for the freshness of its marbles makes it seem to date from yesterday,
whereas it is in reality one of the oldest fountains of modern Rome.
It was constructed three hundred and twenty-five years ago, and
belongs to that period when the Acqua Vergine (Trevi Water) was the
only water with which to feed a fountain. As the Acqua Vergine has
not sufficient head to rise to any great height, and as its supply is
in continuous and wide-spread use for domestic purposes, the designs
for the fountains which it furnishes have to be low, and the sculptor
or architect must rely for his effect not upon any lavish supply of
water but upon the beauty of his materials and his own imagination. The
fountains of Giacomo della Porta show the practical difficulties with
which he had to contend, and the felicity of his genius in overcoming
the limitation. His fountain of the “Tartarughe” is a work of art,
and as such can be admired without the aid of the water. The two side
fountains in the Piazza Navona, also his creations, were quite lovely
before Bernini decorated one and artists of the nineteenth century the
other with fantastic sculpture. His fountain of the Piazza Colonna has
been less tampered with and, standing in full sunlight or darkened
by the vast shadow of the Antonine Column, it remains, in its quiet
beauty, a masterpiece among the Roman fountains. It is a graceful,
hectagonal receptacle, half basin, half drinking-trough, composed of
different kinds of Porta Santa marble. These are joined together with
straps of Carrara ornamented by lions’ heads.[G] Its waters come to it
from a vase of antique shape standing in the centre. From the shallow
bowl of this central vase the water gushes upward to fall over the rim
in a soft, unbroken, silvery stream, and through this vestal’s veil the
Carrara, to which the waters have given a wonderful surface, gleams in
unsullied freshness and beauty. Two tiny jets, set midway on either
side between the ends of the fountain and the vase in the centre,
bring an additional volume and add to the animation of the pool. The
vase in the centre is represented in an old engraving by Falda as
being much lower than the present one and carved in crowded leaflike
convolutions, like the vase of the Scossa Cavalli fountain.
By 1829 this bit of old travertine sculpture had become so misshapen
that the artist Stocchi, by order of Leo XII, replaced it by the
present Carrara vase, adding at that time to either end of the trough
the small groups of shells and dolphins. These are such dainty bits of
fancy, and so frankly an afterthought, that in their first freshness at
least they could not have marred the beauty of the original conception.
Rather must they have enhanced it, as the white doves which are perched
upon its rim make the charm of the “Pliny’s Vase.” Giacomo della Porta
is the first fountain builder of modern Rome, and the fountains which
he did for Gregory XIII--all constructed for Trevi Water--are still
among the loveliest the city holds. The passion for fountain building
began in the second half of the Cinque Cento. Julius III rediscovered
the immense æsthetic value of water, the Nymphæum in his Villa Giulia
being, in fact, the apotheosis of the Acqua Vergine. Pius V’s enlarged
fountain of Trevi was a recognition of the importance of water to the
city’s welfare. This Pope and his predecessor, Pius IV, as well as his
successor, Gregory XIII, all occupied themselves seriously with the
restoration, improvement, and upkeep of the Virgo Aqueduct. The return
to the water question is the one healthy and hopeful sign in the city’s
life during those years which lay between the death of old Paul III and
the accession of Sixtus V. Michelangelo died within this period and his
great spirit was not more surely departed than was the age of art and
learning in which he had moved as king. That outrage to civilization
known as the “last sack of Rome” had occurred in 1527, under Clement
VII, and Rome, in the person of her pontiff and in that of every
citizen, had suffered insult, spoliation, and dishonor.
