza at its summit crowned by the Palace of the
Senators, with the Museum of the Capitol to the left and the Palace
of the Conservatori on the right; and it is so impressive in its
architectural majesty that the fountain which is a part of it all keeps
its true place in the great composition, and is recognized only as a
note in the general harmony of proportion, design, and decoration.
This is, of course, as it should be--as Michelangelo meant it to be
when, some three hundred and seventy-five years ago, the vision of
the Campidoglio as it now stands unfolded itself in his brain. Not
that every detail of the magnificent reality is as he planned it.
The fatality which followed him, spoiling or changing nearly all his
great designs, has been at work here; and it is the fountain which has
suffered.
This fountain, which is a part of the approach to the Senate House, was
to have as its central statue a figure of Jove. Vasari, who is quite
carried away with Master Michelangelo’s beautiful design, describes
the fountain as if it were already done,--Jove in the centre and the
two river-gods on either side. But Michelangelo and the enthusiastic
Vasari had been dead for years when Sixtus V brought the Acqua Felice
to the Campidoglio and finally erected the fountain. He placed in the
noble niche where a colossal and majestic Jupiter should have stood,
the antique statue of a Minerva done over to represent Rome. The
white marble head and arms of this statue are modern restorations,
but the porphyry torso was found at Cori, and its air of undeniable
antiquity is all that saves this curiously inadequate figure from utter
insignificance. It is too small for the niche it occupies, and is so
out of proportion to its surroundings and on so different a plane
of artistic treatment that it would quite spoil any creation less
triumphantly dominant than is this whole staircase and façade.
The two river-gods which also adorn this fountain are very old.
Together with Marforio, now to be found in the Museum of the Capitol,
they have the distinction of never having been buried since the
downfall of Rome. Once they stood before “that most magnificent of all
Roman temples”--Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. Later they belonged to
the Mediæval Museum of Statues, a collection kept in or near the old
papal palace of the Lateran, where they had been called Bacchus and
Saturn. The Nile, who should have been unmistakable because of his
emblem of the Sphinx, has now his proper designation; but the other
statue has a curious history. It was originally the River Tigris, a
river familiar to the Romans since the wars with Mithradates. When,
under Paul III, Michelangelo placed these statues in their present
position, some influential person suggested that the Tigris, no longer
of any interest to the Romans, should be changed into the Tiber. The
emblem of the Tigris--a tiger--was then altered to represent the Roman
Wolf, and the Twins were added. Pirro Ligorio tells the story, and goes
on to say that the fingers of one of the Twins were originally a part
of the Tiger’s fur.
The erection of the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in
the centre of the piazza was the first step in the design of the
Campidoglio of to-day, for Michelangelo’s admiration of the statue
had been shared by Paul III, and the Pope brought it hither in 1538
when the embellishment of Rome, originally begun in honor of the
visit in 1534 of Charles V, had become with both Pope and citizens
a great and permanent interest. This statue also had been a part of
that Mediæval Museum in the Lateran which was probably one of the
places to visit when Charlemagne came to Rome to be crowned in old
St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800. The façade of the Senate House,
which forms the background to the piazza and its statues, is built in
great part of travertine, so the structural part of the fountain is
of the same material. This consists of a huge niche, sixteen and a
half feet in height, sunk into the foundation of the terrace before
the main entrance to the Senate House. On either side of the niche is
a pair of Doric pilasters, which support the floor of the terrace and
its beautiful balustrade. A great stairway, down which the balustrade
continues, connects this entrance of the Senate House with the piazza
below; and the foundation of these steps, forming triangular wings to
the niche, serves as a background to the river-gods. These figures lie
one on either side of the semicircular basins containing the water. The
simplicity of the design partakes of the inevitable. Considering it
from any point of view, it is not only impossible to think of anything
better, it is impossible to think of anything else. If it is not the
work of Michelangelo, there must have been two Michelangelos in 1538!
[Illustration: View of the Piazza del Campidoglio from the left side of
the Cordonata.]
In Piranesi’s engraving of the Campidoglio a fine balustrade like the
one on the stairway surrounds the fountain. It follows the contour of
the lower basin and stands at some three or four feet distant from
it. This balustrade, which has disappeared, enhanced distinctly the
beauty of the fountain, bringing it more into harmony with the entire
composition.
