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Title: Fountains of Papal Rome
Author: Mrs. Charles Mac Veagh
Illustrator: Rudolph Ruzicka
Release date: March 25, 2025 [eBook #75707]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915
Credits: deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUNTAINS OF PAPAL ROME ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
FOUNTAINS OF PAPAL ROME
FOUNTAINS
OF PAPAL ROME
BY
MRS. CHARLES MAC VEAGH
ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN
AND ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY
RUDOLPH RUZICKA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published October, 1915
[Illustration]
TO THE MEMORY OF
A FATHER AND DAUGHTER
CONTENTS
ST. PETER’S 1
SCOSSA CAVALLI 19
PIAZZA PIA 33
CAMPIDOGLIO 41
FARNESE 61
VILLA GIULIA 81
COLONNA 105
QUATTRO FONTANE 117
TARTARUGHE 133
FONTANA DEL MOSÈ 143
THE LATERAN 153
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI 167
VILLA BORGHESE, NOW VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO 179
LA BARCACCIA 195
TRITON 205
NAVONA 213
TREVI 227
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO 239
PINCIAN 257
FONTANA PAOLA 267
MONTE CAVALLO 285
APPENDIX 303
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF AQUEDUCTS MENTIONED, ANCIENT AND MODERN 307
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF POPES MENTIONED 308
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, AND
ENGRAVERS MENTIONED 310
LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
View of Fountains and Obelisk of St. Peter’s from beneath
Bernini’s Colonnade 9
Upper Basin of the Fountain in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli 25
View of the Piazza del Campidoglio from the Left Side of the
Cordonata 47
One of the Fountains in the Piazza Farnese 71
Fountain of the Virgins 91
Fountain of the Tartarughe 137
The Fountain of the Sea-Horses 183
The Fountain of the Amorini 191
The Fountain of the Triton 209
The Fountain of the Four Rivers 217
Figure of “Neptune” in the Fountain of Trevi 233
Piazza del Popolo from the West 247
Mostra of the “Fontanone” 279
The Fountain of Monte Cavallo 291
ERRATA
Page 170, line 18, for London read Westminster.
Page 221, line 25, for Leo X read Innocent X.
Page 232, line 22, for Tre-vii read Trevie.
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTION
Rome has been called the most religious city in the world because of
the number of her churches. With equal propriety, and perhaps with
greater justice, she might be called the cleanest city in the world
because of the number of her fountains. Pagan emperors and Christian
popes alike have found both profit and pleasure in adding another
fountain or in making or repairing one more aqueduct to give a still
greater supply of water to the Roman populace. No other people, with
the possible exception of the Spanish Moors, have so appreciated the
value and the beauty of abundant water.
There are few squares, even in the Rome of to-day, where, at least
in the silence of the night, the sound of splashing water may not be
heard. The tiny fountain, often fern-fringed, with its ceaseless,
slender stream of water, is the one priceless possession in hundreds of
old courtyards, where it fills a damp and lonely silence with charm,
or redeems by its indestructible quality of beauty the meanness of
the squalid life about it. It is impossible to think of Rome without
her fountains. Yet, after a few weeks, the eye is hardly aware of
their presence. It is as if by their very beauty and omnipresence
they had acquired the divine attributes of sunlight; and it requires
the silence, as with the sunlight it requires the cloud, to rouse our
consciousness to their existence. They take their place among the
elemental causes of happiness, since the pain we feel at their loss is
the only adequate measure of the pleasure they give us.
It is difficult for the man of to-day to picture to himself the
abundance and splendor of the fountains in imperial Rome. Some idea
of their character may be obtained from the description gathered from
various sources of Nero’s fountain on the Cælian. The mingled waters
of the Claudian and the Anio Novus aqueducts were brought thither over
the Neronian arches. A wall fifty feet in height, faced with rare
marbles and decorated by hemicycles and statues, formed the background
of the first cascade. At the foot of this wall a huge basin received
the stream, which then fell into another basin ten feet below the
first, and thence flowed into the great artificial lake, described by
Suetonius as like unto a sea, which filled all that space now occupied
by the Coliseum. Of great magnificence also was the fountain of
Severus Alexander on the Esquiline which served to introduce the Acqua
Alexandrina, the eleventh and last water-supply of imperial Rome. A
coin of the period gives a representation of this fountain, and in it
can be traced a certain resemblance to the Fontana Paola which stands
at the present day on the Janiculum, and which in its size and quantity
of water reproduces faintly the fountains of the past.
That fine phrase, “la nostalgie de la civilisation,” nowhere finds a
more perfect illustration than in the attitude of the Western world
toward Rome. Some homing instinct of the human heart has for centuries
carried thither men of every nation and of every sort of belief or
unbelief; and the conviction that it will bring them thither in the
future as in the past is implied in that other name by which we know
her. She is the Eternal City. Every one can feel but no one can explain
the charm which she has over the spirits of men. Here the psychic
forces of the world’s great past are stored in imperishable memories.
Here each individual finds spiritual influences which seem to have
been waiting through the ages for his own peculiar appropriation.
King Theodoric, in the sixth century, spoke not only for himself but
for all succeeding generations of Northmen when he said that Rome
was indifferent to none because foreign to none. It seems as if the
feeling for Rome were an instinct congenital with our appetites and our
passions. It requires no justification and it admits of no substitute.
It is dateless and universal. The Gothic king of the past finds a
spiritual brother in the schoolboy of to-day who caught his mother’s
arm on the Terrace at Frascati to say, with an uncontrollable tremor
in his voice: “See there; that little spot over there! That is Rome,
and she was once the whole world!” King and schoolboy might have met
familiarly in some sunny portico of the classic city. Both were members
of the great freemasonry of the lovers of Rome, which stretches its
network far and wide over our civilization.
In this company there are not a few who find themselves in Rome, yet
not able to see Rome--to see it, that is, as the historians, artists,
archæologists, and their own minds call upon them to see it. Their
right to tread the Roman streets depends upon their obedience to
some law compelling an existence lived entirely in the open air and
in the broad sunshine. To such the gates of Paradise seem closed. To
be forbidden the galleries and churches and catacombs and the hidden
recesses of the old ruins appears an intolerable fate. Yet even to
these, who have made the great acceptance and are living upon the
half-loaf of life--even to these, Rome is kind. Little by little, in
easy periods, they can get back into the days of the Renaissance,
of the Counter-Reformation, of the Napoleonic Era, and of the great
Risorgimento. This can be done under the conditions of open air and
sunshine; for it is in such surroundings that we find the fountains,
and the fountains of Rome are in themselves title-pages to Roman
history.
ST. PETER’S
[Illustration]
ST. PETER’S
“Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late
Renaissance,” and those which stand on either side of the great Square
of St. Peter’s show that Symonds’s statement should be enlarged so as
to include the century which followed that period. Mr. John Evelyn,
the accomplished English traveller of the seventeenth century, saw the
fountain of Paul V soon after its completion and describes it in his
diary as the “goodliest I ever saw”. Since his day the twin fountains
both of Trafalgar Square and of the Place de la Concorde have been
erected, but Evelyn could still give the superlative praise to the
great Roman model. Although the two fountains in the Square of St.
Peter’s are exactly alike they are not of precisely the same date. The
conception of the design belongs to Carlo Maderno, who executed the
fountain on the right of the approach to the basilica for Pope Paul V
(Borghese, 1605–1621), while the fountain to the left was copied from
this for Pope Clement X (Altieri, 1670–1676), some sixty years later.
Clement’s courtiers had observed that whenever His Holiness walked in
the direction of Paul V’s great fountain his eyes continually turned
toward it. At length Clement ordered his architect, Carlo Fontana,
nephew of Carlo Maderno, to make an exact copy of Maderno’s work and
to erect it on the south side of the obelisk. The double fountain not
only enhances the magnificence of the entire scene, but so changes it
by introducing the additional element of balance that Clement X’s order
for the second fountain was in reality an order for a new composition.
The coat of arms cut upon the octagonal support of the upper basins and
half hidden and obliterated by the falling water is, on the right-hand
fountain, that of the Borghese family (the crowned eagle above the
dragon); and on the left-hand fountain, that of the Altieri family,
an inverted pyramid of six stars. The latter fountain looks as if it
were the older, for, as it is situated in the southeast corner of the
wide piazza, it is exposed to the full sweep of the Tramontana, or
north wind, which has fretted and worn in no small degree the surface
of the travertine. It may have been the more sheltered position of the
northeast corner which determined the location of Paul V’s fountain,
the earlier of the two. In the spring the Altieri fountain is the more
beautiful because at that time that portion of the Colonnade which
forms its background reveals vistas of foliage, while the moss web
woven about the crown of the shaft is of a more brilliant green and the
lower basin is full of the same aquatic growth swaying with the motion
of the water.
The Acqua Paola, which feeds these fountains, comes, in the last
instance, from the summit of the Janiculum, and therefore their central
jets are flung upward to a height of sixty-four feet, far above
the balustrade crowning Bernini’s lofty colonnades, which form the
background of the piazza. This height exceeds by from twenty-four to
thirty-four feet the height of the English and French fountains; and
whereas in the fountains of London and Paris the supply and force of
the water varies with the season of the year and the time of day (the
Trafalgar Square fountains in summer play thirteen hours out of the
twenty-four and in winter only seven), the abundance and power of the
water in these great Roman fountains is unfailing and unchanging. At
midnight, at high noon, in summer, in winter, they are always flowing,
and the splash and wash of the water makes them akin to the cascades of
Nature.
This perpetual flow has been a characteristic of the Roman fountains
since the days of the Emperors. Frontinus, writing in the reign of
Trajan, says that all the great fountains were constructed with two
receiving-tanks, each from a separate aqueduct, so that no accident
or emergency should diminish or stop the supply of water. The later
popes were also careful to preserve this uninterrupted flow, and since
the close of the Cinque Cento their fountains have played unceasingly.
The lowest basins of both fountains (twenty-six feet in diameter) are
of travertine with a rim of Carrara marble. The middle basins (fifteen
feet in diameter) are of granite. That in the right-hand fountain is
of red Oriental granite, and that in the left-hand fountain of gray
granite. The inverted basins at the summit, on which the water falls,
are of travertine, as are also the massive shafts, which, however,
Maderno adorned with a slight moulding of Carrara marble just above the
water-line in the lowest basins. The entire structures have been so
transformed in color by three hundred years’ deposit of the Acqua Paola
that they have the appearance of bronze. The water in each fountain
rises in a crowded mass of separate jets from the summit of the central
and single shaft, and falls at first on an inverted basin covered by
deep carving, the richness of which gains in beauty from the green web
woven about its curves and angles by the fall of the water. This upper
carving seems to be a part of the fantastic action of the wind-tossed
spray. The lower basins which receive the water are severely plain,
the design following Nature’s scheme of development, from a fretted
and turbulent source to the broad surfaces of the full stream. But
the architectural values of these fountains are incalculably affected
by the wonderful play of the water. It leaps upward as if to meet the
sun; it falls back in tumult and foam; it drenches all about with
its far-flung spray and wasteful overflow. It is the very triumph of
vitality and joy.
The fountains of St. Peter’s might be said to bear toward the vast
piazza of which they are a part the same relation as that of the eye to
the human countenance: without them the noble spaces would seem cold
and inanimate. This gleaming, tossing water endlessly at play with
the wind and the sun, instinct with a power and a beauty not of man’s
making--this it is which gives to the world-famous scene the touch of
life.