The devotion of the Romans to Clement’s successor (the Farnese pontiff,
Paul III) was in great part due to their recognition of the fact that
his pontificate represented a sustained and gallant attempt to restore
to his people their lost prestige--that _figura_ so dear to the Roman
heart. With the death of the old patrician the deplorable condition of
the city once more asserted itself and men realized more keenly than
ever the permanent devastation wrought by the sack. Posterity gains
some faint idea of its horrors from the autobiography of Benvenuto
Cellini. It is indebted to him for the dramatic description of the
death of the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a chance shot from the
ramparts when, in the dense fog which enveloped the beleaguered
city, he was planting the scaling ladders against the walls. Four
days earlier, and during the march on Rome, the other commander of
the besieging army, the veteran George Freundsberg, had died of a
stroke of apoplexy brought on by the mutinous conduct of his troops;
so that, without leaders, forty thousand of the worst soldiery of
Europe were turned loose within the city walls--turned loose to recoup
themselves for their long arrears of wages out of everything which
the taste, learning, and moral sense of civilized man has always
held most precious. History records that the Spanish were the most
cold-blooded, the Germans the most bestial, and the Italians the most
inventive in forms of villainy. The week of unspeakable atrocities,
wanton destruction, and wholesale pillage came to an end; but when
it did, that marvellous treasure-house of civilization--Rome of the
Renaissance--had perished, and the place thereof was to know her
no more. It was no wonder that, during the decade which followed,
Rome--what was left of her--seemed hardly to breathe. When, during the
pontificate of Paul III she began to revive, it was plain to all men
that she was not, and could never be, the same. Life came back to her
at last, not through æsthetic but through ethical channels.
Thenceforward the popes, whether they wished it or not, were to be
serious men. As the Reformation spread through England, the Low
Countries, France and Germany, the papacy set its house in order and
prepared to fight, not for its temporal supremacy, as in the mediæval
struggle with the Emperors, but for its spiritual authority. It was
at this point that there came to its aid a new force, a force whose
influence has never yet been accurately measured. In 1539, just before
the close of Luther’s life, Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of
Jesus. This was in the time of Paul III. Four pontificates later, under
Pius IV, the Jesuits, as Calvin was the first to call them, furnished
the sensational element in the second sitting of the Council of Trent;
and in 1572, when Ugo Boncompagni became Pope, under the title of
Gregory XIII, the order made its appearance on the world’s stage as
the recognized director of the church militant. The Jesuits were the
keepers of this Pope’s conscience, and the history of his pontificate
is the first chapter in the history of Jesuit rule. For them the
Pope erected the present building of the Collegio Romano, founded in
Loyola’s time; for them he founded the German and English colleges at
Rome, and, according to Ranke, “probably there was not a single Jesuit
school in the world which had not to boast in one way or another of his
bounty.” The chief architects of the time were put at their disposal.
Vignola designed and built for them the vast Church of “the Gesù”; and
as he died while the work was in progress, his distinguished pupil,
Giacomo della Porta, turned from the making of beautiful fountains and
completed the cupola and façade. The latter also built the high altar
in that church, and in its construction showed once more that love of
rare marbles which is so distinctive a feature in the Colonna and other
fountains of his creation.
Gregory XIII had begun life as a Bolognese lawyer. He had been called
to Rome by Paul III the very year Loyola founded the Society of Jesus.
He had gone to Spain as Papal legate under Paul IV, had been created
cardinal by Pius IV, and at the age of seventy was made Pope. His life
had peculiarly fitted him to appreciate Jesuit ideals. His belief
in educational institutions, his keen interest in geography and the
remote corners of the earth, the correctness of his private life after
his elevation, his previous worldliness, and his secular training, all
combined to make him the Jesuit Pope. The Roman Church remembers him as
the builder of the Gregorian Chapel in St. Peter’s, the reformer of the
calendar, the reorganizer of a great body of ecclesiastical law, and
the patron of the Order of the Jesuits. To Protestants he remains the
Pope who sang “Te Deums” for “the St. Bartholomew.”
The pontificate of Gregory XIII was a deplorable one for the Holy
See and for the Romans. Conditions of living sank to a very low
level. Banditti terrorized the States of the Church and could not be
controlled even in Rome. The great families whose estates Gregory
had confiscated to pay for his architectural and ecclesiastical
extravagances were in open revolt, and the treasury was empty. Venice
had been estranged, and England and the Netherlands were forever lost.
Gregory XIII’s successor, Sixtus V, fell heir to this condition of
misrule and disaster. No one can be surprised at the grim irony of the
new pontiff in ordering masses to be said for the soul of Gregory XIII!
Looking at the tranquil loveliness of the Colonna fountain--so white
and shining in the sunlight--it is difficult to picture it as a part
of the turbulent life of the period in which it was erected. Yet many
a time its waters must have restored consciousness, stanched wounds,
stifled cries for mercy or succor, and washed away the stains of blood.
