the level of the pavement that it is necessary to descend a flight of
steps in order to stand beside it. This device, which was rendered
necessary by the low head of the water, is excellent from an æsthetic
view-point, as the spectator, being on a different grade from the
piazza and its surroundings, feels that he is in another world and is
able to forget the city and give his entire attention to the scene
before him. Looking up, he sees a great ledge of broken rock, over
which the water pours in many streams and waterfalls, disappearing
and reappearing among the rocks like a veritable mountain torrent.
The main stream descends in a series of three quite lovely cascades,
their semicircular-shaped basins being prototypes of the great lower
basin, into which all eventually flow. Their edges are smooth, as if
they had been water-worn, and the force of the water feeding them is
so great that it boils and roars among masses of broken rock as it
does in a natural waterfall. Above all this finely simulated wildness
rises the ornate group of Neptune riding in a chariot made of an
enormous sea-shell and drawn by two sea-horses. The horses are placed
well to each side of the central cascades, and the group is terminated
by Tritons who are restraining the onward dash of the horses and
are blowing conches. The background or frame-work to this scene of
commotion and tumult is the highly finished conventional façade of a
Roman palace; Neptune issues forth not from a rocky cavern but from a
Renaissance tribune constructed with four Ionic pillars and a richly
carved roof, on the frieze of which runs the following inscription:
CLEMENS · XII · PONT · MAX
AQVAM · VERGINEM · COPIA · ET · SALVBRITATE
COMMENDATAM · CVLTV · MAGNIFICO · ORNAVIT
ANNO · DOMINO · MDCCXXXV · PONTIF: VI
_Pope Clement XII decked out with magnificent ornament the aqueduct of
the Maiden, which is recommended for its plenteous flow and for the
healthful qualities of its water. In the year of the Lord 1735, and of
Clement’s pontificate the sixth._
On either side of this tribune the palace wall breaks into niches
containing statues, one of Abundance, the other of Health; and
separated from each other by tall columns are panels depicting in high
relief the discovery of the water and the construction of the aqueduct.
Beyond these sculptures the windows and balconies of the palace frankly
make their appearance.
Nothing could be more incongruous and artificial. The design is one
which demands a background as an integral part of the composition, but
this background has absolutely no connection with the fountain, except
the purely physical connection of juxtaposition. Neptune should be
appearing from some sea cave, worn in straight, steep cliffs like the
cliffs at Sorrento. The architect who could so skilfully mass these
rocky ledges and dispose these streams and cascades could have designed
quite as well stone palisades and grottos; but the fountain belongs to
an age which played “Macbeth” in periwig and ruffles, and it remains a
magnificent example of the taste of that period.
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO
[Illustration]
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO
The fountains in the Piazza del Popolo should not be considered
as individual creations; they must be regarded as parts of an
architectural composition which includes the piazza as a whole--its
shape, dimensions, and location, and the buildings which surround it.
This composition is the work of the distinguished Roman architect
Giuseppe Valadier, whose life lay within the last thirty-eight years of
the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth.
His bust stands in the place of honor on the Pincian; that is, it
stands at the end of and facing the long, broad drive called the
Passeggiata, which begins on the terrace before the Villa Medici and
runs northward along the western crest of the Pincian Hill. Valadier
had been papal architect under Pius VI and Pius VII, and he had laid
out for Napoleon the public gardens of the Pincian. Up to that time
most of that land had belonged to the Augustinian monks whose convent
stands below the hill, close to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo.
It has been their vineyard, and the story goes that it was while he was
walking in this vineyard that Valadier got his first conception of what
he might make out of the Piazza del Popolo.
