Cardinal Montalto II, and later on it was known as the Villa Negroni.
Engravings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show that it
contained an endless variety of fountains; among them Fontana’s great
fish-pond was truly magnificent. All of these had been made possible
by the Acqua Felice. Sixtus V preferred the Quirinal to any other
residence. Perhaps the Villa Montalto may have become distasteful to
him by reason of the crime which was immortalized by Webster’s tragedy
of “Vittoria Accoramboni or the White Devil.” Cinque Cento Italy was
the Italy of the Elizabethan dramatists, and in this tragedy, the
blackest of their Italian productions, many of the chief characters
were drawn from actual life. The Cardinal Monticelso of the written
tragedy had been the actual Cardinal Montalto, and Vittoria Accoramboni
and her husband had been his nephew and his nephew’s wife. Francesco
Peretti was the cardinal’s favorite nephew, and the ever-perplexing
question of the formation of a cardinal’s household had been solved
for Montalto by domiciling Francesco and Vittoria in the Villa
Montalto. Vittoria had great beauty, and her ambition and audacity
were boundless. She aspired to something higher than the handsome
nephew of a parsimonious and conspicuously infirm old cardinal. She
captivated the head of the Orsini, the Duke of Bracciano, and gave
him to understand that she would marry him after he had made away with
his wife and her husband. The Duchess of Bracciano was the sister of
the powerful Grand Duke of Tuscany. Nevertheless, Bracciano strangled
her with his own hands while pretending to kiss her. Young Peretti
was then called away from the Villa Montalto one night on the pretext
that his dearest friend had need of him, decoyed into the desolate
spaces on Monte Cavallo, and stabbed to death. The cardinal, his
uncle, buried him without a cry either for justice or vengeance. He
waited. But Gregory XIII forbade forever the union of Vittoria and
the duke. More the Pope could hardly dare do against the greatest of
his subjects. Vittoria and Bracciano went through a mock ceremony and
retired to the duke’s great fortress castle of Bracciano, not far from
Rome, where they waited for the Pope’s death. When this occurred, they
returned to the city in order to have the marriage performed during
that interim which must elapse between the death of one pope and the
election of another. Vittoria became the legal Duchess of Bracciano;
but her former husband’s uncle, the feeble old Cardinal Montalto, was
elected Pope, and the two great criminals fled from a certain and
terrible retribution. Venice at that time was the refuge for all the
terror-stricken, and the duke’s kinsman, Ludovico Orsini, lived there
as a successful general. Bracciano died there seven months later; and
six weeks afterward Ludovico Orsini murdered both Vittoria and her
young brother Flaminio in Padua, whither they had gone to live on the
duke’s great legacy. Vittoria’s possession of Bracciano’s fortune, and
the outraged pride of the Orsini occasioned by her marriage, for she
was of humble origin, prompted Ludovico’s crime. But all three of these
actors in the tragedy were guests of Venice, and Ludovico Orsini had
in very truth reckoned without his host. There was one pride greater
than that of a Roman noble, and that was the pride of Venice. Padua
was Venetian territory, and the republic suffered no such acts of
lawless vengeance within her jurisdiction, no matter by whom they were
committed nor on what provocation. The Venetian reprisals were summary
and fearful. Ludovico Orsini was strangled by the Bargello with the
red silk cord which, as a nobleman, he had a right to demand; and his
accomplices died by torture in the public square. It was an age of
crime, flagrant and atrocious; but the story of Vittoria Accoramboni,
involving, as it did, the temporary ruin of the Orsini family, lives on
when others equally horrible have been happily buried and forgotten in
the archives of the families in which they occurred.
Sixty years after the death of Sixtus V this region about the Quattro
Fontane had become both fashionable and beautiful. The fountains were
then known as the four fountains of Lepidus, and Evelyn described
them as the “abutments of four stately ways.” Sixtus V had made it
illegal for any house along his great thoroughfare of the Felice to be
torn down against the will of the owner, even after a decree of the
Tribunal.
In an age of uncertainty created by the Pope’s own high-handed
measures, this security alone must have gone a long way toward
encouraging building.
In 1587 Sixtus himself bought the beautiful Piazza of Monte Cavallo
from the heirs of the Caraffa family, and the Quirinal Palace, already
begun by Gregory XIII, was finished by him with great magnificence.