Pope Paul V has not only the honor of having erected the first of
these two modern fountains, but he has also that of having himself
discovered the original manuscript of a poem in which mention is made
of the first fountain connected with the Church of St. Peter. This
poem dates from the fourth century and was written by Pope Damasus
(366–384). This pontiff was, like the Emperor Hadrian, a Spaniard; and,
like Hadrian, he was not only a ruler of men, but gifted with many and
varied talents. He was an archæologist, a civil engineer, theologian,
and poet. He presided over that Ecumenical Council by which the second
great heresy threatening the church was condemned, as the first had
been at the Council of Nicæa.
St. Jerome, after years of friendship, became secretary to the then
care-worn and ailing pontiff, among whose many labors had been the
restoration of the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, and other tombs of the
early Christians and martyrs, some of which he marked with metrical
inscriptions of his own composition. It must have been while engaged
upon this pious work of reconstruction in the Vatican Hill that he came
upon those springs that, for lack of a proper channel, had damaged
the tombs upon the hillside and were threatening to undermine his
great basilica (the first Church of St. Peter) within less than fifty
years of its erection by Constantine. He drained the ground in the
vicinity, building a small aqueduct, “neatly in the old Roman style
of masonry,” to lead these unshepherded waters to definite localities
where they could be a benefit and not a danger to their surroundings.
The water thus collected is called the Acqua Damasiana, and to this
day the private apartments of the Pope are supplied from this source.
The feeding springs of this water are located at Sant’ Antonio, to the
west of the church, and the aqueduct of Pope Damasus lies at a depth
of ninety-eight feet. Pope Damasus himself describes this in the poem
which was discovered in 1607, more than twelve hundred years later, by
Pope Paul V.
Pope Damasus says: “The Hill” (Vatican Hill) “was abundant in springs,
and the water found its way to the very graves of the saints. Pope
Damasus determined to check the evil. He caused a large portion of the
Vatican Hill to be cut away, and by excavating channels and boring
_cuniculi_ he drained the springs so as to make the basilica dry and
also to provide it with a steady fountain of excellent water.” Of this
steady fountain there is no description, and therefore the fountain of
Pope Symmachus (498–514) becomes the first fountain recorded in the
history of St. Peter’s.
[Illustration: View of fountains and obelisk of St. Peter’s from
beneath Bernini’s Colonnade.]
Pope Symmachus was a Corsican. He evidently had a passion for building
every kind of structure connected with water as a cleanser and as a
beautifier of man’s civic life. His fountain, built at a time when
civilization and art in Rome were at a low ebb, was a quaint and
exquisite structure, composed of a square tabernacle supported by eight
columns of red porphyry with a dome of gilt bronze. Peacocks, dolphins,
and flowers, also of gilt bronze, were placed on the four architraves,
from which jets of water flowed into the basin below. The border of the
basin was made of ancient marble bas-reliefs, representing panoplies,
griffins, and other graceful devices. On the top of the structure were
semicircular bronze ornaments worked “à jour,” that is, in open relief,
without background, and crowned by the monogram of Christ. In the
centre of the tabernacle and under the dome stood a bronze pine-cone.
This fountain stood, not in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, but in the
atrium, or the square portico, which stood in front and on the right
hand of the old basilica.
The history of the construction and destruction of this beautiful
fountain of the dark ages is an excellent example of the artistic and
architectural methods of those times. Arts and crafts had already sunk
to so low a depth that there were no longer any men in Rome capable
of casting or carving statues like those of former days, and marble
had ceased to be imported into the city. Consequently all monuments or
other artistic structures were made up of figures in marble or bronze,
panels, columns, friezes, and similar decorations, stolen from the
productions of the great days of the Empire. The Arch of Constantine,
erected in 315, is composed to such an extent of columns and sculpture
from a Triumphal Arch of Trajan that it was surnamed “Æsop’s Crow”; and
the Column of Phocas (608), the last triumphal monument to be erected
in imperial Rome, consists of a shaft and capital surmounted by a
bronze figure, all taken from earlier as well as different structures.
Pope Symmachus was only following the established methods when, to
ornament his porphyry columns (themselves probably part of some classic
temple), he took four of the golden peacocks which had been originally
cast for a decoration to the railing of the walk surrounding the
Tomb of Hadrian, and, furthermore, placed as the centrepiece a great
pine-cone taken from the Baths of Agrippa. These pine-cones were a
customary feature of the classic fountain, as the scales of the cone
present natural and graceful outlets for the falling water. Symmachus’s
fountain was one of the beauties of Rome in the days when the great
Gothic King Theodoric ruled and loved the city. Three hundred years
later it captivated the fancy of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in St.
Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800; and the fountain afterward erected
before his great cathedral at Aix is ornamented with a huge pine-cone
like the one which he and his Franks had seen in the exquisite fountain
of St. Peter’s.
Three other fountains were placed before the church as the years went
by. They are described by Pope Celestinus II (1143–1144), while he
was Canon of St. Peter’s, and are set down in his “Ordo Romanus,” or
Itinerary, or Guide. They were situated, not in the atrium, where
stood the fountain of Symmachus, but below, in that small square or
_cortile_ at the foot of the steps of St. Peter’s. One fountain was of
porphyry and two of white marble. They would seem to have disappeared
quite early. The fountain of Symmachus was described in 1190 by Censius
Camerarius, afterward Pope Honorius III, and it stood through more than
eleven centuries of the confused and turbulent history of the city.
It survived the siege and capture of Rome by Vitiges in 537. It came
unscathed through the sack of the city by the Saracens in 886, and
that of the Normans in 1084; and stranger still, it was not wrecked
by the terrible Lanzknechts of the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. Only
when the ages of violence and pillage were passed, did this historic
fountain of the early church succumb to a fate similar to that of the
Pagan monuments, out of which it had itself been formed. When in 1607
the work on the new Church of St. Peter, which was begun in 1506 at
the rear of the old sanctuary and brought forward through the century,
had reached the atrium, this “gem of the art of the dark ages” was
deliberately demolished by Pope Paul V, who melted the gilded bronze
to make the figure of the Virgin now surmounting the Column of Santa
Maria Maggiore. Perhaps the metal thus obtained was more than he
needed; possibly some artistic or antiquarian compunction visited the
pontiff--for two of the peacocks and the great bronze cone were spared.
They found their way to the Vatican Gardens, and now they stand in the
Giardino della Pigna waiting for the next turn of Fortune’s wheel.
Yet another fountain was once associated with the basilica of St.
Peter. It was erected in the old square while the fountain of Symmachus
still stood in the atrium to the right of the main entrance to the
church. About the year 1492, Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibo)
gathered the waters from springs on the Vatican Hill and from the
practically ruined Aqueduct of Trajan into this fountain, which was
finished by his successor, Alexander VI (Borgia). The design was
greatly admired in its day. It consisted of golden bulls, from whose
mouths the water fell into a granite basin, and the bull was the emblem
of the Borgia family. During the crowded years of the famous Cinque
Cento, or until the pontificate of Gregory XIII, this fountain of
Innocent VIII, and the old fountain of Trevi (restored by Sixtus IV)
supplied Rome with what the present day would call its pure drinking
water. They contained the only water brought into the city from distant
springs, for mediæval Rome had lost all but two of her great aqueducts,
and these were constantly falling into disuse; and all the pontiffs,
painters, poets, and architects, as well as the populace of that
dramatic period drank the doubtful water of wells and of the Tiber.
This fountain of Innocent VIII was destroyed when the modern Piazza
of St. Peter’s replaced the very much smaller one of earlier days.
Probably the golden bulls were melted down into other shapes, and the
great red granite basin was used by Carlo Maderno for the upper basin
of the magnificent new fountain which he designed and executed at that
period for Paul V, and which is the northern one of the two fountains
of the present day in the Piazza of St. Peter’s.
Standing between the fountains of St. Peter’s is an obelisk, the
surpassing interest of whose history adds not a little to the
importance of the fountains themselves, and indeed of the entire
square. It is, according to Lanciani, undoubtedly the obelisk at the
foot of which St. Peter was crucified. Formerly the place of his
martyrdom was located on the Janiculum Hill, on the spot where San
Pietro in Montorio was built by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of
Castile to commemorate the event. Lately this location of the site of
St. Peter’s crucifixion has been discredited, but it is easy to see how
that mistake occurred.
Caligula had brought the obelisk from Heliopolis some time during the
four short years of his reign and placed it in the circus he began to
build in those gardens of his mother, the noble Agrippina the elder,
which lay along the northern side of the plain between the Janiculum
and Mons Vaticanus. There it stood on the centre of the _spina_, the
long, straight line stretching down the middle of the arena from the
two opposite goals at either end. Caligula was assassinated before he
could finish the circus and it was completed some thirteen years later
by Nero, under whom it became the scene of those atrocities against
the Christians which have rendered his reign infamous. St. Peter was
crucified one year before the death of Nero. His cross was raised
on the _spina_ of the circus at an exact distance between the two
goals--_metas_--built at either end of the amphitheatre, and therefore,
at the foot of the obelisk which stood on that spot.
Christian tradition handed down the description of the place “between
the two goals” (inter duas metas). Now _meta_ was a name afterward
given to tombs of pyramidal shape, two of which existed in mediæval
Rome--one, that of Caius Cestius, still standing next to the present
Protestant Cemetery, and the other in the Borgo Vecchio, destroyed
later by Alexander VI. A straight line drawn from one of these
tombs to the other has its centre in a point on the Janiculum, and
therefore this spot was thought to be the exact location of St. Peter’s
martyrdom. Even to-day visitors to the exquisite Tempietto of Bramante,
erected in the cloister of the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, are
shown below its pavement the very stone in which the cross of St. Peter
was fixed. The legend of this location for the crucifixion of St. Peter
grew up during the Middle Ages, a period in which all knowledge of
the authentic site was entirely lost. Modern archæology has recently
succeeded in locating this position and its topography can now be
easily understood.
When the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity,
determined to build a basilica in honor of St. Peter, he planned to
erect the edifice so that its centre should rise directly over the
tomb of St. Peter, who, according to historical documents, was buried
not far from the scene of his martyrdom. To do this, he found himself
obliged to build so near the Circus of Caligula and Nero that the
southern wall of his edifice corresponded exactly to the northern
wall of the Circus. He therefore used this wall of the Circus as the
southern foundation wall of his church. This naturally brought the
southern side of the old St. Peter’s within a very short distance of
the _spina_ of the Circus, on which stood the obelisk, with a chapel
before it called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. The Chapel disappeared
seven or eight centuries ago, but not before its true significance
had been quite forgotten, and men supposed the name to refer not to
the crucifixion of St. Peter but to the Crucifixion of Our Lord. An
old engraving by Bonanni, antedating the reign of Sixtus V, shows
the old Church of St. Peter on its southern side, with the obelisk,
still tipped by its Pagan ball, standing in close proximity. When the
plan for the new Church of St. Peter was accepted it was seen that
the southern side of the great edifice would extend so far beyond the
limits of the original church that it must entirely cover the spot on
which the obelisk was standing; and as the connection of the obelisk
with the martyrdom of St. Peter had long since been forgotten, Pope
Sixtus V conceived the idea of moving the obelisk to a more conspicuous
and important position.