[Illustration]
Standing on the brow of the hill, from which is obtained the
incomparable view of St. Peter’s at sunset, Valadier looked down
upon the Piazza del Popolo as Piranesi had engraved it in his time
(1720–1778). A somewhat shapeless area of flat ground stretching in an
indeterminate way westward from the base of the Pincian Hill, it seemed
to be only the debouchment of the three great thoroughfares running
into it from the heart of the city. The twin churches standing one
on either side of the Corso, the centre thoroughfare, were the chief
architectural features on the south side, while on the north side ran
the city wall and the Church of St. Mary of the People. In the centre
of this area stood the obelisk as it stands to-day, placed there by
Sixtus V in 1589, and with a single fountain at its foot--a huge basin
carved by Domenico Fontana out of one solid block of marble taken from
the ruins of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. The water supplying this
fountain was the Acqua Trevi, the same which fills the fountains of the
present day. Such was the Piazza del Popolo as Valadier’s eyes beheld
it, but at that point where the Aurelian wall is pierced by the Porta
del Popolo (the old Flaminian Gate) he saw something else: He saw the
end of the Flaminian Way--the great highroad leading directly from
the north. And at that point the actual faded away, and to Valadier
there came a vision. He saw the Piazza del Popolo as the magnificent
and adequate antechamber to Rome. He saw it approached by this great
highroad which, first skirting the shore of the Adriatic, then
traversing the breadth of Italy and the watershed of the Appenines,
descends thence to the western slopes of Mount Soracte and, crossing
the Ponte Molle, comes all the way to Rome from far-off Ariminum, or
Rimini, the Roman fortress and frontier town on the Adriatic--two
hundred and twenty miles distant--and the key to Cisalpine Gaul. Down
this road, which is but a continuation of the still greater Via Emilia,
have come all the northern friends and all the northern foes of Rome.
Other eyes than Valadier’s can see that procession. Barbarian invaders
and imperial armies have covered all the countryside like swarms of
locusts--the progress of most of them marked by burning farms and
plundered villages. In quieter times there have come pilgrim hosts and
companies of merchants; and travelling scholars, and artists “with
hearts on fire” for Rome; also ambassadors and foreign prelates, exiles
and penitents, great bridal processions like Margaret of Austria’s
in 1537, funeral pageants, bandit troops, fugitives of every type,
bare-legged friars (among them a Luther), soldiers of fortune, and
English noblemen in travelling carriages with postilions; every sort
and condition of man whom the north has sent forth to the Eternal
City. Down this Flaminian Road they came, passed through the Flaminian
Gate, and received their first impression of Rome here in the Campus
Martius--the modern Piazza del Popolo. Valadier lived in the period of
the First Empire, when the shock of change and of contrast quickened
even the most formal imagination. He came down from his “mount of
vision” and designed the noble and finely proportioned piazza of the
present day. He formed the vast and slovenly-shaped piece of ground
into a stately ellipse, whose broadly curving ends, made of Roman brick
and travertine, ornamented by sphinxes and allegorical figures, become
the retaining walls of the terraced gardens at their rear, so that
these long retaining walls seem coped by a line of glistening green
foliage. On the side of the Pincian Hill the grass and trees of the
Pincian Gardens rise in four tiers of terraces, high against the sky.
Behind the retaining wall, opposite the Pincian, the tall cypresses
screen the new city which stretches off toward the Tiber. A beautiful
small semicircular basin, with a shell-like upper basin, stands in the
centre of each of these curving ends. They might be called decorative
keystones to recumbent arches. The water gushes through the retaining
walls which form their background and falls between the convolutions of
the shell in a fringe of steady, slender streams.
It has been truly said that the eighteenth century did not die with
the close of the year 1799. It lingered on through the first, and
more than the first, decade of the century which followed. Valadier
remained an eighteenth-century architect to the end of his life.
This is most apparent in the Piazza del Popolo, his work of widest
scope and freest fancy and the product of his most mature talent.
Elegance, proportion, and formality are the qualities on which Valadier
relies. His composition is simple, polished, and formal, and the note
of affectation ingrained in the art of that period is given in the
Egyptian character of some of the ornaments and accessories. This
character was undoubtedly suggested by the obelisk, but it is a curious
coincidence that many archæological remains of Egyptian origin have
been discovered in this part of Rome.