Fontana also built in one corner of the Quattro Fontane the Palazzo
Mattei, now the Palazzo Albani. The invaluable stimulant of the
“master’s eye” was always to be felt about the neighborhood, for Sixtus
V often took his Sunday walk after mass along these streets, examining,
criticising, and commanding everything. He was “always in a hurry.” It
was as if he felt the time was short. No modern methods surpass the
rush of his undertakings; but unlike the modern building, that which
he built remained, and remains until this day. The feeble body which
so successfully deceived the Conclave at his election and yet survived
for those five titanic years of his pontificate lies in Santa Maria
Maggiore, in the great chapel built for him by his Fontana. There, as
Stendhal truly says: “Amid all the marble magnificence, what one really
cares to see is the sculptured physiognomy of the Pope himself.”
One other statue of this Sixtus which formerly adorned Rome would
now be of surpassing interest. It was erected at the Capitol in the
Pope’s lifetime, and was the work of that gifted young Florentine
artist, Taddeo Landini, who modelled the bronze boys in the Tartarughe
fountain. The night the Pope died this statue was covered by boards
for fear of the violence of the mob, and soon after it was removed;
but it is probably still in existence, and the increasing interest in
Sixtine Rome may some day bring it to light.
In this mortuary chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore there is also the tomb
of Pope Pius V, erected by Sixtus V, and one of the panels in the
Vatican Library depicts the solemn removal of the old saint’s body to
this splendid resting-place. Sixtus V saw this accomplished in his
lifetime, for his devotion to the Pope, who, like himself, had begun
life as a friar, and who had made him cardinal and stood his friend in
trouble, never wavered nor grew cold. Historians have dwelt much upon
Sixtus V’s parsimony. Economy was said to be his favorite virtue. But
the best of the Quattro Fontane is that which represents the virtue of
fidelity; and this is the only one of them which is decorated with the
emblems of Sixtus V.
TARTARUGHE
[Illustration]
TARTARUGHE
Giacomo della Porta, Domenico and Giovanni Fontana, Carlo Maderno, and
Bernini are the Roman masters in the gentle art of fountain-making.
Giacomo della Porta stands first chronologically, and he has also
created the loveliest of the lovely. This is the Tartarughe fountain
for which the Senate and people of Rome paid over twelve hundred scudi,
evidently a large sum at that time for a fountain, as Baglioni mentions
it particularly. Giacomo della Porta delighted in rare marbles and for
his fountain of the Tartarughe he carved the broad shallow bowl of the
classic drinking cup in the centre in _bigio morrato fasciato_, or
veined gray marble, while he made the stem of a mottled yellow marble
called Saravezza. The cup stands upon a Carrara base, moulded and
carved with decorative shields or escutcheons, from the four corners
of which project huge shells of rare beauty and distinction of form
carved in different varieties of African marble. It rises from a
shallow travertine basin, gracefully shaped and slightly sunk below the
level of the present pavement. So far there is nothing to distinguish
this fountain from others of its kind except the richness of its
marbles and the shape of the shells, but its four bronze figures so
harmoniously composed give this design the dignity of a work of art,
and make it the most exquisite of Roman fountains. They are by Taddeo
Landini, whose early death was a distinct loss to the world of art.
These figures are of boys in the most beautiful period of adolescence,
their sinuous bodies lean against the swelling stem of the cup, one
slender leg of each figure pushed backward so that the foot rests on
the toes, preserving the balance, while the other leg, lifted high and
bent at the knee, presses its foot upon the head of a bronze dolphin.
The torsos lean toward each other in couples, each supporting itself on
its elbow so that the right shoulder of the one and the left shoulder
of the other come rather close together. The hands of these supporting
arms grasp the tails of the dolphins, while the other arms, raised high
above the head, push upward with open palms and outspread fingers four
bronze tortoises which clamber over the rim of the cup in haste to
plunge into the water. Projecting from the under surface of the rim are
carved in marble heads of cherubs, so placed that the water which they
spout falls in a steady stream between the figures of the boys and is
received into the lowest basin.
The composition of these figures of boys and water-creatures is quite
lovely; and the water, rising in a central jet from the drinking-cup,
gushing from the mouths of the dolphins and slipping in slender runnels
from the cunningly curved lips of the huge shells enhances, as it
should, the joyous naturalness of the entire conception.