Thus it came about that the obelisk now forms the central feature in
the piazza before the Cathedral of Christendom; while the place of
St. Peter’s crucifixion, that site of transcendent interest to all
Christians, remains unidentified, buried beneath the masses of masonry
composing the Baptistery on the southern side of the vast structure
which bears St. Peter’s name.
SCOSSA CAVALLI
[Illustration]
SCOSSA CAVALLI
This work of Carlo Maderno belongs to that group of fountains which
owe their origin to the introduction into Rome of the Acqua Paola. The
lower basin stands about three feet above the level of the pavement. It
is oblong in shape, the oval broken at both ends by graceful variations
in the curve. The secondary basin is much smaller, round and quite
shallow. From its centre rises a richly carved cup much resembling
a Corinthian capital, this cup being the apex of the central shaft,
upon which rests the second basin, and the main stream of water spouts
upward from its leaflike convolutions. The proportions of the fountain
are excellent. It is neither too low nor too high, and the lower basin
is large enough to catch and retain the water which pours over the rim
of the upper basin, so that it does not wash over as does the water
in Maderno’s much more magnificent fountain in the Square of St.
Peter’s. The central shaft of the Scossa Cavalli fountain has a Doric
massiveness which gives a background of strength to the whole design
and makes all the more delicate the play of the four slender jets of
water, about five feet in height, which, rising at equal intervals
from the lower basin, form an arch around the upper basin into whose
shallow water they fling their spray. The crowned eagle and griffin of
the Borghese are still to be discerned on the half-obliterated carving
of the central shaft. The kind of travertine out of which this fountain
is made is so susceptible to erosion, and has become so blackened by
the deposit of the water, that the whole structure appears far older
than it is. In reality it has stood here little more than three hundred
years, as the Acqua Paola was not brought to Rome until the time of
Pope Paul V. This splendor-loving pontiff determined, on his accession
in 1605, to emulate and, if possible, surpass Pope Sixtus V, whose
brilliant pontificate antedated his own by less than a score of years.
Sixtus V had built the first great aqueduct of modern Rome. Paul V
determined to build the second. Sixtus V had christened after himself
the water which he had brought to Rome, and Paul V gave his name to the
stream which, partly by using the all but ruined Aqueduct of Trajan,
he had brought from Bracciano and its hills. Domenico Fontana had
built for Sixtus V, as the chief outlet for the Acqua Felice, the fine
Fountain of the Moses on the Viminal Hill. Giovanni Fontana, brother
of Domenico, should design for the Acqua Paola on the opposite slope
of the Janiculum a yet more glorious fountain which should dispense
five times the amount of water given out by the fountain of Sixtus V.
All this was done, and from the heights of the Janiculum the great
stream descended in various channels, and was widely spread over the
Trastevere or that portion of the city lying on the western side of
the Tiber. One channel found another fine outlet in the fountain which
Carlo Maderno, nephew of Fontana, also built for Paul V on the northern
side of the Square of St. Peter’s. From thence the water was conducted
down the Via Alessandrina (now the Borgo Nuovo) to this small piazza
of the Scossa Cavalli where Maderno constructed for it this second and
very properly less splendid fountain. Thus it will be seen that the
water as well as the architectural part of this fountain belongs to
the beginning of the seventeenth century; but the interest attaching
to the buildings surrounding the square in which it stands dates back
farther than that, dates back in fact to the crowded days of the High
Renaissance, when this prosaic little piazza was a centre of ardent and
vivid life.
The long, plain, yet dignified building to the south, now called the
Ora Penitenzieri, was built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, who
was one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV and brother to Pope Julius
II, the friend and patron of Michelangelo. To the west, and on the
corner made by the square and the street of the Borgo Nuovo, stands
the house built by Bramante, and purchased by Raphael. The atelier of
the “divine painter” is the corner room on the second floor. Against
the wall behind those gloomy windows stood his last picture, “The
Transfiguration,” unfinished; and on a bed placed at the foot of that
picture, Raphael died.
Another death agony is connected with the history of the square, for
in the gardens behind the palace to the north, now called Palazzo
Giraud-Torlonia, was held that fatal supper where the Borgias, father
and son, fell victims to the poison which they had prepared for the
cardinal who was their host and the owner of the palace. Even the
legends of classic Rome seem somewhat colorless compared with the
memories which haunt this dull little square. Nothing could be more
prosaic than its present-day appearance. It is truly “empty, swept,
and garnished,” but the devils which have gone out of it have seldom
had their equal; its memories belong to a more splendid and to a more
shameful past than is the heritage of any other city of our modern
world.
In 1492, when Columbus had discovered the Western Hemisphere and
Copernicus was revolutionizing the mediæval view of the universe, Rome
was still emerging from the shadow under which she had lain while
the popes resided at Avignon. In 1471 Sixtus IV began to restore
and embellish the city, and with him the Holy See entered upon that
long period of secularization which reached its acme of infamy,
of magnificence, and of territorial possessions in the respective
pontificates of the Borgia, Medici, and Barberini popes. Each of these
pontiffs left his mark on some particular quarter of the city; and
although in the years following the times of Alexander VI efforts were
made to obliterate the memory of the Borgias, the Borgo Nuovo remains
forever bound up with their history.
[Illustration: Upper basin of the fountain in the Piazza Scossa
Cavalli.]
Throughout the Middle Ages the only thoroughfare from the Bridge of
St. Angelo to the Square of St. Peter’s was the Borgo Vecchio. It was
a narrow and tortuous street and quite inadequate to the traffic and
processions and pilgrimages which continually passed between its rows
of crowded old houses.
Alexander VI formed the new Borgo by cutting a street through the
orchards, gardens, and slums of this quarter, and by granting special
privileges to the property owners who, within a specified time would
build on it houses not less than forty feet high. The Pope was greatly
interested in his new street and christened it for himself, the Via
Alessandrina. He was fortunate in having in Rome at that time Bramante
of Urbino, who was just launched on that career of popular favor which
was only to be surpassed in length of days or in exaggerated estimation
by the career of Bernini a century later.
A sure way to please the Pope was to employ some great architect and
to erect a noble house upon the new thoroughfare. Raphael, who was
amusing himself with architecture, is said to have worked with Bramante
in the construction of the palace afterward owned by him, next door to
the palace owned by the Queen of Cyprus,[A] and the great room on the
_piano nobile_, the beautiful wooden ceiling of which had been designed
by Bramante, was a stately studio. The room is now divided into two
apartments; but it is easy in imagination to sweep away the modern
alterations and to see this most beautiful, gracious, and best-loved of
all Italian artists at work here among his pupils, or receiving with an
exquisite sweetness and modesty the greatest princes of the Church and
State.
Rome was at this period the finest marble quarry in the world. It was
still a century before the time of Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana;
the Farnese had not yet built their great palace from the spoils of
the Baths of Caracalla and other noble ruins; the last sack of Rome
was still thirty years in the future; and very little building of
any importance had been carried on through the long period of the
popes’ absence in Avignon. Bramante found the richest marbles ready
to his hand, and he built the façade of the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia
out of materials taken from the Basilica Giulia and the Temple of
Janus. However, already in Sixtus IV’s time the rage had begun for
the destruction of old monuments, and in order to build the Via
Alessandrina, the Pope had demolished a Pagan tomb which had once been
a landmark in the Borgo. During the Middle Ages it was called the Tomb
of Romulus, and Raphael has painted it in his “Vision of Constantine.”
It was of pyramidal form, like the tomb called the Pyramid of Cestius,
which is still standing near the Protestant Cemetery on the road to
St. Paul’s Beyond the Walls. Doubtless, its massive blocks went into
the construction of the new palaces surrounding the little square,
which now took the place of the old tomb as the central point in that
quarter of the city. In this square the two chief palaces are connected
with two of the greatest of the Pope’s cardinals, each of whom had
found it to his advantage to hold a post in foreign lands.
The fiery and forceful Giulio della Rovere, who gave his name to the
palace built by his brother Domenico and now known as the Penitenzieri,
had been the chief rival of Rodrigo Borgia in the papal election of
1492, and, thereafter, the open enemy of Alexander VI. It is possible
he might never have become that Pope’s successor had he not put himself
under the protection of Charles VIII of France. On the other hand,
Cardinal Adriano Corneto, who built the palace now the Giraud-Torlonia,
stood high in the Pope’s good graces. Alexander made him collector of
the papal revenues in England, where he was already known as the papal
peacemaker between Henry VII and the ill-starred James IV of Scotland.
There he made a valuable friend in no less a personage than King Henry
VII himself. The Tudor King was not lavish of his money, but, for some
reason, he gave large sums to Cardinal Corneto as a personal gift.
England proved a safe and agreeable asylum for the accomplished
cardinal, and when he was finally recalled he must have returned to
Rome with some misgivings. He found the Curia, as well as the city,
living under that spell of terror which the Borgias, father and
son, had woven about them. Strange stories, horrible suspicions,
and mysterious crimes were the order of the day; and the cardinal,
returning from his bishopric of Bath and Wells and the frankness and
simplicity of the English court, must have found the change little to
his liking. Very probably it was to secure the Pope’s friendship that
he engaged the services of Bramante and began to build a magnificent
palace on the Pope’s new thoroughfare. But while Alexander VI loved
splendor, he also coveted money. The new palace was slow in building,
and before it was completed, the Pope could see that all the gold which
the cardinal had collected in England had not gone into the papal
coffers. In short, he comprehended the fact that his Cardinal Adriano
Corneto was a very rich man; and in the summer of 1503 he sent him a
message that His Holiness and the Duke of Valentino (Cesare Borgia)
would honor him by taking supper with him on the night of August 12.
It is easy to understand the consternation with which the message
was received, the look of frozen horror on the cardinal’s face as
he already saw himself dying in sudden convulsions or fading slowly
away with a fatal and mysterious malady. No time was to be lost, and
a large share of the cardinal’s English gold bought over the Pope’s
majordomo to his side. Possibly some of the deadly work had already
begun before the bargain was struck. Possibly the majordomo thought it
best to appear to have obeyed the Pope’s orders, even at the risk of a
little torture to the cardinal, for although Cardinal Corneto survived
that fatal supper, it was said that the skin fell from him in strips.
The Pope died within ten days, the monstrous appearance of the corpse
terrifying all who beheld it. Only Cesare Borgia’s almost superhuman
vitality saved him from a like fate.
Years after, when he had been shut out forever from Rome, Cesare told
his friend and admirer Machiavelli that the results of this supper in
the gardens of the cardinal’s palace had frustrated all his plans.
Cesare had fully determined that his father’s successor should not
humiliate and despoil him as his father had despoiled and humiliated
the nephews of his predecessor, Pope Sixtus IV. He had made every
arrangement to make himself master of Rome as soon as his father should
die. He had, so he told the author of “Il Principe,” foreseen and
provided for every possible difficulty. The one thing he had not been
able to foresee was that he himself should be too ill to leave his bed.
