Barcaccia is neither French nor Spanish, but belongs pre-eminently
to the English-speaking race. This fantastic fountain, with its
commonplace background and its limited view of the Scalinata, forms
the only outlook from the windows of the house in which the poet Keats
spent the last three months of his life; so that from the position of
this house the fountain of the Barcaccia is connected for all time with
the fate of the “young English poet” who lies buried now these many
years in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls. From the windows of
his narrow death-chamber he watched the plashing waters in the fountain
below him, while above his head the bells in the church, which he could
not see, remorselessly rang out the quarter-hours or tolled for some
fellow creature the “agonia,” or “passing bell.” During his hours of
listlessness or fits of sombre rage, this passing of time and of life
was always in his ears, as the futile play of the water was always
before his eyes.
It is not difficult to connect the bells and the fountain with the
bitter epitaph written, by his own wish, above his grave:
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
TRITON
[Illustration]
TRITON
“Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”
The exquisite lines rise involuntarily to the lips as one comes
suddenly upon Bernini’s old fountain in the Piazza Tritone, which,
standing in the centre of one of the busiest and most prosaic
thoroughfares of modern Rome, still keeps its own quality of beauty
and seems to weave about itself the enchantment of the world of
fable. Roman art has created many Tritons, notably the joyous group
surrounding Galatea in the Farnesina Palace, but there is about this
water-worn old figure such distinction and such emphasis of life that
he becomes the prototype of all his race. He is _Il Tritone_.
Triton blows his conch-shell with all his might as he kneels across the
hinge of a wide-open scallop-shell, which is supported on the upturned
tails of three dolphins massed together in the middle of a large,
low-lying basin. The dolphins’ tails are twisted and folded about large
papal keys--a Bernini conceit which, suggesting St. Peter both as
fisherman and pontiff, must have delighted the Pope. The composition of
dolphins, keys, and shell is extraordinarily rich and harmonious.
Triton, kneeling upon this noble support is, from the waist upward,
a severely simple figure, almost uncouth and somewhat out of keeping
with the rest of the design. This effect is entirely accidental. It
has been brought about by the ceaseless flow of the water, which for
two and a half centuries has been thrown upward in a slender jet of
great height, returning upon itself with such precision that Triton’s
face and shoulders have been worn and blurred into shapeless surfaces
of travertine. Triton has suffered from a sculptor’s point of view,
but as a work of imaginative art it is, perhaps, all the better for
Nature’s modelling. The shapeless head and shoulders have in them
something of the formlessness and blurred masses of the elements, and
the water-creature becomes more real to the imagination in proportion
as he suggests--but does not entirely resemble--a man. The entire
design is on a colossal scale and has a dignity and harmony rarely to
be found in Bernini’s creations. This is because the central idea is
the only idea, and no subsidiary and fantastic inventions are presented
to bewilder the eye and brain.
[Illustration: The Fountain of the Triton.]
This fountain was done by Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Urban VIII. It
stands near the Barberini Church of the Capuchins, and was intended to
adorn the approach to the Palazzo Barberini. This third of the trio
of the great palaces of the nepotizing Popes--Farnese, Borghese, and
Barberini--was built by Urban VIII in order to invest his house with
an importance equal to that enjoyed by the families of Paul III and
Paul V. As the fountain was an adjunct of the palace, it had to bear
upon it in some way the emblem of the Barberini--the colossal bee--and
this explains why Bernini united the curving bodies of his dolphins by
escutcheons carrying three bees and the papal arms.
Another fountain, contemporaneous with the Triton, once stood in this
same piazza, at the corner of the Via Sistina; and this fountain,
also made for Urban VIII by Bernini, was in itself the emblem of the
Barberini, for it represented merely a great shell into which the bees
spouted water. In some way this second fountain has disappeared, but
the piazza still remains the Barberini quarter of the city; and the
Triton, as well as the magnificent palace, recalls the days when the
power and rapacity of that family brought upon it the unforgettable
pasquinade:
“What the Barbarians spared,
The Barberini took.”