The allegorical groups placed behind the fountains represent on the
side of the Pincian the god Mars in full armor, supported by the
river-gods Anio and Tiber, each with his respective emblem, one
of the emblems belonging to the Tiber being the figure of Mercury,
the god of trade. On the side toward the river the group represents
Neptune between two Tritons. These groups are by Valadier, and their
mass of elaborate detail proves an admirable foil to the fountains
beneath, which in their great simplicity are among the very loveliest
in Rome. Small white marble sphinxes, said to be made out of blocks of
Greek marble, found under the sea at the time that the bronze vase of
Mithradates in the Palazzo dei Conservatori was discovered, mark the
descending grades along the curving wall, and, as might be expected,
statues of the four seasons adorn its four terminal piers.
These conventional figures are the work of various and now little
known artists of Valadier’s time or later. The effect of Valadier’s
creation has been somewhat marred by the huge monument to King Victor
Emmanuel I of Italy. This ponderous and tasteless masonry rises in a
series of three tiers, placed one above the other, against the Pincian
Hill, and makes a hard and artificial background to the fountains in
the square. Besides being far less attractive than the green turf and
living foliage, this monument is quite out of proportion to all its
surroundings. It occupies the place where Valadier had intended in
the first instance to construct a vast fountain, which was to rise in
various jets on the summit of the hill now bordered by the esplanade
and balustrade, and descend in cascades from terrace to terrace until
it gained the level of the piazza. The scheme was abandoned for lack
of water. Only the aqueducts of imperial Rome could have furnished the
amount required for such a fountain. The design was most imposing,
but it is possible that Valadier himself may have relinquished it
willingly. He was keenly alive to the beauty of proportion, and the
monument to “Il Re Galantuomo” shows how incongruous a Niagara would
have been amid such circumscribed and highly finished surroundings.
[Illustration: Piazza del Popolo from the West.]
When the time came to carry out Valadier’s design for the fountains
about the obelisk, Domenico Fontana’s massive old basin was removed
from its position on the south side of that monument and placed in
the gardens of San Pietro in Montorio, now the public gardens on the
Janiculum. Then the low stone terrace with its five steps was built
around the base of the obelisk, and the four corners of this terrace
were marked by miniature pyramids of seven steps, the top of each
pyramid supporting an Egyptian lioness couchant carved of Carrara.
The water gushes in a copious fan-shaped stream from the mouths of
these beasts and falls into four massive travertine basins, each basin
set so close against the base of its pyramid that the lower steps of
the pyramid project well over a portion of the basin’s rim. The task
of providing a modern architectural setting to an Egyptian obelisk
is probably an impossible one. It must be conceded, however, that
Valadier, while not achieving the impossible, did succeed in producing
a design which enhances the dignity and importance of the obelisk,
considered as the central architectural feature in a Roman square.
More than this could not be expected, and as much as this has not been
achieved by any other architect. The obelisk on Monte Cavallo is in no
way affected by the objects grouped about it. It is as utterly detached
from the Roman fountain and the Greek statues at its base as though
it stood by itself at Alexandria. Bernini’s extravaganzas, in which
the Egyptian symbol of the mystery of life becomes the meaningless
centrepiece for a banal fountain, have long ceased to give pleasure. It
is doubtful whether the obelisk was altogether pleasing to the ancient
Romans. They could not fail to admire its austere dignity and strength,
and they regarded it as the insignia of supreme power, human or divine.
Roman Emperors from Augustus onward constantly imported them to Rome to
celebrate a victory, to adorn a circus, or to place in pairs, one on
either side of the entrance to a tomb. But when the Romans re-erected
an obelisk, whether in Rome, in Egypt, or in Constantinople, they
frequently, if not always, raised the monolith a perceptible distance
above the plinth of the base. On the four corners of this plinth
they placed a bronze crab--one of the emblems of Apollo--or, as in
Constantinople, a square of metal, and the obelisk itself rested upon
these, daylight being distinctly visible between the obelisk and its
base. The crabs were fixed into the plinth of the base by huge bronze
dowels, and other dowels ran up into the four corners of the obelisk,
holding it in place. The obelisk in New York, its mate in London,
the larger Constantinople obelisk, and the Vatican obelisk were
all re-erected by the Romans in that way. Opinions differ as to the
reason for this departure from the original Egyptian method, but the
decorative effect of this bold but simple device is at once apparent.