The Borgias passed away from Rome. Cardinal della Rovere was made Pope,
and men set about to obliterate all memories of that brood whose crimes
had made Rome a stench in the nostrils of Christendom. Gradually, but
effectively, the work was accomplished. Alexander VI’s tomb was built
without any monument. The Fountain of the Gilded Bulls, the emblem
of the Borgias, which stood before St. Peter’s was destroyed. The
Borgia apartments in the Vatican were walled up, and remained so for
centuries. The nude figure of the beautiful Giulia Farnese on the tomb
of her brother Pope Paul III in St. Peter’s was covered with painted
metal draperies. Even the Via Alessandrina became the Borgo Nuovo.
Cardinal Adriano Corneto lived through the pontificate of Pope Julius
II and into that of Pope Leo X; but the fame of his riches did at
last work his undoing. Leo X, who needed money as much as Alexander
VI, insisted that the cardinal was privy to a conspiracy against his
life. Corneto was deprived of his cardinalate, even degraded from the
priesthood, and was obliged to make his escape from Rome. He died in
obscurity, leaving his beautiful palace, still unfinished, to his
benefactor King Henry VII, who made it the residence of the English
ambassador.
A century later, when Maderno built the fountain of the Scossa Cavalli
for Pope Paul V, Cardinal Corneto’s palace had again passed into the
hands of the Romans, where it has remained. The Reformation had swept
over England, and there was no longer an English ambassador to the
Papal See.
PIAZZA PIA
[Illustration]
PIAZZA PIA
No one can walk the Roman streets without perceiving, and almost at
once, that here time is of no importance. It is, in fact, an absolutely
negligible quantity. Buildings and monuments dating from widely diverse
periods stand side by side, and it is in no wise incongruous from the
Roman standpoint to find at the head of the Borgo (the ancient Leonine
city) one of the very latest fountains of papal Rome. It is a charming
little creation, quite consciously harking back to the great days of
the papacy and rebuking by its sober, yet imaginative sculpture those
geometrical designs or extravagant ebullitions of fancy--the fountains
of the present régime. It stands in the Piazza Pia, against that
narrow façade which blunts the point of the long angle or wedge-shaped
block of buildings lying between the Borgo Vecchio and the Borgo Nuovo.
Its Fontanesque mostra is composed of two beautiful white Carrara
columns with Corinthian capitals supporting a pediment and entablature
on which is an inscription to the effect that the fountain was erected
by Pius IX in the sixteenth year of his pontificate, which would make
it the year 1862. The sculptural part of the fountain bears a certain
resemblance to the work of Luigi Amici and Bitta Zappalà, the artists
who not many years later executed the modern figures in the side
fountains of the Piazza Navona.
The Piazza Pia fountain might also be ascribed to Tenerani, a
distinguished sculptor of Pius IX’s pontificate, who, in his devotion
to the Pope, did not disdain to design some of the triumphal devices
with which Rome welcomed back Pio Nono after Gaeta. But Tenerani’s bust
is among the “Silent Company of the Pincio,” and if the little fountain
were indeed his work, the fact would be known. As it is, the sculptor’s
name seems, for the present, at least, to have been forgotten in the
confusion attendant upon the transformation of papal into Italian Rome.
The fountain originally held Paola water, and the charming little vase
and dolphins composed of white Carrara have become through the deposits
of this water so black that the beauty of the fountain is distinctly
marred. This fountain takes the place of an earlier one executed by
Carlo Maderno and called the Mask of the Borgo. The design was a large
mask from which water flowed into a pilgrim shell over which perched
the Borghese eagle, while two lions’ heads on either side spouted
additional streams. As this first fountain was in travertine it had in
all probability succumbed to the disastrous effects of the Paola water,
which seems to disintegrate as well as to discolor some varieties of
that stone.
There is in the Piazza Mastai another fountain erected by Pius IX. And
he also instituted several washing troughs in the Trastevere among the
poor, for whom he had always a sincere and profound sympathy. Those
who would render justice to this last “Papa Re” should drive up the
magnificent approach to the Quirinal Palace. This modern driveway and
masonry were erected, as can be seen from the tablet on the sustaining
wall of the terrace, for Pius IX by his great architect and engineer
Virginio Vespignani. They give the finishing touch of magnificence to
the Piazza of the Quirinal, originally laid out on its present grade
and in its fine proportions by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V (some
two hundred and eighty years earlier). This approach to the Quirinal
and the great buttress walls of the Coliseum might easily be enough
to prove Pius IX’s care for the city; but, as with those of his
predecessors who had the welfare of their people most at heart, his
chief claim upon the memory of the Romans lies in the interest which
he took in the city’s water supply. Pius IX gave his permission to
an English company to introduce into Rome the rediscovered springs
of the Marcian water. These springs had been first brought to Rome
by the Marcian aqueduct in the years 144–140 B. C. This aqueduct was
the first of the true high-level aqueducts, and covered its path of
fifty-eight miles on great arches which brought it to Rome at the Porta
Maggiore one hundred and ninety-five feet above sea-level. The two
aqueducts which antedated it--the Appian and the Anio Vetus--ran most
of the distance underground, the Anio Vetus appearing above ground
for only eleven hundred feet, while the Appian (the first of all the
Roman aqueducts) was carried overground on low arches for three hundred
feet, and actually entered the city fifty feet below the surface of the
earth. The springs of the Marcia are now called the Second and Third
Serena and are situated in the Valley of the Anio above Tivoli, on the
north side of the stream, near Agosta. The original Marcian aqueduct
had been destroyed by Fontana when he was collecting material to build
the Acquedotto Felice. A portion, however, of the ancient masonry
remains, and although to-day the Marcian water comes to Rome chiefly
through modern iron pipes, some parts of its passage lead through the
old stone channels. The water now enters Rome through the Porta Pia
at an altitude of two hundred feet; thus it ranks next to the Paola,
which is two hundred and three feet above the sea-level. The Marcia
ranks next to the Virgo in abundance, and at present supplies most of
the dwelling houses in Rome. Its history is embodied in its full name,
Acqua Marcia Pia.
Pius IX made his last public appearance as sovereign pontiff when this
water was introduced into Rome. This occurred on September 18, 1870,
just two days before the famous “Venti Settembre,” when the Italian
troops entered Rome through a breach in the Porta Pia. The fountain
which was destined to be the last fountain of papal Rome stood in the
Piazza delle Terme,--not where the present one stands, but off to one
side, for the city was still papal Rome and the great Villa Negroni
(formerly Montalto) of Pope Sixtus V then covered the site now occupied
by the present railway station. Within the gardens of that villa many
of the original Acqua Felice fountains were still flowing, and one
latter-day inhabitant of the villa tells how, as a child, she often
looked down at night from her nursery windows upon an old fountain
about which stood a circle of little Campagna foxes drinking from its
cypress-guarded waters. The Pope drove to the inauguration of his
Marcia Pia amid a vast concourse of people who strewed flowers and
shouted: “King, King!” There were, however, few distinguished people
at the ceremony. He drank a cup of the water, praised its purity and
freshness and thanked the magistrates for giving it his name. It was
the last public act of his sovereign pontificate, and derives both
significance and dignity from that long list of popes who, since the
time of Hadrian I had constituted themselves guardians and builders of
Roman aqueducts.
The fountain which Pius IX thus inaugurated has been swept away to make
room for the present bronze affair. But the Acqua Marcia Pia now flows
in the Pope’s pretty fountain of Piazza Pia, so that here in the Borgo,
the ancient “Porch of St. Peter’s,” we find the last water and, with
the exception of the fountain in the Piazza Mastai, the last fountain,
of papal Rome.
CAMPIDOGLIO
[Illustration]
CAMPIDOGLIO
The three fountains of the Campidoglio have one fundamental
characteristic in common--that of being a part of Rome from a period of
great antiquity. Like those families who “were there when the Conqueror
came,” the sculptures which adorn these fountains have been in Rome
since Christian Rome began. All the statues have occupied their present
positions a comparatively short time, and have passed through many
vicissitudes before reaching the places they now hold. In fact, each
fountain of the Campidoglio is a fountain with a past. The sculptural
part of each is a survival of some artistic design or idea antedating
to a remote period the time of its conversion into the fountain of
to-day.
The general view of the Campidoglio comprises the stairway called “La
Cordonata,” the piazza at its summit crowned by the Palace of the
Senators, with the Museum of the Capitol to the left and the Palace
of the Conservatori on the right; and it is so impressive in its
architectural majesty that the fountain which is a part of it all keeps
its true place in the great composition, and is recognized only as a
note in the general harmony of proportion, design, and decoration.
This is, of course, as it should be--as Michelangelo meant it to be
when, some three hundred and seventy-five years ago, the vision of
the Campidoglio as it now stands unfolded itself in his brain. Not
that every detail of the magnificent reality is as he planned it.
The fatality which followed him, spoiling or changing nearly all his
great designs, has been at work here; and it is the fountain which has
suffered.
This fountain, which is a part of the approach to the Senate House, was
to have as its central statue a figure of Jove. Vasari, who is quite
carried away with Master Michelangelo’s beautiful design, describes
the fountain as if it were already done,--Jove in the centre and the
two river-gods on either side. But Michelangelo and the enthusiastic
Vasari had been dead for years when Sixtus V brought the Acqua Felice
to the Campidoglio and finally erected the fountain. He placed in the
noble niche where a colossal and majestic Jupiter should have stood,
the antique statue of a Minerva done over to represent Rome. The
white marble head and arms of this statue are modern restorations,
but the porphyry torso was found at Cori, and its air of undeniable
antiquity is all that saves this curiously inadequate figure from utter
insignificance. It is too small for the niche it occupies, and is so
out of proportion to its surroundings and on so different a plane
of artistic treatment that it would quite spoil any creation less
triumphantly dominant than is this whole staircase and façade.
The two river-gods which also adorn this fountain are very old.
Together with Marforio, now to be found in the Museum of the Capitol,
they have the distinction of never having been buried since the
downfall of Rome. Once they stood before “that most magnificent of all
Roman temples”--Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. Later they belonged to
the Mediæval Museum of Statues, a collection kept in or near the old
papal palace of the Lateran, where they had been called Bacchus and
Saturn. The Nile, who should have been unmistakable because of his
emblem of the Sphinx, has now his proper designation; but the other
statue has a curious history. It was originally the River Tigris, a
river familiar to the Romans since the wars with Mithradates. When,
under Paul III, Michelangelo placed these statues in their present
position, some influential person suggested that the Tigris, no longer
of any interest to the Romans, should be changed into the Tiber. The
emblem of the Tigris--a tiger--was then altered to represent the Roman
Wolf, and the Twins were added. Pirro Ligorio tells the story, and goes
on to say that the fingers of one of the Twins were originally a part
of the Tiger’s fur.
The erection of the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in
the centre of the piazza was the first step in the design of the
Campidoglio of to-day, for Michelangelo’s admiration of the statue
had been shared by Paul III, and the Pope brought it hither in 1538
when the embellishment of Rome, originally begun in honor of the
visit in 1534 of Charles V, had become with both Pope and citizens
a great and permanent interest. This statue also had been a part of
that Mediæval Museum in the Lateran which was probably one of the
places to visit when Charlemagne came to Rome to be crowned in old
St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800. The façade of the Senate House,
which forms the background to the piazza and its statues, is built in
great part of travertine, so the structural part of the fountain is
of the same material. This consists of a huge niche, sixteen and a
half feet in height, sunk into the foundation of the terrace before
the main entrance to the Senate House. On either side of the niche is
a pair of Doric pilasters, which support the floor of the terrace and
its beautiful balustrade. A great stairway, down which the balustrade
continues, connects this entrance of the Senate House with the piazza
below; and the foundation of these steps, forming triangular wings to
the niche, serves as a background to the river-gods. These figures lie
one on either side of the semicircular basins containing the water. The
simplicity of the design partakes of the inevitable. Considering it
from any point of view, it is not only impossible to think of anything
better, it is impossible to think of anything else. If it is not the
work of Michelangelo, there must have been two Michelangelos in 1538!