It has always been a Pilgrims’ Fountain. Long before Sixtus V with his
passion for converting the “high places” of Paganism into Christian
monuments had restored the Antonine column and placed upon it the
statue of St. Paul--long before that time the ascent of the column
had been a part of the Roman pilgrims’ itinerary. In the Middle Ages
the column had become the property of the monks of San Silvestro, who
leased it to the highest bidder. As Rome numbered her pilgrims by the
thousands in any year, and by the tens of thousands during the years
of the Papal Jubilee, a goodly profit was derived from the fees paid
by the pilgrims to the custodian of the column, and the monks could
therefore always count upon making an advantageous lease. Gregory XIII,
in erecting this fountain, must have thought primarily of the comfort
and interest of the pilgrims. As the traveller of to-day remembers the
fountain of Trevi, so the pilgrim of the sixteenth century remembered
the fountain by the side of the Column of St. Paul--the fountain of
the Piazza Colonna. Its beauty delighted the eyes of footsore men from
far-off and still barbarous countries; while the crystalline waters
which quenched their thirst and washed away the stains of travel would
have had for these Christians from the North a symbolic significance
undreamed of by the Romans. The vision of this shining fountain has
been carried back to many distant monasteries and remote firesides
throughout the Christian world. Its situation in the Piazza Colonna,
which is but a widening of the Corso, has kept it in the main current
of Roman life. The people use it and cherish it; Falda has engraved
it; and, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XII
embellished it with its dainty shells and dolphins, as a father might
twine flowers in the hair of some beautiful child.
QUATTRO FONTANE
[Illustration]
QUATTRO FONTANE
These quaint old fountains, now fast fading away, were erected during
the pontificate of Sixtus V to decorate the famous “Crossing” created
by himself and his architect Domenico Fontana when these two began
to make over Rome of the Renaissance into modern Rome. The Crossing
occurs where the Via Venti Settembre traverses at right angles the
Via Sistina. The former leads from the Porta Pia to the Piazza of the
Quirinal, and the latter runs all the way from the Trinità de’ Monti
to Santa Maria Maggiore, changing its name just above the Crossing to
Via Quattro Fontane, and after passing the Via Nazionale becoming Via
Agostino Depretis. The Via Venti Settembre becomes, after leaving the
Crossing on the Quirinal side, the Via Quirinale. Sixtus V laid out the
Via Sistina, and called it for himself the Via Felice. The Via Venti
Settembre was called in his time the Via Pia, as it led to the Porta
Pia, which was erected by Pope Pius IV.
The four fountains are of travertine and represent two rivers and two
virtues. They are all by Fontana except that one which is placed across
the grille in the wall of the Barberini Gardens. This is the work of
Pietro da Cortona. The choice both of the rivers and of the virtues
is significant. Pope Sixtus V’s early life shows what need he had of
fortitude, while fidelity marks his attitude toward his two (and only)
friends, Pope Pius V and Domenico Fontana.
The Tiber, represented by a river-god behind whom the reeds are
growing, was of course to be expected. The Anio, also a river-god but
with the emblem of the oak-tree, may have been chosen because of Sixtus
V’s intention to bring its waters to Rome, not by an aqueduct but in
a canal, for the transportation of the travertine and wood needed in
his great enterprises. For the Tiber also he had plans. He wished to
enlarge its bed so that he might bring up his galleys from the sea to
Rome; and he had a scheme for its separation at the Ponte Molle and
for bringing one arm of it behind the Vatican, so as to make an island
of that part of Rome containing the papal palace, St. Peter’s and the
Castle of St. Angelo. These were among the projects which he had not
the time to carry out, for Sixtus V’s pontificate lasted but five
years. Seeing what he actually accomplished during that short period
and reading what he still intended to do, it seems as if this Pope
were not a link in the long chain of St. Peter’s successors but one
of those “explosions of energy” which occur from time to time in the
history of men.