The river-god is one of the earliest sculptural personifications of
natural phenomena. In these days comparatively little heed is paid
to the smaller water-ways, so the modern spirit fails to see the
significance of these conventionalized figures. To the ancients,
however, the statues personified that physical object upon which all
civilized life depended--a great stream of unfailing water. The rivers
of Greece were small, while the Roman Empire contained some of the
largest in the world; but the ideas they represented were the same. The
river, small or great, made the city. The river gave food and drink
to the inhabitants, connected them with the outside world, brought
trade, turned the mills, defended the city from invasion, carried away
pestilence, cleansed, purified, and supported all the works of men; and
therefore Father Tiber and his brothers were to be worshipped and to
be honored, and statues were to be set up to them in public places, so
that men should remember what they owed to their river. The river is
always personified as a benign and majestic figure in the full strength
of mature manhood, with long and abundant hair and beard. The lower
limbs are draped, so that the mystery of partial concealment hangs
about him. On one arm he bears a horn of plenty; while with the other
he reclines upon some support, which is usually the characteristic
emblem of the particular stream which he represents.
Power, abundance, and calm strength are the qualities of a great river;
and these qualities the ancients most adequately expressed in their own
peculiar medium, which was sculpture. Men of to-day put their ideas
into music, or more explicitly into prose or verse, and there are still
those who appreciate the significance of the river. Washington Irving’s
epithet of the “lordly Hudson” proves the hold that great river had
over his perception and imagination; and not any statue of a river-god
can give the conception of a river which is to be found in Arnold’s
“Sohrab and Rustum”:
“But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hush’d Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon;--he flow’d
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles--
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil’d circuitous wanderer--till at last
The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”
[Illustration]
MARFORIO
The nearest approach which the Romans have left us to such grandeur as
this is to be found in their statue called Marforio. The north wing
of the Campidoglio group is known as the Museum of the Capitol, and
it is in the entrance court of this edifice that Marforio is now to
be seen. If this most majestic of all river-gods ever represented any
particular river, the name of that river was forgotten centuries ago.
His title of Marforio was given him long since, because he once poured
the water into a fountain which stood in a small square to the left of
the Senate House, where Augustus had erected the Martis Forum. There he
seems to have remained throughout the darkest days of Rome’s decadence,
surviving every vicissitude, and always respected by the half-barbarous
Romans of that time. Gregory XIII (Boncompagni, 1572–1585) is
responsible for removing Marforio from this classic position and for
separating him at that time from the huge granite basin into which
flowed the water from the urn on which he is leaning. Thenceforth the
basin has a history of its own, while Marforio’s odyssey (he wandered
for some time after leaving his old home) finally brought him to
the Campidoglio. Sixtus V then placed him on the left side of the
piazza, facing the south wing. This south wing, known as the Palazzo
dei Conservatori, was the first of the present group of buildings
to be erected, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri--a Roman gentleman and one of
Michelangelo’s few intimates--having had charge of its construction in
Michelangelo’s lifetime. The north wing, or the Museum of the Capitol,
was not done until the architect Rainaldi erected it for Innocent X
(Pamphili), twelve pontificates after the reign of Paul III. During a
period of one hundred and sixty years Marforio remained where Sixtus
had placed him, and then Clement XII (Corsini) installed him in the
court of the Capitoline Museum, and again he was given a fountain to
feed and protect.
Marforio’s career after he had been parted from his basin was a
curious one. Bored, perhaps, by the lonely magnificence of his new
surroundings, he fell into evil ways. He became the partner of
Pasquino! Pasquino, the mutilated torso from an old Greek group of
statuary, stands at the farthest corner of the Braschi Palace (now
the Ministero dell’ Interno). He had first been set up there in the
reign of Alexander VI; and from that time he had become the medium for
the popular and anonymous criticisms of the government. His name of
Pasquino was taken from a witty tailor or barber who lived near the
Palazzo Orsini and whose sallies against those in authority greatly
delighted the Roman people. It became the custom to affix anonymous
couplets or epigrams to the old torso, which thus obtained the name of
Pasquino, and the epigrams came to be known as pasquinades; and from
the days of the Borgias to the time of Napoleon, and even later, most
of the current witticisms or scathing reflections upon public events
or notable personages were ascribed to Pasquino. When Marforio took up
his abode in the Piazza of the Campidoglio, he became to the Romans
the partner of Pasquino. According to a modern authority, Marforio
never originated the sally. His function was to put the question
which elicited the witty retort, or to reply in kind to Pasquino’s
interrogatories. With Marforio’s incarceration in the court of the
Museum the long dialogue came to an end; and a century later the
passing of papal Rome brought Pasquino’s career to its final close.