[Illustration: View of the Piazza del Campidoglio from the left side of
the Cordonata.]
In Piranesi’s engraving of the Campidoglio a fine balustrade like the
one on the stairway surrounds the fountain. It follows the contour of
the lower basin and stands at some three or four feet distant from
it. This balustrade, which has disappeared, enhanced distinctly the
beauty of the fountain, bringing it more into harmony with the entire
composition.
The river-god is one of the earliest sculptural personifications of
natural phenomena. In these days comparatively little heed is paid
to the smaller water-ways, so the modern spirit fails to see the
significance of these conventionalized figures. To the ancients,
however, the statues personified that physical object upon which all
civilized life depended--a great stream of unfailing water. The rivers
of Greece were small, while the Roman Empire contained some of the
largest in the world; but the ideas they represented were the same. The
river, small or great, made the city. The river gave food and drink
to the inhabitants, connected them with the outside world, brought
trade, turned the mills, defended the city from invasion, carried away
pestilence, cleansed, purified, and supported all the works of men; and
therefore Father Tiber and his brothers were to be worshipped and to
be honored, and statues were to be set up to them in public places, so
that men should remember what they owed to their river. The river is
always personified as a benign and majestic figure in the full strength
of mature manhood, with long and abundant hair and beard. The lower
limbs are draped, so that the mystery of partial concealment hangs
about him. On one arm he bears a horn of plenty; while with the other
he reclines upon some support, which is usually the characteristic
emblem of the particular stream which he represents.
Power, abundance, and calm strength are the qualities of a great river;
and these qualities the ancients most adequately expressed in their own
peculiar medium, which was sculpture. Men of to-day put their ideas
into music, or more explicitly into prose or verse, and there are still
those who appreciate the significance of the river. Washington Irving’s
epithet of the “lordly Hudson” proves the hold that great river had
over his perception and imagination; and not any statue of a river-god
can give the conception of a river which is to be found in Arnold’s
“Sohrab and Rustum”:
“But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hush’d Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon;--he flow’d
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles--
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil’d circuitous wanderer--till at last
The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”
[Illustration]
MARFORIO
The nearest approach which the Romans have left us to such grandeur as
this is to be found in their statue called Marforio. The north wing
of the Campidoglio group is known as the Museum of the Capitol, and
it is in the entrance court of this edifice that Marforio is now to
be seen. If this most majestic of all river-gods ever represented any
particular river, the name of that river was forgotten centuries ago.
His title of Marforio was given him long since, because he once poured
the water into a fountain which stood in a small square to the left of
the Senate House, where Augustus had erected the Martis Forum. There he
seems to have remained throughout the darkest days of Rome’s decadence,
surviving every vicissitude, and always respected by the half-barbarous
Romans of that time. Gregory XIII (Boncompagni, 1572–1585) is
responsible for removing Marforio from this classic position and for
separating him at that time from the huge granite basin into which
flowed the water from the urn on which he is leaning. Thenceforth the
basin has a history of its own, while Marforio’s odyssey (he wandered
for some time after leaving his old home) finally brought him to
the Campidoglio. Sixtus V then placed him on the left side of the
piazza, facing the south wing. This south wing, known as the Palazzo
dei Conservatori, was the first of the present group of buildings
to be erected, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri--a Roman gentleman and one of
Michelangelo’s few intimates--having had charge of its construction in
Michelangelo’s lifetime. The north wing, or the Museum of the Capitol,
was not done until the architect Rainaldi erected it for Innocent X
(Pamphili), twelve pontificates after the reign of Paul III. During a
period of one hundred and sixty years Marforio remained where Sixtus
had placed him, and then Clement XII (Corsini) installed him in the
court of the Capitoline Museum, and again he was given a fountain to
feed and protect.
Marforio’s career after he had been parted from his basin was a
curious one. Bored, perhaps, by the lonely magnificence of his new
surroundings, he fell into evil ways. He became the partner of
Pasquino! Pasquino, the mutilated torso from an old Greek group of
statuary, stands at the farthest corner of the Braschi Palace (now
the Ministero dell’ Interno). He had first been set up there in the
reign of Alexander VI; and from that time he had become the medium for
the popular and anonymous criticisms of the government. His name of
Pasquino was taken from a witty tailor or barber who lived near the
Palazzo Orsini and whose sallies against those in authority greatly
delighted the Roman people. It became the custom to affix anonymous
couplets or epigrams to the old torso, which thus obtained the name of
Pasquino, and the epigrams came to be known as pasquinades; and from
the days of the Borgias to the time of Napoleon, and even later, most
of the current witticisms or scathing reflections upon public events
or notable personages were ascribed to Pasquino. When Marforio took up
his abode in the Piazza of the Campidoglio, he became to the Romans
the partner of Pasquino. According to a modern authority, Marforio
never originated the sally. His function was to put the question
which elicited the witty retort, or to reply in kind to Pasquino’s
interrogatories. With Marforio’s incarceration in the court of the
Museum the long dialogue came to an end; and a century later the
passing of papal Rome brought Pasquino’s career to its final close.
Modern freedom of the press leaves no place for Pasquino; and it may be
said of him that, Marforio being gone,
“... of sheer regret
He died soon after.”
This is not strictly true, for, although the statues themselves no
longer have a part in the game, it still goes on. One of the most
popular of the Roman newspapers still publishes questions and repartee
by Marforio and Pasquino.
It is only necessary to study for a short time the various river-gods
in Rome, such as those of the Tiber and the Nile, here at the Capitol,
or Fontana’s statue in the Quattro Fontane, or the modern work in
the western fountain of the Piazza del Popolo, and then to return to
Marforio, to appreciate the immense artistic superiority of the latter.
Marforio is truly a river-god, a personification of all or any of the
earth’s rivers. The ancient and forgotten sculptor has given to the
ponderous stone a fluid quality which is really wonderful. To make
the hair and beard merge into the god’s breast and shoulders would
have been simple both in conception and execution, but only a genius
could have secured to the massive and supine figure that appearance of
being outstretched in powerful yet melting length along the surface of
things. Artists of the Renaissance from Rome and from beyond the Alps
always speak of the _gran simulacro a giacere_, an expression difficult
to anglicize, but which is an attempt to describe this singular
quality of a static position instinct with continuous and onward
flowing movement. Finally, the god’s face is full of genuine power and
benignity and is the adequate consummation of the sculptor’s ideal. It
is no wonder that Marforio has become a type. Vasari, for instance,
speaks of young Baccio Bandinelli making “a Marforio” out of snow, as
not long before the youthful Michelangelo had made a faun from the same
perishable material.
For a thousand years--and we do not know for how much longer--Marforio
has been a part of the city’s life. He has survived the Norman pillage
in 1084, as well as the great sack of Rome in 1527. As a kindly god,
dispensing water to rich and poor, he has had his part in all the
triumphs and disasters, and has shared the ups and downs of life
not only with the city but with her children. Roman and barbarian,
patrician and plebeian, slave and citizen, Pagan and Christian--all
have drunk from his fountain. What has he not seen, and not heard!
It was an unerring instinct for the fitness of things which made him
Pasquino’s gossip, and his present honorable but unnatural seclusion
from the city’s busy streets and squares is commonly attributed not to
Pope Clement XII’s lack of imagination but, on the contrary, to his
recognition of Marforio’s malicious influence over the popular mind. A
tablet has been set up in the house which is built over the site where
history finds him, Number 49, Via Marforio. In short, Marforio belongs
to that curious class of inanimate things which have developed a
personality; injury to him would arouse fierce popular resentment; and
were he to be destroyed, the Romans would feel that they had lost not a
work of art but a personal friend.
THE LION
The third fountain in the trio of the Campidoglio is to be found in
the upper garden of the Palazzo dei Conservatori--the building to the
right hand in the ascent of the Cordonata. It can hardly be called
a fountain, since it is merely a large basin of water surrounding
some rockwork on which stands an old bit of sculpture of a character
manifestly inappropriate to the sentiment of a fountain. It represents
a lion tearing out the vitals of a horse which it has sprung upon
and borne to the ground. This much-restored fragment is of real
importance from an artistic standpoint, while as a Roman antiquity it
has extraordinary interest. The marble bears distinct traces of having
been subjected to the action of water, and, as a matter of fact, it
was found more than a thousand years ago in the bed of the River Almo.
Nothing is known of its history previous to that discovery.
[Illustration]
The Almo is a little brook in the Campagna not far from Rome, rising
in the hills between the Via Appia and Via Latina and emptying into
the Tiber. Its modern name is Acquataccio. The Almo was connected
with the ancient worship of the goddess Cybele, whose sacred image
was ceremonially washed in it each year on the 27th of March by the
priests. This religious ceremony, doubtless, preserved the channel
of the stream so that it would have been quite possible to hide
successfully a great piece of statuary in its depths or in some reedy
pool along its banks. River-beds were not uncommon hiding-places for
treasures during the Dark Ages which followed the breaking-up of the
Roman Empire, and it is quite possible that this group may have been so
hidden by its owner whose great villa, situated near the stream, was
threatened with pillage or destruction by some barbarian incursion. The
high value evidently placed upon it by its original possessor was also
given to it by its discoverers. It belonged to that remote museum of
antiquities kept in or near the Lateran Palace during the Middle Ages
and dating back at least to the days when Charlemagne first visited
Rome, in 781, bringing with him his little son Pepin, aged four, to be
anointed King of Italy by Pope Hadrian I. This museum contained also
the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now standing in the centre of
the piazza of the Campidoglio, together with the two river-gods, placed
later on by Michelangelo where they now lie--one on either side of the
central fountain of the Campidoglio; and other marbles and bronzes of
great value. Most of these art treasures were removed from the Lateran
to the Capitol when Pope Sixtus IV (Riario, 1471–1484) founded the
Capitoline Museum; but long before that time the Lion, as it was always
called (the original portion of the horse being merely the body), had
been taken from its academic seclusion and set in the midst of things.
During three centuries of the turbulent life of mediæval Rome, it
stood to the left hand and at the foot of the long flight of steps
which, previous to Michelangelo’s time, led up from the Piazza of the
Ara Cœli to the Capitol. All about it was held the public market; the
city officials, found guilty of misdemeanors, were made to do penance
sitting astride the Lion’s back with their hands tied behind them and
their faces smeared with honey--the Roman version of the pillory! The
ferocity of the Lion was thought to typify the punishment of crime,
and the public executions were held before this old fragment. Here,
on August 31, 1354, the famous soldier of fortune, Fra Monreale, was
beheaded by order of Cola di Rienzi. On October 8 of the same year,
Rienzi himself was caught as he was escaping in disguise from the
burning palace of the Capitol, and here he stood, during the last hour
of his life, leaning against the Lion, turning his head this way and
that in vain quest of succor, while the mob which was so soon to tear
him to pieces held back in a strange awe, and a silence reigned over
everything! That was the greatest of all the tragedies--though there
were so many of them--connected with the Lion.