[Illustration: Fountain of the Tartarughe.]
The popular appreciation of the beauty of the Tartarughe is shown by
the wide-spread impression that it was designed by Raphael. It is
painful to give up that belief, and in the face of facts which prove
the hopelessness of such a contention the enthusiastic admirer can only
assert that had Raphael designed a fountain this is the fountain he
would have designed.
There is assuredly some excuse for this assertion. Raphael depicted
often, and with peculiar tenderness, the gracious figures of youths.
There is, also, a whimsicality in this conceit, a certain sympathy
seems to unite the boys with the water-creatures; it is as if they
were all joining in the sport of their own free will, and might at any
moment break away from each other only to reunite in some fresh prank
in splashing water under happy skies. All this is highly reminiscent
of the art of Raphael. By virtue of it the Tartarughe belongs not
to the end of the sixteenth century but to that great period of the
High Renaissance when “for Leo X Raphael filled rooms, galleries, and
chapels with the ideal forms of human beauty and the pure expression of
existence.”
This fountain was erected in the last year of the pontificate of
Gregory XIII and the first year of the pontificate of Sixtus V, which
would explain why its erection is attributed sometimes to the reign
of one pope and sometimes to that of the other. It is difficult to
understand how Sixtus V could have permitted the erection of any
fountain so entirely devoid of scriptural suggestion, so purely
pagan in its expression of joyous and irresponsible life, as is the
Tartarughe. Possibly the play of the boys in the splashing water
reminded the old man, who was in spite of his fierce enthusiasms so
kindly and so human, of the far-off days of his childhood. As Cardinal
Montalto he had done much for his native village, and many acts of his
pontificate prove he had the poor always with him. He never forgot
their sufferings or their simple pleasures, and in that old heart
there lingered memories of his father’s fruit garden at Formi, of
the pear-trees which he placed in his coat of arms, and of the great
cistern in which he dabbled with such happy recklessness that one day
he fell in and had to be fished out like any other urchin destined or
not for the papal chair.
Rome would, undoubtedly, be the richer for a fountain by Raphael,
but it is probably fortunate for the Tartarughe that it was not of
Raphael’s creation. It is not likely that this bit of fancy in bronze
and rare marbles could have escaped destruction at the time of the
sack of Rome in 1527, only six years after Raphael’s death. Perhaps,
also, this last blossom from the golden Summer of Italian Art owes its
perfect preservation to its position in an obscure corner close to
what was once the Ghetto. But as a setting for this gem no situation
could be more inadequate. A mean square of dingy, uniformly ugly
houses surrounds it, and there is not one redeeming feature in all
this dreariness except the patch of blue sky overhead. A fountain fit
to be the crowning beauty of some prince’s garden or to be celebrated
in a canto of “The Faerie Queene” plays on in this commonplace part of
Rome unheeded, and seemingly uncared for. However, when in 1898, one
of the tortoises was stolen the indignation felt at the theft was so
wide-spread and so fierce that the thief was only too glad to abandon
the precious tortoise in a place where it could be easily discovered.
Trevi water supplies this fountain at present. Until quite recently it
was the Acqua Paola, but its deposits had so discolored the bronze and
marbles that the water in the shells was changed back to the Trevi, for
which water it was originally constructed. However, the highest jet in
the fountain was not changed, as Paola water can rise to a much higher
level than Trevi.
FONTANA DEL MOSÈ
[Illustration]
FONTANA DEL MOSÈ
This is the first of the great Fontana fountains, and if Domenico
Fontana got his inspiration for it from the beautiful public fountain
made by Amannati for Julius III on the Via Flaminia, with which he was
familiar before the Casino was placed above it, his fountain in its
turn became the prototype for the great fountains erected in the next
century by his brother for Pope Paul V.