NAVONA
[Illustration]
NAVONA
Before the genius of Valadier moulded the isolated buildings and waste
spaces of the Piazza del Popolo into a noble symmetry, the Navona was
considered the finest and most important piazza in Rome. In length
and breadth it is a reproduction of the stadium of Domitian, for the
houses, churches, and palaces which line the Piazza Navona are based
squarely upon the seats and corridors of that old Roman playground.
This part of the city, not far from the Pantheon or old Baths of
Agrippa, is low, and it has always been easy to flood it with water.
The ancient Romans were so keen for shows of every kind that when the
great Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) was closed for repairs,
Domitian found it necessary to provide a second place of amusement
where the gladiatorial combats and the _naumachiæ_ or sea fights could
go on without interruption.
It was a rule strictly enforced under the empire that no one could
open new baths in the city without providing a fresh supply of water.
Something more than a century after Domitian, Alexander Severus--having
brought the Acqua Alessandrina to Rome--was able to repair Domitian’s
old stadium and to use it once more for the _naumachiæ_. In modern
times there does not appear to have been any fountain here until
the pontificate of Gregory XIII, and at that time the passion for
fountain-building in modern Rome really began.
Pius IV, the Pope last but one preceding Gregory XIII, had repaired
the old aqueduct of the Acqua Virgo, originally brought to the city
by Marcus Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, so that that water,
which for a long time had been running only intermittently in the
fountain of Trevi, could now be obtained in a continuous stream. It is
impossible to throw Virgo Water to any great height, and the fountains
of the Piazza Navona have had to be constructed with reference to this
limitation.
[Illustration: The Fountain of the Four Rivers.]
The two end fountains, designed for Gregory XIII by Giacomo della
Porta, are simply great basins of Porta Santa marble standing in still
larger Carrara basins of exactly the same shape and sunk into the
ground. The beauty of these fountains consists in their elegant shape,
the fineness of the marble, and in their air of simple distinction. The
great basins hold the limpid Trevi Water as a Venetian goblet holds
wine: the receptacle and that which it contains enhance each other’s
beauty, and any further decoration seems superfluous and unfortunate.
This, however, was not the taste of the seventeenth century, at which
time there were added the various figures now crowding the upper basin
of the south fountain. On one side of the piazza stands the fine
palace built for Innocent X (Pamphili, 1644–1655) by Rainaldi. It was
occupied during the Pope’s lifetime by his sister-in-law, Donna Olympia
Maidalchini, who, for that period, became the most important person of
the papal court. She filled the palace with art treasures and, in order
to make its exterior still more imposing, Bernini was commissioned to
decorate della Porta’s fountain, which stood directly in front of the
palace. The central figure, called the Moor, was modelled by Bernini
himself, and it was sculptured for him by Gianantonio Mari. It is in
travertine. The Carrara masques and marine creatures are by various
pupils of Bernini. Toward the close of the last century the originals
of these side groups, which had become badly disfigured, were removed
and replaced by those of the present day, which were sculptured by
Amici after the old models. This fountain since Bernini’s time has been
called the fountain of the Moor. The fountain at the other end went
from the earliest times by the name of the Fountain of the Scaldino,
probably because of the shape of the small vase in the centre which
resembled a classic scaldino or brazier. It can be seen in an engraving
by Piranesi, for the fountain was left undisturbed until the close of
the last century when the Scaldino was removed and replaced by the
figure of Neptune. This figure was carved by Bitta Zappalà from a model
of Bernini’s found in the Villa Montalto. The figures around the edge
are Zappalà’s own, and they as well as the Neptune are of Carrara.
All this wedding-cake decoration has spoiled the original effect of
della Porta’s work, and the best that can now be said for the side
fountains is that they are in harmony with the fountain in the centre.
In justice, however, to the genius of della Porta and to the taste of
an earlier day, an attempt should be made to think of these fountains
without their more modern excrescences. It is a pity that the Roman
municipality has found it necessary to surround them with a high iron
fence. If these fountains could be left free like the side fountains
in the Piazza del Popolo their charm could be and would be much better
appreciated.