Modern freedom of the press leaves no place for Pasquino; and it may be
said of him that, Marforio being gone,
“... of sheer regret
He died soon after.”
This is not strictly true, for, although the statues themselves no
longer have a part in the game, it still goes on. One of the most
popular of the Roman newspapers still publishes questions and repartee
by Marforio and Pasquino.
It is only necessary to study for a short time the various river-gods
in Rome, such as those of the Tiber and the Nile, here at the Capitol,
or Fontana’s statue in the Quattro Fontane, or the modern work in
the western fountain of the Piazza del Popolo, and then to return to
Marforio, to appreciate the immense artistic superiority of the latter.
Marforio is truly a river-god, a personification of all or any of the
earth’s rivers. The ancient and forgotten sculptor has given to the
ponderous stone a fluid quality which is really wonderful. To make
the hair and beard merge into the god’s breast and shoulders would
have been simple both in conception and execution, but only a genius
could have secured to the massive and supine figure that appearance of
being outstretched in powerful yet melting length along the surface of
things. Artists of the Renaissance from Rome and from beyond the Alps
always speak of the _gran simulacro a giacere_, an expression difficult
to anglicize, but which is an attempt to describe this singular
quality of a static position instinct with continuous and onward
flowing movement. Finally, the god’s face is full of genuine power and
benignity and is the adequate consummation of the sculptor’s ideal. It
is no wonder that Marforio has become a type. Vasari, for instance,
speaks of young Baccio Bandinelli making “a Marforio” out of snow, as
not long before the youthful Michelangelo had made a faun from the same
perishable material.
For a thousand years--and we do not know for how much longer--Marforio
has been a part of the city’s life. He has survived the Norman pillage
in 1084, as well as the great sack of Rome in 1527. As a kindly god,
dispensing water to rich and poor, he has had his part in all the
triumphs and disasters, and has shared the ups and downs of life
not only with the city but with her children. Roman and barbarian,
patrician and plebeian, slave and citizen, Pagan and Christian--all
have drunk from his fountain. What has he not seen, and not heard!
It was an unerring instinct for the fitness of things which made him
Pasquino’s gossip, and his present honorable but unnatural seclusion
from the city’s busy streets and squares is commonly attributed not to
Pope Clement XII’s lack of imagination but, on the contrary, to his
recognition of Marforio’s malicious influence over the popular mind. A
tablet has been set up in the house which is built over the site where
history finds him, Number 49, Via Marforio. In short, Marforio belongs
to that curious class of inanimate things which have developed a
personality; injury to him would arouse fierce popular resentment; and
were he to be destroyed, the Romans would feel that they had lost not a
work of art but a personal friend.
THE LION
The third fountain in the trio of the Campidoglio is to be found in
the upper garden of the Palazzo dei Conservatori--the building to the
right hand in the ascent of the Cordonata. It can hardly be called
a fountain, since it is merely a large basin of water surrounding
some rockwork on which stands an old bit of sculpture of a character
manifestly inappropriate to the sentiment of a fountain. It represents
a lion tearing out the vitals of a horse which it has sprung upon
and borne to the ground. This much-restored fragment is of real
importance from an artistic standpoint, while as a Roman antiquity it
has extraordinary interest. The marble bears distinct traces of having
been subjected to the action of water, and, as a matter of fact, it
was found more than a thousand years ago in the bed of the River Almo.
Nothing is known of its history previous to that discovery.