This Fountain of the Moses is a great portal consisting of three arches
equal in size, from the base of which the water issues in double
cascades. The water falls into three large basins guarded by couchant
lions, and each lion spouts an additional stream of water. In the
centre archway stands a colossal figure of Moses in the act of striking
the rock, and the niches on either side of him are filled by high
reliefs of scenes from the Old Testament relative to the importance
and significance of water. The relief to the right represents Gideon
testing his soldiers and is the work of Flaminio Vacca, and in the
left Giovanni Battista della Porta has carved the scene in the desert
after Moses has brought the water from the rock. Four beautiful marble
columns with Ionic capitals stand one on either side of these arches,
and in the small triangular spaces between the capitals and the
keystones are the emblems of Sixtus V--the star, the three mounts, the
pear branch and the lion. These arches and columns support a massive
entablature of which the inscription, in the noble Sixtine caligraphy,
forms the most important feature, and is, in fact, the most impressive
part of the entire structure. Above the inscription rises the florid
pediment, flanked by two obelisks (an idea distinctly borrowed from
Amannati’s fountain) and bearing on its apex the three mounts of Sixtus
V which carry the huge iron cross. Underneath this and occupying the
greater part of the pediment are the armorial bearings of Sixtus V. The
huge shield is supported by two angels, a conceit borrowed, perhaps,
from Pius IV’s escutcheon over the Porta Pia, and repeated again for
Paul V in his fountain on the Janiculum. The armorial sculpture is by
Flaminio Vacca. Such is the great Fontana fountain, grandiose rather
than magnificent, but still distinctly imposing and adequately filling
by its size and importance the honorable position which it occupies
among the fountains of Rome. It is the main delivery tank of the Acqua
Felice; and the Acqua Felice was the first new supply of water which
Rome had received since the aqueducts had been cut off from the city by
Vitiges in 537.
The statue of Moses is a colossal blunder. Prospero Bresciano had
modelled the curious Sixtine lions which served to support the Vatican
obelisk, and the Pope gave him the commission for the principal
figure in his great fountain. Contrary to the advice of his friends,
Bresciano carved this statue, which was to be his masterpiece, directly
from the travertine without any previous modelling--the block lying
horizontally on the ground. When the figure was raised it was found
to be not only out of proportion but also out of conformity with the
laws of perspective. Its unveiling was greeted by the critical Roman
populace with a shout of derisive laughter, so Homeric in its volume
and duration that it utterly condemned the artist, who, as a result,
fell into a melancholia and died.
The present lions, which are of bigio marble, are modern, dating from
the days of Gregory XVI (1846). This Pope created the Egyptian Museum
in the Vatican and removed thither the original lions, which were of
Egyptian origin and had been appropriated for his fountain by Sixtus
V--two from the Piazza of the Pantheon and two from the gate of St.
John Lateran.
The two great points of difference between the Fontana fountains
and the Amannati fountain on the Flaminian Way are interesting and
significant. They are, first, the place of the inscription, and
secondly the volume of water. The first point of difference is due
to the fact that the Fontana fountains, here and on the Janiculum,
proclaim the appearance in the city of a new supply of water. Sixtus V
and Paul V had each built a new aqueduct and could announce the fact
conspicuously by magnificent inscriptions; whereas Julius III, using
a stream of water from an aqueduct already in existence, could only
claim the honor of having erected the fountain for the convenience of
the public. His inscription, therefore, is not borne aloft on triumphal
arches but occupies a place in the central niche, filled in Sixtus
V’s fountain by the figure of Moses, and in Paul V’s fountain left
absolutely vacant. The stream which Julius III dared appropriate from
the Virgo Aqueduct was only large enough to fill a single basin placed
before the central niche of Amannati’s fountain; whereas in the Fontana
fountains the water fills the entire space below the mostra, as it was
naturally the intention to show the magnitude and force of the new
supply.
Pope Sixtus V’s great fountain demands for its effect, like Paul V’s,
wide and spacious surroundings. The high modern buildings crowding
upon it and dwarfing it have done much toward diminishing its artistic
values. One of the panels in the Vatican Library shows what the
fountain was like in the years immediately following its erection.
Gardens and vineyards lay all about it, and it easily dominated the
walls and gateways which were its only architectural neighbors. The
Porta Pia to the left merely enhanced its dignity, and in the far
distance the hills, aqueducts, and the open sky lent themselves for a
magnificent background.
The Acqua Felice, which was the first water of papal Rome, had been the
last water brought to the ancient city. In 226 the Emperor Alexander
Severus built the eleventh and last aqueduct of the classic city.