[Illustration]
Sixtus V was not a Roman nor even by descent an Italian. His origin
was from the humblest condition in life. The family name of Peretti (a
little pear) might have been taken by his father, an Illyrian immigrant
of Slavonic origin, to denote his occupation, which was that of a fruit
gardener. At twelve years of age this man’s son, Felix Peretti, became
a Franciscan novice; and from that time the enthusiasm, ideals, and
limitations of the great Order of St. Francis moulded and inspired a
character formed by nature for leadership in any position to which it
might attain. To an ardent temperament, an imperious will, and a strong
intellect was added a constructive, even fantastic, imagination of a
high order; but his lack of early culture and his exclusively monastic
training had kept him in ignorance of all education not immediately
connected with religion and had bred in him a hostility toward classic
art almost amounting to fanaticism. Such was the great Franciscan
friar, Felix Peretti who, after first becoming Cardinal Montalto, was
elected Pope in 1585 and took the title of Sixtus V. It may be said
that, although as head of the Roman See his abilities obtained a far
wider scope than his order could have given him, yet from the point
of view of character and ideals he remained the Franciscan friar all
his life. His brief and splendid pontificate closed suddenly amid
the last great political and religious struggle between France and
Spain. To neither opponent had Sixtus, who could see both sides of the
conflict, given his final support; and his suspension of judgment in
a cause where the forces of Protestantism were still represented in
the person of Henry of Navarre gave rise to suspicions, most unjust,
of his orthodoxy. The Roman people forgot the benefits and glories of
his reign and remembered only its severity, the destruction of their
antiquities, the drain of his taxation, and his temperate policy toward
a Protestant king. The marvel of his extraordinary rise to power had
produced in the public mind fantastic theories, and when a great storm
burst over the Palace of the Quirinal, where the Pope lay dying, it was
commonly believed that “Friar Felix” had at last been called upon to
fulfil his part of the compact which he had made with the devil for
power and place.
When this Pope ascended the chair of St. Peter he found an exhausted
treasury, a starving people, a cramped and crowded city suffering from
lack of water and from every means of hygienic living; and added to
this there was such a condition of lawlessness in the States of the
Church as made them a byword throughout Christendom. Within a year
after his election the last great chieftain of the banditti had been
destroyed, and the foreign ambassadors journeyed in safety to take up
their abode in the Holy City. Within three years he had deposited in
the Castle of St. Angelo great sums of money, which were to be used,
however, only for the defense of the city, the purchase of lost papal
territory, and wars against the Turks, with which last contingency
his imagination was constantly at play. During these years he had
also reconciled the feud of the Colonna and Orsini, had restored the
disputed privileges of the nobility in the great cities, and had
brought Venice once more into harmony with the papacy. It was by
command of this Pope, Sixtus V, that the gardens, hills, wolds, and
valleys of the States of the Church were planted with mulberry-trees,
so that “where no corn grew the silk industry might flourish.” It was
Sixtus V who encouraged woollen manufacture so that--to quote his own
words--“the poor might have something.” In connection with this, it
is interesting to see that he had fully intended to turn the Coliseum
into an immense woollen factory. The streets of Rome resounded with
the cheerful din of his architects and masons; and though the nobility
and populace had reason enough to fear the entire destruction of their
ancient monuments at the hands of this Franciscan, yet they could but
admire the great triumphs of architecture and engineering which day by
day raised the city to her lost pre-eminence and restored the pride
of the Roman people. His first great public enterprise marked him at
once as a born administrator. This was the introduction into Rome of
a new supply of water. The work which the Pope determined should be
worthy of imperial Rome was accomplished in spite of every obstacle
and at a cost of two hundred and fifty-five thousand three hundred
and forty-one scudi. By it he all but doubled the population of his
city and reclaimed that great tract of land comprising the Viminal,
Quirinal, and Esquiline Hills. This quarter had been a desert during
eleven centuries; and yet, in the days of the Empire, it was the garden
of Rome.
Piranesi’s engravings give some idea of the savage wildness of the
uninhabited parts of Rome; and the ragged and uncouth figures with
which he peoples his ruins are, no doubt, a faithful representation
of the squalor of the wretched tribe of outlaws who dwelt among them.