The old bit of sculpture continued to hold its sinister place in Roman
life, until the pontificate of Paul III (Farnese, 1534–1549). At that
time Master Michelangelo (to use Vasari’s phraseology), working for the
Pope, remodelled the Capitol and decorated it with many old statues.
The group of the horse and lion was then completely, though poorly,
restored, and placed in the court of the Palazzo dei Conservatori--this
being the first of the three buildings of the Capitol to be built
after Michelangelo’s designs. At the same time the place for the public
executions was transferred from the piazza of the Ara Cœli to the
Piazza di Ponte Sant’ Angelo.
The Lion was placed in its present position in 1903, and Rome of the
twentieth century is responsible for the extraordinary taste which
converted into a fountain this old fragment, highly interesting as an
antiquity but repulsive in itself, and associated chiefly with the
bloodiest and least attractive pages in Roman annals.
It is impossible to leave the Campidoglio without a heightened
appreciation of the might of the constructive imagination. Only that
faculty, developed to its highest power as in Michelangelo, could
have produced this magnificent harmony out of the incongruous mass of
classic and mediæval survivals with which he had to deal.
FARNESE
[Illustration]
FARNESE
“At the entrance to this palace stand two rare and vast fountains made
of granite stone and brought from the Baths of Titus.” Thus wrote John
Evelyn in November, 1644. The description holds to this day, although
the modern sight-seer will substitute Caracalla for Titus.
The fountains were erected by the Farnese family to add the final
touch of distinction to their new palace. They owe their unique
combination of original classic features and seventeenth-century taste
to the genius and opportunities of Paul III and his grandson, Cardinal
Alessandro Farnese II, and to a still later descendant Cardinal Odoardo
Farnese. The Pope and the earlier cardinal, men of wide culture and
enormous wealth, were the first to excavate and exploit the Baths of
Caracalla. The treasures they there found might well have been the
loot of some fabulous city, and yet the pearls and gold and rubies
brought some twenty years later by Francis Drake to his royal mistress
were of small significance compared to the works of art found in those
great baths--baths which had been the most sumptuous pleasure-house of
imperial Rome. It is the glory of Italy that she knew this at the time.
Her great churchmen reverently exhumed those masterpieces of Greek
and Roman art and made of them the Farnese Collection--according to a
well-known authority the rarest collection ever got together by private
individuals, and forming to-day the chief interest in the Museum at
Naples.
When the Pope, Paul III (Farnese), began the erection of the great
new palace which was to bear his name and fitly domicile the princely
family he was founding, he, and his descendants after him, used for
its decoration the rare marbles and minor artistic trophies from the
baths. No doubt, it seemed to them a happy inspiration to turn these
gigantic granite tubs into a pair of fountains; for these notable
fountains are, in the last analysis, simply huge bathtubs, rendered
imposing by their size, and magnificent by the material out of which
they are made. They are seventeen feet long and about three feet deep,
and are absolutely devoid of decoration except for the lion’s head
carved in relief, low down in the middle of each side--and this is
merely an ornamental outlet for the water, quite as necessary to the
original purpose for which these tubs were made as are the handles
carved high up on either side under the curved rim, simulating metal
rings through which the bronze staves had been inserted whenever it was
found necessary to move the tubs. Carlo and Girolamo Rainaldi, who, in
1612, adapted for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese this furniture of the past
to seventeenth-century decorative purposes, could think of no more
original design than that of the well-known Italian fountain of their
own day. They placed each of the tubs in a large, elegantly curved
basin similar to those in the Piazza Navona standing some two feet
above the pavement. In the middle of each tub they erected a sumptuous
Italian vase, its large, swelling stem, richly carved, upholding an
elaborate shallow bowl, oblong in shape, out of which rises as the
fountain’s final consummation a highly conventional fleur-de-lis, the
emblem of the Farnese family. This is overwrought with fine stone
traceries, and sends upward from its centre convolution a single
slender stream of water. Additional jets, of no artistic value, rise
one on either side in each of the lower basins. This modern work is all
in travertine.
The combination of the severely classic lines of the baths with the
Gothic carving and mediæval emblem of the fleur-de-lis is not good. It
is disastrous to the design as a composition and makes these fountains
archæological curiosities rather than artistic creations. Still, the
Farnese fountains impose by their qualities of size and strength, and
once seen can never be forgotten.
The pleasure derived from the sight of a pair of fountains is not
merely double the pleasure that is felt at the sight of one. The two
objects, though exactly similar, create by their mutual relation an
entirely new set of æsthetic emotions. The feeling for balance and
composition is aroused, and this particular pleasure is produced
in no small degree by these two fountains. Twin fountains are an
unusual feature. There are few of them in the world; and in Rome,
whose fountains are perhaps still unnumbered, there are but five--the
fountains of St. Peter’s, the side fountains of the Piazza del Popolo,
the two end fountains of the Piazza Navona, Vansantio’s fountains in
the Villa Borghese, and these of the Piazza Farnese.
Mr. John Evelyn also describes in his journal the custom of his day for
the Roman gentry to take their airing in the Piazza Farnese, driving
or walking before the palace and about the fountains, whose water gave
to all the architectural magnificence that touch of freshness and
charm essential to the Roman idea of a pleasure-ground. That Evelyn
was taken to the Farnese Palace the very first day of his sojourn
in Rome is significant. The Roman of 1644 evidently considered this
palace and its precincts to be Rome’s chief attraction; and this
proves that in spite of the efforts of Paul V (Borghese), who had died
some twenty years previously (1621), and of Urban VIII (Barberini),
then just passing away, the Farnese pontiff, Paul III, dead for a
century past, had succeeded in giving and preserving to his family an
importance and magnificence hardly to be emulated and impossible to
surpass. The bronze and marble tomb of Paul III is in St. Peter’s, to
the left of the tribune. It contains the dust of as worldly a person,
to quote Ranke, as ever Pope had been. Yet if his actions cannot be
said to “smell sweet and blossom in the dust,” his memory survives in
the annals of Rome, fragrant with the love and pride of his people. He
was an old, old man when he died in 1549. He had been fifteen years
Pope and forty years a cardinal. The date of his birth carries the
mind back to the years before Columbus. His education, conducted by
Pomponeus Lætus, had begun in the full tide of the High Renaissance. In
his early twenties he became a member of the household of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, at whose table and in whose gardens he had met the most
brilliant men of his time and had heard talk that embraced all that
was then known or surmised of art and learning. For Constantinople had
fallen to the Turk only a generation before that time, and what had
survived of Greek culture, fleeing across the seas to Italy, had found
its chief shelter and patronage in the household of the great Medici.
While in Florence, young Farnese must have heard Savonarola preach; but
no trace of the great Dominican’s influence is to be found throughout
his long life. The classic spirit enthralled his intellect, and the
splendor of the Medici prince captured his imagination. In later years
his careful Latinity, his splendid and liberal manner, and his gay and
witty conversation, together with his patronage of artists and his
passion for the antique, proved how profoundly he had been influenced
by the experiences of his early youth. Placed thus in the very heart of
a movement which freed the individual from all limitations save those
of his own personality and opened the world before him, he early made
up his mind to become Pope and to raise his own family, as the Medici
had done, to the rank of princes. The ambition was perhaps common, but
the ability with which he pursued these aims for upward of sixty years
was not common, and their complete achievement was little short of the
marvellous. It took him forty years to reach St. Peter’s chair, and
he occupied it only fifteen; but before he died one of his grandsons
had married a daughter of Charles V, the Emperor of Austria; another
was betrothed to the daughter of the King of France; and two more were
cardinals and multimillionaires. Later on, his descendants married
into the royal houses of Portugal and Spain, and the Farnese family
passed out of existence only by being merged by marriage into the royal
house of the Neapolitan Bourbons. One grandson, Cardinal Alessandro
Farnese II, was the chief art patron of his time, and this in an age
when there were many such men; and one great-grandson was that Duke
of Parma whose fame as a great captain is written in what were, until
the second decade of the twentieth century, the bloodiest annals of
the Netherlands. To provide a suitable setting for this princely
family, the Pope, some five years before his death, began this Farnese
Palace. Antonio da San Gallo, the younger, Giacomo della Porta, and
Michelangelo designed its façades and cornice. The great structure was
completed long after the Pope’s death by Alessandro Farnese II. It
was recognized at once to be the most sumptuous of the Roman palaces.
It stands upon the site of the old Palazzo Ferriz, which was at one
time the residence of the Spanish ambassador, and had passed into the
possession of the Augustine monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The old
Ferriz Palace had been on the Tiber bank, for it was not until Julius
II’s time that the _Strada_, or Via Giulia, was cut through, thus
separating the palace from the river. Where these fountains now stand
as the ornaments of a spacious piazza, there was at that time nothing
but a collection of hovels extending as far as the Campo de’ Fiori. The
far-sighted young cardinal--the Farnese were thrifty, for all their
magnificence--bought the old palace from the monks, and lived there in
ever-increasing splendor under the successive pontificates of Julius
II, Leo X, and Adrian VI.
Finally, under Clement VII, the great sack of the city caused him to
fly to the Castle of St. Angelo. As in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
forty-seven years later, only those Huguenot gentlemen survived who
were kept in the King’s closet, so during the horrors of the sack only
those cardinals escaped outrage who were sheltered with the Pope in
the Castle of St. Angelo. Farnese by this time ranked next to the Pope
in importance, and he was, of course, among these. From the Castle he
witnessed, with the terrified Clement, the devastation inflicted upon
the latter’s exquisite pleasure-house on Monte Mario, an act of wanton
vandalism committed by the Colonna to spite the Pope. Some ten years
later Cardinal Farnese bought this wrecked palace, restored it, and
presented it to his daughter-in-law, Margaret of Austria, who rested
there on her triumphal wedding procession into Rome. It is called after
her to this day the Villa Madama.
In 1540, when the old Palazzo Ferriz was destroyed to make room for
the Palazzo Farnese, the workmen came as usual upon traces of earlier
times. Modern archæologists have discovered that the mosaic pavement
under the right wing of the palace was a part of the flooring of the
Barracks of the “Red Squadron of Charioteers.” It has been generally
supposed that the new palace was built of stone from the Coliseum,
but its materials came from numerous and varied sources. The great
travertine blocks were quarried at Tivoli; and Paul III obtained
permission to demolish and use for his building the partly ruined
battlemented monastery of St. Lorenzo Outside the Walls. After this
quarry was exhausted, his nephews obtained the ruins of Porto, the
Baths of Caracalla, and what was still more important the remains of
the greatest temple of imperial Rome--Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun,
which, at that date still towered one hundred feet above the Colonna
gardens.
[Illustration: One of the fountains in the Piazza Farnese.]
Contemporary artists sketched these various structures as the masons
destroyed them, so that students of the present day can form some
idea of their classic grandeur, and can judge for themselves the value
of the Farnese Palace on the one hand and on the other that of the
imperial baths and temple, and the mediæval monastery, out of which it
is built.
The great new palace made necessary the great new square in front of
it; but years before this the Pope had begun that regeneration of Rome
for which he is so gratefully remembered.