In the centre of the piazza, immediately opposite the church, Bernini
erected for Innocent X the Fountain of the Four Rivers. The obelisk of
red Oriental granite which surmounts it was brought from the Circus of
Maxentius, and tipped with the bronze dove and olive-branch, the emblem
of the Pamphili family, to which Innocent X belonged. Bernini placed
the obelisk on four flying buttresses of white granite, crossing each
other at right angles. The obelisk rests upon the arch thus formed,
and the space beneath it is left as a grotto with four openings. This
gives the obelisk the appearance of resting upon nothing, an effect
which was greatly admired by the artist’s contemporaries. The bases of
these flying buttresses are broadened and flattened so as to receive
the recumbent figures of four river-gods carved in Carrara. They
represent respectively the Ganges, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rio de
la Plata. The obelisk and its base stand in the centre of a basin some
seventy-eight feet in circumference, which is sunk into the pavement,
and which receives the water flowing from the four rocky projections
where the river-gods lie. Beneath the grotto additional jets of
water spout upward, while a river-horse dashes furiously through one
archway as if in terror of a lion which is coming out of another to
drink of the water under the shade of a palm-tree cut in high relief
against the rocks. On top of one of the rocks crawls a serpent, and
a mass of cactus grows upward from behind one of the rivers. In the
lower basin two monstrous travertine fish are disporting themselves
in characteristic Bernini contortions. Escutcheons bearing the arms
of Innocent X (three fleur-de-lis and a dove with an olive-branch) of
course are not wanting. All this sculpture is in travertine.
This fountain has been called Bernini’s masterpiece, and it deserves
that title as an example of the utmost length to which the Bernini idea
of artistic invention can be carried. From an æsthetic standpoint
it shows both in execution and design the faults and excesses into
which he was led by his popularity, and the boundless fertility of his
genius. The extravagances and absurdities of this fountain and its
debased execution arouse curiosity both as to the artist and to the
taste and character of the seventeenth-century Romans for whom it was
erected and by whom it was so greatly admired. Bernini came in with the
seventeenth century and lived through eighty years of it. The pompous
epitaph under his bust, which is let into the wall in the Palazzo
Mercede, speaks no more than the truth. Princes and popes did bend
before him, from Paul V, who recognized his precocious genius, to Louis
XIV, who enticed him to Paris. Charles I sent his Van Dyck portraits
to Rome, that Bernini might use them as guides in making his portrait
bust of the Stuart King, and Urban VIII thanked a gracious Providence
that Bernini lived during his pontificate. His journey to Paris was a
triumphal progress. The few clouds which marred his long and prosperous
day were due not to any waning of popular appreciation but to the
inevitable jealousy of less fortunate men. Yet his best work was done
in his youth under the enlightened patronage of Paul V and Urban VIII.
By the time Innocent X (a mediocre man) could command his services
his faults had obscured his genius, and the great days of Rome were
definitely over. With the death of Urban VIII, the Pope immediately
preceding Innocent X, the last trace of vigorous artistic life had
disappeared; for as the French influence in the papal court declined
and the Hapsburg ideas regained and held the ascendancy spontaneous and
free expression of thought and feeling were rigorously repressed. Men
were made to live on the surface of things, and in proportion as they
became formal and superficial in themselves they demanded excitement
and extravagance in their art. This was the secret of Bernini’s immense
success. He was exactly fitted to his time. Men wanted “Sound and fury,
signifying nothing,” and he gave it to them in full measure.
In this fountain he strove to produce the effect of a wild concourse
of waters. He wished to reproduce in stone the tumult of the falls of
Tivoli. Confusion, rapidity of movement, and noise are the qualities
which he attempted to embody in his sculpture. That the effect should
be bathos and not grandeur was inevitable. The ideas which Bernini
strove to express cannot be portrayed. Music is the only artistic
medium by which they can be rendered, and in looking at the Bernini
sculpture as well as architecture it is impossible not to wish that
this artist of such undeniable genius and immense facility had been
a musician. As the composer and interpreter of great _brio_ music
Bernini might have given no less pleasure to the men of his time
and have secured from posterity a kindlier appreciation.[M] But in
the seventeenth century secular music as an art was still in its
infancy, and it was inevitable that Bernini should express himself
in sculpture, or in the “frozen music” of architecture. As the Borgo
holds its memories of the Borgias, and the Via Sistina and its vicinity
recall the power of Sixtus V, and the Piazza di Spagna the versatility
of Urban VIII, so the Piazza Navona brings back the times of Innocent
X. The greatest gift which the Pamphili family has left to Rome is the
Villa Pamphili, which was built by the Pope’s nephew, but here in the
Piazza Navona stand the Pamphili Palace, the Collegio Innocentium and
the Church of St. Agnes, whose new façade dates from his pontificate.