It is obvious that an obelisk mounted in this way lends itself more
easily to alien architectural surroundings.
This obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo was brought to Rome by young
Octavius, afterward the Emperor Augustus, to honor his victory over
Mark Antony at the battle of Actium, B. C. 31. Octavius believed that
he owed his triumph to Apollo; and this obelisk erected by an Egyptian
monarch of the XIXth dynasty before the great temple in Heliopolis,
the city of the sun, seemed an altogether appropriate trophy. Octavius
erected it in the Circus Maximus, where it stood throughout the
greatest days of the Roman Empire. But the fate of the Roman obelisks
had overtaken it at some time, for when Domenico Fontana suggested to
Sixtus V to remove it to its present position it was lying broken in
three pieces under masses of rubbish on the site of the old Circus.
There is no inscription upon the four fountains of the lionesses. They
are to be regarded solely as adjuncts architecturally suitable to the
obelisk, the interest of which must transcend all minor annals.
In developing his design for the Piazza del Popolo. Valadier had to
consider and amalgamate the architectural features of many previous
generations; for here in the Piazza del Popolo are grouped the works of
a great number of Roman architects--men of the very first distinction
in their own time and who have left the imprint of their industry or
genius upon a large part of modern Rome. Baccio Pintelli, Michelangelo,
Vignola, Carlo Fontana, Rainaldi, and Bernini were at work here in the
centuries preceding Valadier, but to this last was given an opportunity
of combining the past with the works of his own creation, such as had
not fallen to the lot of any other Roman architect since the days when
Michelangelo remodelled the Capitol.
Throughout the Middle Ages, all that part of Rome which lies between
the Flaminian Gate and the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina on the
Corso was almost devoid of human habitation and given over entirely
to orchards and gardens. This condition still prevailed when Sixtus
IV (1471–1484) demolished the old Flaminian Gate, through which, some
five hundred years before, the Saracens had captured Rome. He did this
in order to build the modern Porta del Popolo. It was by way of this
Porta del Popolo that Charles VIII of France entered the city on New
Year’s Day, 1495, with the most imposing and brilliant force of arms
which modern Rome had ever beheld. At three o’clock on the winter’s
afternoon, the great gates opened to receive them, and it was nine
at night before they could close. For six hours the great procession
marched down the Corso, and when darkness fell torches and flambeaus
were lighted and held aloft by the marching troops. The advance-guard
of Swiss and Germans was followed by five thousand Gascons, small of
stature and very agile, like the bersaglieri of the present day. Then
came the cavalry, twenty-five hundred cuirassiers from the French
nobility, all arrayed in silk mantles and golden collars, and each
knight followed by his squire and grooms leading three additional
horses. Then more cavalry, and finally four hundred archers, of whom
one hundred were Scotch. These last formed the body-guard of the King,
who rode surrounded by two hundred of the greatest of his nobles;
and among these came Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, afterward Pope
Julius II, at that time papal legate to France and the most implacable
enemy of the Pope whose territory they were invading. “The King,”
wrote Brantôme, “was in full armor; lance on thigh as though pricking
toward a foe. Riding thus in full and furious order of battle, trumpet
sounding, drums a-beating,” the rattle and rumble of the artillery
bringing up the rear, Charles made his way to the Palazzo di Venezia,
whence he issued his edicts and gave his orders, while his army, with
all its network of sentries and pickets, occupied the city as though it
were Paris.
Pope Alexander VI fled to the Vatican and, later, to the Castle of
St. Angelo. Very little came--or, for the time, very little seemed to
come--of all this glitter and commotion. “Charles VIII and his lusty
company of young men, among them the youthful Bayard, all of good
family,” says the old chronicler, “but little under control,” were
making a holiday war. They could not have comprehended the great forces
that were at work beneath the noisy agitation of their enterprise.