The entry into Rome of Charles V, on the 5th of April, 1534, first
aroused the Romans to the deplorable condition of their city, and,
under the Pope’s enlightened guidance, the preparations for the
imperial visitor took the form of permanent and far-reaching municipal
improvements, which improvements were carried on throughout the
entire period of Paul III’s pontificate. The enlarging of such great
thoroughfares as the Babuino and Condotti date from this time, as
does also the modern Corso, this last finally superseding the Via
Giulia as the fashionable resort. Paul III preferred the old Palazzo
di Venezia at its foot to any other residence, and he connected it
with the Campidoglio by the great viaduct, lately destroyed; while for
him Michelangelo designed the Campanile of the Senate House. A great
Roman of the present day asserts that the fifteen years of Paul III’s
pontificate comprise one of the happiest periods in the city’s life.
When Margaret of Austria rode through the Porta del Popolo, “two hours
before sunset, dressed in white satin embroidered in pearls and gold,”
it was not merely a curious crowd who met and welcomed her. That
concourse of citizens represented the self-respect of the Romans, risen
from the abasement of a decade, and eager to prove to the daughter of
the world’s greatest sovereign their worthiness to be her subjects.
They could not know that Margaret felt contempt for her youthful
husband, nor that in the long duel between Paul III and the Emperor of
Austria she stood not for Rome but for Austria, saying once when her
assistance was sought that she had rather cut off her children’s heads
than ask her father to do anything that displeased him! These were
matters for the Farnese to deal with. So far as Rome was concerned,
with the entry of the Emperor’s daughter, its place among the cities of
the world became once more important and imposing.
Charles V might despise the upstart Farnese as Francis I had
laughed at Cesare Borgia, but the self-made Italians of the
Renaissance--churchmen, merchants, and condottieri, were forces which
hereditary monarchy could not do without. Spain had the riches of the
New World; France and England were breeding the manhood of Europe; but
Italy held the keys to the past--to the culture for which men’s souls
longed. The time was not yet--in 1540--although it was close at hand,
when Italy’s deliberate choice of evil rather than good finally made
her, by weakening and corrupting her, a captive to Spain. Time was not
yet; and in that last lingering glow of her greatness and freedom the
old Pope, Paul III, moves as her incarnate spirit. To a figure slight
and stately, though with stooping shoulders, was united a shrewd and
kindly countenance, with a massive nose and flowing beard, mobile lips
and piercing eyes. His voice was modulated, and his manner gracious and
noble. This outer man held guard over a mind so crafty and tenacious,
so secretive and resourceful, that to the Venetian ambassador--ever the
most astute observer--he remained a fascinating and baffling enigma;
while for Cardinal Mendoza and the Emperor he was an antagonist whom,
for all their secret Austrian contempt and bitter hatred, they could
not afford to ignore.
It was remarked that the Pope never wished to hear or to speak of
his predecessor. He felt that the election of Clement VII had robbed
him of fourteen years of the papacy. Posterity may well share his
prejudice, for it seems safe to assume that, had Paul III been Pope
in 1527, Bourbon’s soldiers would never have got within sight of the
city walls; there would have been, in fact, no sack of Rome. The Pope
felt with all the force of his Italian nature the danger to Italy from
the side of Spain. Better patriot than priest, he had made secret
treaties with the Protestants as a weapon against the Spaniard; and
while no one realized more keenly than he the necessity of reforms in
the Church, yet he dreaded them lest they might in any way weaken the
strength of the papacy. His singular ability to unite the fortunes of
his family with profitable political undertakings runs throughout his
long life; but this nepotism, which no pope ever carried further, and
for which he has been unsparingly censured by historians, represents
the kindliest strain in his nature. It was the human side; and it was
the direct cause of his death. In a dispute over retaining the Duchy
of Parma in his family, the Pope’s grandson, Octavius, opposed the old
pontiff. Paul felt this ingratitude deeply, and spoke openly about it
to the Venetian ambassador. The day after All Saints’ Day, 1549, the
old man repaired to his villa on Monte Cavallo “to ease his mind,” and
from there he sent for Alessandro Farnese II. He came, this magnificent
young cardinal, handsome, courtly, the great art patron, the lover of
scholars and poets, the finest flower of the Farnese, a grandson and
namesake of whom Paul III was justly proud. The cardinal was the Pope’s
darling, and from him Paul felt he could expect support and sympathy.
The interview, however, soon became stormy. High words passed. The
Pope flew into a rage and snatched the biretta from the cardinal’s
head. He had discovered that Alessandro also was carrying on a secret
counterplot against him, and the discovery broke the old man’s heart.
Such a violent attack of anger at the age of eighty-three brought on
an illness from which he had neither the strength nor the wish to
recover, and in a week’s time Paul III was dead. Even after his death
the Romans loved him--a rare tribute to any pope--and all Rome went to
kiss his feet. He had been the first Roman to occupy St. Peter’s chair
in over one hundred years, and the Romans felt his virtues and his
failings to be their own. Fifteen years before, they had carried him
on their shoulders into old St. Peter’s for his coronation, and now
they buried him there. His tomb cost twenty-four thousand Roman crowns,
and is the masterpiece of Guglielmo della Porta. The two recumbent
statues upon it are said to be after a sketch by Michelangelo. The
connection of Michelangelo’s name with the tomb is interesting, but
of greater interest is the romantic legend which surrounds the statue
of the younger woman. This figure, once called Truth and now known
to be Justice, is said to be the portrait of Paul III’s sister, and
this recalls the fact that the fortunes of the princely family of the
Farnese rest upon no more honorable basis than the passion of Alexander
VI (Borgia) for this sister, the beautiful Giulia Farnese. No one can
study the statue on the tomb without understanding how it was that this
magnificent creature seemed to the men of her time the flesh-and-blood
presentment of those Pagan goddesses whom they all, secretly or openly,
worshipped. The superb body is now concealed by Bernini’s hideous
leaden draperies, but the carelessly waving hair and tiny ear have
witchery even in the marble, while the face possesses that solemnity
of perfect beauty found only in the masterpieces of the Greeks. Never
before or since was such a price paid for the Red Hat! Alexander
VI made the young brother, Alessandro Farnese, aged twenty-five, a
cardinal, and Giulia Farnese went to reign in those Borgia apartments,
decorated by all the genius of Pinturicchio, and at once the pride and
disgrace of the Vatican. The young cardinal was nicknamed the Petticoat
Cardinal; but he seems to have felt no compunction at the transaction.
With the Romans, as with the Parisians, ridicule is the most powerful
engine of destruction; and the fact that Alessandro Farnese lived this
sobriquet down, proves, as nothing else can prove, the hold he had upon
the Roman people.
Any account of Paul III would be incomplete without some reference to
his extraordinary belief in astrology. It was quite a recognized fact
that he never even considered any scheme, public or private, before
consulting the planets. If the heavenly bodies were not in favorable
conjunction, the enterprise was given up, or as nearly given up as
was possible to so obstinate and tenacious a mind. In his own time
this singular characteristic was felt to be incongruous and rather
disgraceful; but it is easy for the modern spirit to understand, and
even condone, the weakness. Surely, it was not strange that such a man,
with such a life, should feel that “the stars in their courses fought”
for him.
The impression made upon the mind by the Farnese fountains is not
pleasing. They are certainly “rare and vast,” but as fountains they
are not a success. The form overshadows the substance; for the single
jet of water thrown upward over the structural part of the fountain
is not adequate, and is lost in the effect produced upon the eye
by the huge tubs turned black by the deposits of the Acqua Paola;
while the water falling back into these receptacles is caught as in
a prison, the overflow from the upper to the lower basins being not
sufficient to give an idea of a copious stream. The monster granite
baths have a sepulchral effect. They seem more like coffins made to
hold the bones of departed heroes than like basins for receiving
and distributing living water. During more than two centuries these
fountains bore witness to the magnificence of the Farnese family; but
as that magnificence had been sought and held for reasons as purely
personal and selfish as men have ever known, it had no real value or
significance for the world. No memories of patriotism or ghost of
romance hangs over these fountains, or over the palace which they
guard. The family and the splendor once were, and now are not; and all
the sunshine which daily floods the spacious piazza fails to reanimate
the majestic vacancy of the façade, or to lift the gloom from the
dejected and sombre fountains.
VILLA GIULIA
[Illustration]
VILLA GIULIA
I. FONTANA PUBBLICA DI GIULIO III
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,
* * * * *
So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were
girdled round.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed
many an incense-bearing tree,
* * * * *
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice....”
The Villa Giulia is the Italian version of “Kubla Khan,” not built
by “lofty rhyme,” but constructed of actual stone and marble for a
pleasure-loving pontiff of the Cinque Cento. The desire to realize
the poet’s vision is often felt by absolute monarchs. Versailles,
San Souci, and the Hermitage show what unlimited power, wealth, and
caprice have accomplished in that direction; but none of the northern
sovereigns possessed either the climate, soil, historical, poetic,
and pictorial setting or the artists, architects, and marvellous art
treasures which were at the command of Pope Julius III.
When this pontiff, whose election dates from 1550, decided to build
a pleasure-house upon the vineyard in the Via Flaminia, which he had
inherited from his uncle, the elder Cardinal Monte, he bought up
adjoining property from various landowners, so that his domain finally
extended from the Tiber eastward up the Valle Giulia and adjoining
slopes of Monte Parioli. The southern boundaries have not yet been
fully determined, but those to the north extended as far as the Chapel
of St. Andrea, a beautiful little building erected by Vignola to
commemorate Pope Julius’s (then Cardinal Monte) deliverance from the
soldiery at the time of the sack of Rome in 1527. The Via Flaminia was
at that time the fashionable drive. It was lined by fine villas and
palaces, and Amannati alludes to it as the “beautiful Via Flaminia.”
The approach to it was from the Piazza del Popolo, then a place of
gardens, through the fine Porta del Popolo which, begun so long before
under Pope Sixtus IV, had just been finished by Michelangelo and
Vignola. The fine avenue extended as far as the Ponte Molle, where it
crossed the Tiber, and, after skirting the western slopes of Monte
Soracte, began its long march to the north. A little road (called
the Via del Arco Oscuro) leading up from the Tiber crossed the Via
Flaminia at right angles and climbed up the Valle Giulia, turning
abruptly toward the northern spur of Monte Parioli. The original Monte
property lay along this little road; and it was at the head of this
thoroughfare, where it turned sharply to the north and therefore at
some distance from the Via Flaminia and on much higher ground, that
Pope Julius decided to build his villa. Its creation quickly became
the absorbing passion of his life. The greatest architects of the time
were employed upon it and no expense was spared. After Pope Julius’s
death, the entire place was confiscated by the Camera Apostolica for
thirty-seven thousand scudi, the estimated amount of Pope Julius’s
debts.
The Monte Pope (Julius III belonged to the Roman family of Monte) would
leave the Vatican by the passage leading to the Castle of St. Angelo,
take there a magnificent barge and be rowed up the great sweep of the
Tiber to the landing-place at the foot of the Arco Oscuro. Here a
fine flight of steps was constructed leading up to a vaulted pergola
which traversed the fields between the Tiber and the Via Flaminia.