It was during his lifetime that the festas of the “Lago of the Piazza
Navona” were inaugurated. Every Sunday in July and August the outlets
of the great central fountain were stopped and the water was permitted
to flood the entire piazza, which was at that time much lower than it
is at present. Then the carriages of the nobility and gentry drove
around the piazza, the water reaching up as far as the middle of the
smaller wheels. The owners of the houses and palaces invited friends
to witness the spectacle from their windows, refreshments were served,
and bands of music played on stands erected at various parts of the
piazza. The fact that only people owning carriages could drive in the
procession and that only the inhabitants of the houses and palaces
could invite their guests, limited the number and regulated the quality
of the participants in these curious pageants. In the earlier days
much license was permitted, and the entertainments lasted through the
night, but in Clement XIII’s time, or about 1760, the number of hours
was curtailed. With the ringing of the Ave Maria the piazza was drained
and the waters once more confined to the basin of Bernini’s Fountain of
the Four Rivers.
These harmless midsummer carnivals which came to an end during the
pontificate of Pope Pius IX were as much relished by the Romans as were
the _naumachiæ_ held fourteen hundred years earlier in the same place.
TREVI
[Illustration]
TREVI
One hundred and fifteen years after Agrippa brought the Acqua
Virgo into Rome the Emperor Nerva appointed as commissioner of the
water-works of the city a man of extraordinary integrity and energy
who was possessed of many accomplishments and had had a long training
in the practical experience of government and war. Fortunately for
posterity, he was able to write as well as govern, and in his book,
“The Water Supply of the City of Rome,” a copy of which has been
preserved in the monastery of Monte Cassino for more than thirteen
centuries, there is an account, true beyond the shadow of doubt, of the
earliest history of the Trevi Water. Frontinus says that the water was
shown to some Roman soldiers by a young maiden who guided them to the
springs near her father’s home, that a small temple was erected near
the springs containing a picture of the incident, and that the name of
Virgo, or maiden, which still endures, commemorates the event. Agrippa
at once brought the water to Rome and its delightful purity as well
as its abundance must have given it immediate popularity. Suetonius
relates that about this time the Romans complained to Augustus of the
expense and scarcity of wine, whereupon the Emperor sent word to them
that his son-in-law, Agrippa, had sufficiently provided for their
thirst by the ample supply of water which he had brought to Rome. The
springs of the Virgo rise in the valley of the Anio and are not more
than eighty feet above sea-level. They are on land which once belonged
to Lucullus. The veteran adversary of Mithradates, who had suffered all
the privations of far-eastern warfare, knew from personal experience
the immense value of pure and abundant water. It is not improbable that
he was aware of his priceless possession and that he kept it for his
own private use during those years of his peaceful old age passed in
his gardens on the Pincian Hill. When, a generation after Lucullus’s
death, Agrippa constructed the Virgo Aqueduct he brought it underground
through the old gardens of Lucullus to a reservoir beneath the hill,
and from there the water was carried to the Campus Martius, and thence
distributed throughout the city, whose gardens and fountains it still
supplies. Cassiodorus, prime minister to that Gothic King, Theodoric,
who, from 493 to 526, governed the Romans with such extraordinary
sympathy and intelligence, felt for the Virgo Water the admiration and
love of a veritable Roman. The true origin of the name had already
been forgotten, and Cassiodorus supposes that “Virgo’s stream is so
pure that the name, according to common opinion, is derived from the
fact that those waters are never sullied, since, while all the others
give evidence of the violence of rain-storms by the turgidity of their
waters, Virgo alone ever maintains her purity.” It was quite a natural
supposition, for the Virgo Water has never had a filtering or settling
reservoir. Those who have the good fortune to drink it receive it from
its Roman fountains exactly as it comes from its springs on the Via
Collatina. This aqueduct was cut off from the city in 537 by the Goths
and Burgundians, and, though in the same year Belisarius restored the
aqueducts of Claudius and Trajan, the Virgo seems to have remained