[Illustration]
The Almo is a little brook in the Campagna not far from Rome, rising
in the hills between the Via Appia and Via Latina and emptying into
the Tiber. Its modern name is Acquataccio. The Almo was connected
with the ancient worship of the goddess Cybele, whose sacred image
was ceremonially washed in it each year on the 27th of March by the
priests. This religious ceremony, doubtless, preserved the channel
of the stream so that it would have been quite possible to hide
successfully a great piece of statuary in its depths or in some reedy
pool along its banks. River-beds were not uncommon hiding-places for
treasures during the Dark Ages which followed the breaking-up of the
Roman Empire, and it is quite possible that this group may have been so
hidden by its owner whose great villa, situated near the stream, was
threatened with pillage or destruction by some barbarian incursion. The
high value evidently placed upon it by its original possessor was also
given to it by its discoverers. It belonged to that remote museum of
antiquities kept in or near the Lateran Palace during the Middle Ages
and dating back at least to the days when Charlemagne first visited
Rome, in 781, bringing with him his little son Pepin, aged four, to be
anointed King of Italy by Pope Hadrian I. This museum contained also
the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now standing in the centre of
the piazza of the Campidoglio, together with the two river-gods, placed
later on by Michelangelo where they now lie--one on either side of the
central fountain of the Campidoglio; and other marbles and bronzes of
great value. Most of these art treasures were removed from the Lateran
to the Capitol when Pope Sixtus IV (Riario, 1471–1484) founded the
Capitoline Museum; but long before that time the Lion, as it was always
called (the original portion of the horse being merely the body), had
been taken from its academic seclusion and set in the midst of things.
During three centuries of the turbulent life of mediæval Rome, it
stood to the left hand and at the foot of the long flight of steps
which, previous to Michelangelo’s time, led up from the Piazza of the
Ara Cœli to the Capitol. All about it was held the public market; the
city officials, found guilty of misdemeanors, were made to do penance
sitting astride the Lion’s back with their hands tied behind them and
their faces smeared with honey--the Roman version of the pillory! The
ferocity of the Lion was thought to typify the punishment of crime,
and the public executions were held before this old fragment. Here,
on August 31, 1354, the famous soldier of fortune, Fra Monreale, was
beheaded by order of Cola di Rienzi. On October 8 of the same year,
Rienzi himself was caught as he was escaping in disguise from the
burning palace of the Capitol, and here he stood, during the last hour
of his life, leaning against the Lion, turning his head this way and
that in vain quest of succor, while the mob which was so soon to tear
him to pieces held back in a strange awe, and a silence reigned over
everything! That was the greatest of all the tragedies--though there
were so many of them--connected with the Lion.
The old bit of sculpture continued to hold its sinister place in Roman
life, until the pontificate of Paul III (Farnese, 1534–1549). At that
time Master Michelangelo (to use Vasari’s phraseology), working for the
Pope, remodelled the Capitol and decorated it with many old statues.
The group of the horse and lion was then completely, though poorly,
restored, and placed in the court of the Palazzo dei Conservatori--this
being the first of the three buildings of the Capitol to be built
after Michelangelo’s designs. At the same time the place for the public
executions was transferred from the piazza of the Ara Cœli to the
Piazza di Ponte Sant’ Angelo.
The Lion was placed in its present position in 1903, and Rome of the
twentieth century is responsible for the extraordinary taste which
converted into a fountain this old fragment, highly interesting as an
antiquity but repulsive in itself, and associated chiefly with the
bloodiest and least attractive pages in Roman annals.
It is impossible to leave the Campidoglio without a heightened
appreciation of the might of the constructive imagination. Only that
faculty, developed to its highest power as in Michelangelo, could
have produced this magnificent harmony out of the incongruous mass of
classic and mediæval survivals with which he had to deal.
FARNESE
[Illustration]
FARNESE
“At the entrance to this palace stand two rare and vast fountains made
of granite stone and brought from the Baths of Titus.” Thus wrote John
Evelyn in November, 1644. The description holds to this day, although
the modern sight-seer will substitute Caracalla for Titus.
The fountains were erected by the Farnese family to add the final
touch of distinction to their new palace. They owe their unique
combination of original classic features and seventeenth-century taste
to the genius and opportunities of Paul III and his grandson, Cardinal
Alessandro Farnese II, and to a still later descendant Cardinal Odoardo
Farnese. The Pope and the earlier cardinal, men of wide culture and
enormous wealth, were the first to excavate and exploit the Baths of
Caracalla. The treasures they there found might well have been the
loot of some fabulous city, and yet the pearls and gold and rubies
brought some twenty years later by Francis Drake to his royal mistress
were of small significance compared to the works of art found in those
great baths--baths which had been the most sumptuous pleasure-house of
imperial Rome. It is the glory of Italy that she knew this at the time.
Her great churchmen reverently exhumed those masterpieces of Greek
and Roman art and made of them the Farnese Collection--according to a
well-known authority the rarest collection ever got together by private
individuals, and forming to-day the chief interest in the Museum at
Naples.