Yet King and nobles fell at once under the spell of Italy. Charles
VIII, bred in the fortress castles of Louis XI, wrote home to his
sister, Anne de Beaujeu, describing the loveliness of his Neapolitan
gardens and the genius of the Italian painters who were to do wonderful
ceilings for him when he had carried them back to France. Before he
quitted Rome, the army got one day of pillage and the King founded
the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. Then after six months more of
picturesque soldiering Charles went back to France, planning his return
already in his heart, and taking with him over the Alpine passes an
army which spread the legend of Italy far and wide through the northern
countries. In the fifteenth century there were but two ways for a man
to see the world. Either he went on pilgrimage to some far-distant
shrine or he had to join an army of invasion! Charles VIII did not
return, but he had shown his subjects the way to Rome, having been the
first French King to cross the Alps since Charlemagne. Even before the
Porta del Popolo was finished and long after the orchards and gardens
of this district had been converted into the spacious Piazza del
Popolo, Rome and France felt the influence for evil and for good set in
motion by this unjustifiable and light-hearted incursion of (as the old
Huguenot historian calls him) a “madly adventurous young King.”
Modern methods of travel have deprived men of one of life’s greatest
sensations. Lovers of Rome know this. One of them, a schoolboy, spoke
for all when he came out of the railway station, exclaiming in bitter
disappointment: “So this is ancient Rome! It might as well be modern
Chicago!” The Piazza del Popolo is no longer the entrance hall to
the Eternal City. It must be sought for, with guide-book or map; but
when it is found there is no better way to revive the ghost of that
thrill which came spontaneously to those who entered Rome by the Porta
del Popolo than to seat oneself upon the edge of one of Valadier’s
fountains, preferably the western one, and then--to try to think!
PINCIAN
[Illustration]
PINCIAN
Until quite recently the Acqua Felice fed all the fountains on the
Pincian Hill, and the altitude of its source is so nearly the same
as the top of the hill, where the public gardens are situated, that
the only kind of fountain possible there was a sheet of water; so the
sculptor of the chief fountain in the Pincian Gardens, Count Brazza,
the elder, made a virtue out of necessity and created a fountain
in which any kind of _jet d’eau_ would be distinctly out of place.
Brazza’s white marble group of the infant Moses and his mother stands,
set about with tall aquatic plants, in the centre of a large white
marble basin, which is filled with placid yet ever-changing water, and
it is so happily suited, both in subject and treatment, to its purpose
that the absence of action in the water is never felt. On the contrary,
plashing water would be a false note in the quiet and legendary harmony
of this composition, and the higher jet produced by the recent change
of water is no improvement. The biblical story is portrayed with great
naturalness and dignity. The mother of Moses has placed the basket
containing her sleeping infant among the rushes, which are represented
by the living plants. As she rises to move away, she pauses, on one
knee, to implore divine protection for the child whom she must abandon
to his fate. The heroic size of the figure enhances the strength and
dignity of the artist’s conception. The design is little in sympathy
with the gay and crowded life of the Pincian Gardens, during the
afternoon, but all through the morning hours this fountain becomes the
centre of one of the world’s most tender settings for the comedy of
childhood and early youth. The civilization which man has made and kept
can show nothing fairer than the Pincian Gardens at that time. The soft
Roman sunshine then filters through the ilex branches only upon groups
of little children and their nurses, solitary old men who have become
as little children, and bands of seminarists or theological students
wearing black or scarlet gowns and speaking divers tongues. The little
company occupy the benches, or walk demurely in small groups beneath
the trees, or play the endless plays of babyhood, in and out of the
warm shadows; all of them living in a dreamland as old as life itself,
and finding in this quiet garden of the Eternal City a background full
of sympathy and significance. Up and down the shaded alleys, linking
the present to the great past, stretch the long rows of portrait busts
placed there by order of Mazzini during the short-lived Mazzinian
Republic of 1849. This is what has been called “The Silent Company
of the Pincio.” No happier fate can befall an imaginative child from
northern lands than to wander at will through this Roman playground.
All unconsciously the classic beauty is woven into his spiritual fibre,
and with that strange sensation of coming into his own--peculiar to
such children--he finds, in these seemingly endless rows of white
marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of
heroes already known to him.