entirely unused for the next two hundred years. During that period the
popes were not sufficiently powerful to undertake any great public
works, but when Charlemagne visited Rome in 778 he gave the needed
support to the head of the church, and thereafter the popes began the
restoration and the maintenance of the Roman aqueducts. The Virgo was
restored in 1447 by Nicholas V, in whose pontificate Constantinople was
taken by the Turks and the Wars of the Roses began in England. He was
a great Pope and repaired the aqueduct so thoroughly that it remained
in use for thirty years. There must always have been a main fountain
for the Virgo Water, but the records of the modern “Fountain of Trevi”
begins with the fountain which Vasari says was rebuilt by Nicholas V’s
architect, Leon Batista Alberti. After a short period the aqueduct was
again restored and the fountain enlarged by “The Great Builder,” Sixtus
IV. Then occurs a period of various vicissitudes, and finally, in 1570,
Pius V restored the Virgo Aqueduct effectively and rebuilt Sixtus IV’s
fountain, making what is now known as the “old Trevi fountain.” This
fountain stood not where the present one stands, but to the west of
it, in the little Piazza Santa Crocifere. The old engravings show it
to have been a huge semicircular pool into which the water poured from
three great apertures made in massive stone piers.
[Illustration: Figure of “Neptune” in the Fountain of Trevi.]
The name of Trevi is supposed by some writers to be derived from these
three streams of water--three ways, Trevie; but there is more reason
to believe that the fountain took its name from the mediæval name of
that quarter of the city--Regione Trevi, from trevium, because of
three roads which converge near the present Piazza of Trevi. Sixtus IV
had constructed near the fountain a large public washing-trough, and
the whole composition was extremely simple and practical. The Rome of
Sixtus V and Paul V became too sumptuous for the old fountain, and as
early as 1625 plans were made for its reconstruction. The Barberini
Pope, Urban VIII, had his own ideas of magnificence; he proposed to
change the fountain from its old site to its present position against
the southern façade of the great Poli Palace; and Bernini made for him
some beautiful sketches for the new masterpiece. Urban VIII stripped
the portico of the Pantheon of its bronze and also carried off a part
of the base of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, proposing to construct
his fountain out of these materials. The Roman people, whose love for
their own antiquities was constantly growing, showed such indignation
when the Pope’s project became known that Urban was actually obliged
to abandon his scheme, and it was not until eleven pontificates after
his time that the work on the new fountain was really begun. Then it
was intrusted to the architect Niccolo Salvi by Clement XII (Corsini,
1730–1740), and after the death of this pontiff and his successor,
Benedict XIV, and eleven years after the death of Salvi himself, the
fountain was at last finished. This was in 1762, under Clement XIII
(Rezzonico, 1758–1769). Niccolo Salvi had succumbed prematurely to the
hardships of his task. The construction of the fountain necessitated
spending much time in the subterranean chambers of the Virgo Aqueduct,
and this had proved fatal to Salvi’s health. The tomb of Cecilia
Metella was never again attacked, and there is no bronze in the present
fountain; in other respects the great scheme of Urban VIII was revived.
The fountain was placed against the Poli Palace, and Salvi used for the
sculptural part of the fountain Bernini’s beautiful designs.
So severe a critic as Francesco Milizia declares that this fountain
is justly considered to be the best work produced in Rome during the
eighteenth century. It has elicited extravagant praise from other
authorities, and in later times some adverse criticism. It has been
woven into many of the romances connected with Rome, and until quite
recently there were few American and English visitors to the Eternal
City who left her without paying a moonlight visit to Trevi, there
to toss a coin into the water while they drank to their certain
return. Romans of the eighteenth century often saw Alfieri, the tragic
dramatist, crouched beside the fountain, lost in a day-dream evoked
by the tumult and beauty of the water; and it is recorded that the
day after Michelangelo’s death there was found in his house no wine
whatever, but five jars of water, presumably the Trevi, as it was the
only pure drinkable water in Rome. The Trevi fountain has become a
feature in the city’s life. It is the chief fountain of the one water
which modern Rome inherits directly from her great past.