This state of things had resulted from one cause--lack of water. The
aqueducts which supplied these hills had been the first to perish at
the hands of the barbarians, and desolation had followed inevitably
upon their destruction. Pius IV had dreamed of restoring this great
portion of the city; but Pius IV, like his immediate predecessors,
had lacked the means of doing this. Sixtus V brought to the task the
required money, public tranquillity, and imagination. He found in the
erstwhile mason’s apprentice from Como, Domenico Fontana, the engineer
and architect for such undertakings. The old Marcian Aqueduct furnished
the materials for the Acquedotto Felice, and the water was brought all
the way from Zagarolla in the Agra Colonna, near Frascati, twenty miles
distant from Rome, to the Pope’s vineyard outside the Porta Maggiore,
and thence to the Church of Santa Susanna. The splendid stream carried
over these arches was thus distributed throughout the desolation and
sterility of the Viminal, Esquiline, and Quirinal Hills. With this
water at his command, Sixtus V began laying out what might be called
to-day Sixtine Rome--the Rome which lies between the terraces of the
Trinità de’ Monti and that portion of the Aurelian wall pierced by the
six gates--Porta Pinciana, Porta Salaria, Porta Pia, Porta San Lorenzo,
Porta Maggiore, and Porta San Giovanni. It was an enormous space to
cover, and the frescoes in the Vatican Library show how desolate and
how wild it was. The two great basilicas of the Lateran and Santa Maria
Maggiore, the Coliseum, and the Septizonium (for very good reasons
not included in the picture), the Baths of Diocletian, the Neronian
arches, the Villa Montalto with its rows of famous cypresses, and in
one panel the Moses fountain and the Porta Pia--these constitute the
main features of the wild landscape with its hilly background and
its foreground of rough, bare earth and shaggy vegetation. The Pope
offered special privileges to all who would build on these hills, and
he himself began the work by levelling the ground about the Church of
the Trinità de’ Monti and building the fine flights of steps which
lead up on both sides to the church. Half-way between this church and
the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore he created the Crossing; and for
rest and refreshment, as well as for beauty, he placed here these four
fountains. This half-way point in the long ascent from the Trinità
de’ Monti to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore was well known to
Sixtus V. Many a time had he, as Friar Felix Peretti, climbed that
lonely hillside and felt for himself the solitude and thirst of the
desolate vicinity. Later on, when he had become Cardinal Montalto, he
had passed that way in such state as a poor cardinal could command.
Here Fontana had first built him a modest dwelling, and here he began
to construct the Villa Montalto, which, as Fontana labored over it,
became at length so beautiful that it, together with the chapel he was
also building in Santa Maria Maggiore, cost Montalto the allowance
given by the Camera Apostolica to poor cardinals, since the Pope judged
no man to be poor who could build so magnificently. Gregory XIII’s
inference and consequent action may have been natural, but was not on
that account just. The enduring antipathy between Ugo Boncompagni and
Felix Peretti dated from that Spanish mission on which they had been
sent together by Pius V; and when Boncompagni had become Pope and had,
therefore, Cardinal Montalto in his power, it befitted him to make a
thorough investigation of any matter concerning his old antagonist
before taking action. As a matter of fact, the villa, though costing
in the end thirty thousand scudi, could not have been so extravagant
in the beginning. The characters of Cardinal Montalto and Fontana, as
well as their accounts, prove how certainly the owner and architect
could get the best possible returns for their money. These two men
formed at that time one of the notable friendships of history. Fontana
supplied out of his savings the funds for continuing the chapel; and
Montalto, as Sixtus V, proved his gratitude and appreciation. Their
confidence in each other was as complete as was their recognition of
each other’s ability. Sixtus gave Fontana the work of taking down and
re-erecting the obelisk of the Vatican--and this, in spite of Fontana’s
youth (he was forty-two years old and judged by his contemporaries
to be too young for such responsibility) as well as the reputation
of Amannati and other competitors. Furthermore, when the obelisk was
finally lowered to its present position amid the prayers of the vast
concourse of people, Sixtus was not even present. The French ambassador
was to have his audience at that hour, and the state of Europe was the
Pope’s chief concern. As Sixtus passed along the street to the Vatican,
revolving the affairs of Philip II and Elizabeth of England, of Mary
Stuart and Henry of Navarre, and the “Unspeakable Turk,” the guns of
St. Angelo apprised him that the obelisk was in place. That had been
Fontana’s business and he had trusted it to him. Nevertheless, the old
pontiff shed tears of satisfaction.