Its remains are still to be seen on the Via Prænestina. Over this
aqueduct he brought the Acqua Alexandrina, which was from practically
the same sources as those which now supply the Acqua Felice. The Acqua
Alexandrina was brought by the Emperor down the Via Labicana as far as
the Esquiline, where he erected for it a magnificent fountain. A coin
of his period shows the design to have somewhat resembled the present
“Fontanone” on the Janiculum.
Sixtus V selected as the site for his fountain an open space on the
Viminal Hill near the Church of Santa Susanna. He faced it southwest,
at right angles to the Via Pia, which terminated at some distance to
the northeast in the Porta Pia. The Acqua Felice enters Rome at the
Porta Maggiore at the altitude of 59 metres and supplies 21,632.8
cubic metres of water daily. In order to bring the water to Fontana’s
fountain it was necessary to cut a wide street, the Via Ceruaia, and
to tunnel through the Baths of Diocletian. Although the Acqua Felice
served the Pope’s purposes and literally made the desert blossom like
the rose, Sixtus V had no sentiment about it. When the water actually
reached the city, his sister and nephew, thinking to please him,
hastened to bring him a cupful. The Pope, who hated a scene of any
kind, refused to drink it, declaring that it had no taste, which is
quite true. It is to this day the least valued of the Roman waters, and
the overflow or “lapsed water” of Fontana’s great fountain is used for
laundry purposes.
The Pope bought the land containing the feeding-springs of the Acqua
Felice from Cardinal Colonna, and brought it to the city underground
for thirteen miles and for the remaining seven over arches. Its channel
is known as the “ugly aqueduct.”
The worst of the crimes committed by Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana
against the antiquities of the city was the destruction of the
Septizonium. Artists of the period have left invaluable sketches of
this last fine example of classic architecture. It had been built by
Septimius Severus against the Palatine, probably as an architectural
screen to the mass of confused buildings in its rear. It faced south
down the road by which travellers from Africa entered the city. It
had survived the sieges, the earthquakes, and the fires of more than
thirteen centuries; yet Sixtus V, without a qualm, demolished it for
the sake of the blocks of travertine and peperino and its beautiful
marble columns, which he wished to use in his own architectural
enterprises. It is impossible not to wonder what were Fontana’s
feelings as he superintended the destruction of this masterpiece of
his own profession. He does little more than mention the fact in his
memoirs, and this may be in itself significant. Some of the material
went into the fabric of the Moses fountain; but the Romans never
forgave either Sixtus V or Fontana.
Considering the dearth of water in Rome in the sixteenth century and
the character of Sixtus V, the conception of the central idea of this
fountain--that of Moses striking the rock--was not only happy but
almost inevitable. Although the Pope was an ardent churchman, it was
easier for him to believe in the conversion to Catholicism of the
conqueror of Ivry than to understand that the Roman ruins had any other
than a commercial value. Leo X had believed in art “for art’s sake.”
He had believed in nothing else. To Sixtus V, on the other hand, all
the efforts of painting, sculpture, and architecture were to be for
the glory of God, more particularly as that glory was understood and
expounded by himself. The Neptunes and Tritons of later pontificates
would have seemed to him creations of the devil. The Old Testament
was to him, as it was to the English Puritan of the next century, the
source of artistic inspiration; and for his great fountain the Hebrew
lawgiver, bringing the water out of the rock at the Divine command, was
alone adequate. It was not unnatural for him to think of himself as
standing in the place of Moses.
SIXTVS · V · PONT · MAX · PICENVS
AQVAM · EX · AGRO · COLVMNAE
VIA · PRAENEST · SINISTRORSVM
MVLTAR · COLLECTIONE · VENARVM
DVCTV · SINVOSO · A · RECEPTACVLO
MIL · XX · A · CAPITE · XXII · ADDVXIT
FELICEMQ · DE · NOMINE · ANTE · PONT · DIXIT
COEPIT · AN · I · ABSOLVIT · III · MDLXXXVII
_Pope Sixtus V, of the Marches, conducted this water from a junction
of several streams in the neighborhood of Colonna, at the left of the
Prænestine road, by a winding route, twenty miles from its reservoir
and twenty-two from its source, and called it Felix, after the name he
himself bore before his pontificate. He commenced the work in the first
year of his pontificate, and finished it in the third, 1587._
THE LATERAN
[Illustration]
THE LATERAN