The pergola was a bower of verdure and terminated in a fine building
and gateway bordering the Tiber side of the Via Flaminia. Here it was
necessary to cross the great highway in order to begin the ascent of
the Arco Oscuro, which led directly to his new villa. The highway was
dusty, and the _salita_ or ascent long and steep, and the Pope decided
to create a resting-place at this point. He had begun digging for water
very early, while cultivating his vineyard, “without ever having had
the slightest indication that water could be found there.” Eventually
he accomplished his purpose, for he succeeded in bringing to his
vineyard the leakage waters of the Virgo Aqueduct. The “leakage” was
very much in the nature of a tap, and the proceeding was high-handed
and reprehensible to a degree. In imperial days such tampering with the
aqueducts was visited by punishment which Frontinus considered not too
severe for so great a crime against the public welfare.
Julius III’s pontificate lasted only five years; but in the year
following his death the Virgo Aqueduct had already ceased to supply
the city, and his successors, Pius IV, Pius V, and Gregory XIII, were
obliged to begin and carry on a systematic and thorough restoration
and enlargement of the aqueduct. For Julius III the wonderful water
was only a perquisite belonging to the “good gift of the papacy,” and
he devoted his short pontificate to its exploitation and adornment,
possibly silencing his scruples by the thought that the construction
of a public fountain on this highway justified his manner of obtaining
the water. At the two opposite angles of the Via Flaminia and the
Arco Oscuro, where the ascent toward his villa began, he erected two
fountains, blunting the acute end of each angle by a mostra or high
façade from the base of which issued the water. The fountain on the
right-hand side was a drinking-trough for horses, while that on the
left was one of the most beautiful and interesting fountains in all
Rome. It was the work of Bartolomeo Amannati, possibly assisted
by Vignola; and very often must the youthful Domenico Fontana have
studied it, for the famous “Fontana Fountain” is only a modification of
this truly beautiful work of the dying Renaissance. It is noticeable
that Amannati’s fountain is not a screen nor a gateway; its mostra
stands against a solid background with severely plain wings of the
same height flanking it at an angle on either side. This mostra is of
peperino in the Corinthian order, the columns supporting a fine classic
entablature and pediment. The apex of the pediment was surmounted by
a colossal statue of Neptune, and the corners of it terminated in two
pedestals carrying, the one a Minerva, and the other a Rome. Between
these two figures and the Neptune were two minor pedestals marking
the architectural termination of the great central division of the
fountain, and on these stood two small obelisks, a feature borrowed by
Fontana for his fountain of the Moses. The arch of the central division
held between its Corinthian pillars the huge square slab with the
inscription:
JULIUS III PONT. MAX. PUBLICÆ
COMMODITATI ANNO III
The niches on either side of this slab once contained statues, one of
Happiness and the other of Abundance, a design embodied two hundred
years later in the background of the Fountain of Trevi. The basin
for receiving the water did not extend across the full width of the
mostra, but was, and is (for this still remains), a noble white
granite conca standing at the foot of the central division under the
inscription. It originally received the water from a beautiful antique
head of Apollo. All this is described in a letter written by the
architect himself, Amannati, from Rome in 1555, and there follows a
description of the arcade behind the fountain. This consists of three
loggias with Corinthian columns, making a semihexagonal design and
carrying a vaulted roof ornamented by pictures and exquisite stucco
work. This was where “his Holiness got repose without incommoding
the public,” which, on the other side of the wall, refreshed itself
and its beasts of burden from the public fountain. The columns were
joined together by a balustrade, and the three-sided colonnade held
in its embrace a large fish-pond with various _jets d’eau_. Beyond
this architectural loveliness stretched long walks bordered with
fruit-trees and espaliers, and up these paths the Pope walked when,
refreshed after his long journey from the Vatican, and eager to see
what his workmen had concluded over night, he finally decided to go on
to the villa on the hill. This beautiful fountain and its loggias have
suffered more than customary outrage from time, neglect, and stupidity.
There would seem to be no vile use to which the loggias have not been
put; and the superimposition of the Casino of Pope Pius IV, which is
now recognized to be the work of Piero Ligorio, has entirely altered
the proportions and beauty of the public fountain. The fate of Pope
Julius’s creation, from the time of his death until 1900, is poorly
outlined in the various half-obliterated escutcheons and inscriptions
which now ornament the fountain and its superstructural Casino. As the
villa and all the land about it had been immediately sequestered by
the Apostolic Chamber in spite of the protests of Julius III’s legal
heirs before a tardy compensation was awarded them, this portion of the
Monte property was divided by Pope Pius IV between a son of the Duke
of Tuscany “who was to have the usufruct for his lifetime” and his own
two nephews, Carlo and Federigo Borromeo. A sister of these Borromeo
brothers married a Colonna, and the property was bestowed upon her as
dowry. It remained in that family until 1900, when it was purchased by
the present owner, Cavaliere Giuseppe Balestra, who already owned the
adjoining villa on the high ground, which might have been a part of the
original Villa Giulia, since it corresponds to that land which Julius
III had acquired from Cardinal Poggio and Cardinal San Vitelleschi.
The Medici escutcheon may have been placed there either by the Duke
of Tuscany or by Pius IV. The Pope was of very humble Milanese origin
and had no connection whatever with the great family whose name he
happened to have; but after he became Pope, the Duke Cosimo I, who
found it to his interest to have the Pope on his side, permitted him
to use the escutcheon. Contrary to the decent Roman custom,[B] the
original inscription of Julius III was removed in the first quarter of
the seventeenth century, by that one of the Colonna who inherited the
property after the death of the last descendant of the earlier branch.
He placed his own, the present, inscription in place of it, sparing the
inscription to Carlo Borromeo, either because of Borroraeo’s connection
with the Colonna family or because of the great veneration felt by
everyone for the memory of the sainted young cardinal. It was also at
this time that the beautiful antique head of Apollo was replaced by the
Colonna escutcheon and the sculptured trophies. The inscription on the
small tablet under the spring of the arch relates that in 1750 Pope
Benedict XIV gave to the Colonna family the right to draw “two ounces”
of water daily from the receiving-tank of the Trevi Fountain for use in
their Roman palace as a recompense to them for their gift to the public
of the Trevi Water in this old fountain.[C]
Those who visit the Villa Giulia in the morning hours may see the
Campagna carts on their way back from Rome drawn up before the public
fountain of Pope Julius III, and the sleepy drivers, tired horses, and
responsible little dogs refreshing themselves with the water.
[Illustration: Fountain of the Virgins.]
So far the picture created more than three hundred and fifty years
ago remains the same; fundamental customs do not change in Rome. But
on the other side of the wall, where once sat and talked the joyous
Pope and his company, what ruin and desolation! Some day the Italian
Government will sweep the crumbling loggias free from dust and rubbish
and tear away the protecting foliage, not redeeming but unmasking the
desecration of the centuries. To-day the dark water in the rough garden
tanks, the unpruned trees and wild flowers, the old mule stabled under
the ruined loggias where hay is stored, the mysterious gloom of the
vaulted roof above the Corinthian capitals and everywhere black shadows
of impenetrable depth make up a scene whose like can in all probability
be found only among the engravings of Piranesi.
[Illustration]
II. THE NYMPHÆUM OR “SECRET FOUNTAIN”
The Villa Giulia proper is designated in the old Italian books as
l’Invenzione nella Vigna Giulia, and the literal English translation
of invention not inappropriately describes this truly marvellous
creation. Amannati, Vasari, Vignola,[D] and even the aged Michelangelo
spent themselves upon the architectural devices by which this
pleasure-house became a place of almost fabulous beauty. Consummate
knowledge of perspective was employed in making the building, which is
not at all large, seem so, and the only defect in the entire design
is, as might have been expected, the Pope’s fault, for Julius insisted
upon working into the loggias in the rear of the upper court of the
fountain a gift of columns, beautiful in themselves but too small for
the surrounding proportions, thus making that part of the construction
appear insignificant and inferior to the rest. The Pope’s changing
caprice wearied even the good-natured Vasari, who has left the record
that “there was no getting the villa done”; and it was not long before
Vignola, a man of genuine and independent genius, wearied utterly of
serving such a master and went off with the great Cardinal Farnese to
build the latter’s villa of Caprarola, where he could work at peace and
for an appreciative and sympathetic patron.
The last remains of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun were presented by
Prince Colonna to the Pope and went into the fabric of the villa, and
a great collection of portrait busts of the Emperors, found in the
villa of Hadrian, helped to adorn the loggias and niches. The villa was
filled with rare marbles, tables, statues, and vases, and the marble
columns of the central loggia were so lustrous that Amannati says they
mirrored every one who entered there. As the villa is constructed on
the hillside, various levels are the natural result, and this feature
has been used with diverse and happy effects. The various courts are
all on different planes while, with the one exception of the grand
double stairway in the central court, all the stairs are cunningly
concealed so that there is no suggestion of physical effort as the
eye passes from one plane to another. The vaulted roofs of the long
semicircular galleries and various rooms were decorated with paintings
or with stucco work of the most exquisite perfection. Traces of this
last are still to be seen above the niches containing the colossal
river-gods, the Tiber and the Arno (Amannati was a Florentine). The
place was truly a Palace of Art. Nothing but beauty was permitted
to enter it. Stables, offices, and kitchens were placed outside the
villa, and the one house which stood within the villa grounds--that
of the keeper or custodian--was designed and decorated with great
care, so that, according to Amannati, the entire invention was of
such beauty that it was in itself “good enough for any great prince.”
Nothing remains of this splendor but the bare shell, and this has been
so tampered with that it is only from old plans or from outlines of
restoration by Letarouilly and Stern that a true conception can be
obtained of the villa of Pope Julius III. It is necessary to know,
for instance, that the front court, now a commonplace garden, was
originally a great paved cortile filled with statuary now in the
Vatican or scattered far and wide over Italy. The loggia leading up
and out of this court was originally closed and entered by doors. The
shallow, broad stairway leading down from the right-hand garden under
the terraces was put in for the benefit of the cavalry quartered there
during a petty war of the eighteenth century, when the horses were
taken down to drink at the Nymphæum! The present gardens in no wise
represent the beautiful formal gardens which stretched there on either
side of the various courts, and the present walls cannot possibly
enclose that space which was once filled with orange groves and every
sort of device for fastidious delight. Somewhere in those grounds,
probably on the right hand, there was a monticello or little hill
from which could be seen the Tiber, the Seven Hills, the “beautiful
Strada Flaminia,” the Vatican, and the vast erection of new St.
Peter’s overtopping and gradually engulfing the old basilica, the view
extending even to the sea. Under the high ground still held in place
by a great retaining wall were grottos beautifully decorated by stucco
and painting and icy cold even in summer. In the woods, where the
Italian pastime of snaring birds was carefully provided for, there were
accommodations for every kind of animal, and everywhere there were
fountains, marble seats, and antique garden statuary.
Louis XIV, for whom careful plans of the villa were drawn, wisely
made no attempt to copy the enchanted palace of Italy. Versailles
makes up in size for the beauty of color, architecture, vegetation,
and art treasures here formed into one beautiful whole by Pope Julius
III. The shape of the Villa Giulia is significant. It is a series of
gardens, loggias, and courts, one enclosing the other, each richer in
ornamentation, more ravishing in beauty than the last, until finally
the heart of the creation is reached, and the “secret fountain” of
the Acqua Vergine is discovered flowing out of the shadow and from
a hidden source into a sunlit Nymphæum of marvellous beauty and
again mysteriously disappearing into the shadow. The Fountain of the
Virgins, as it came to be called, was felt by its creator, Amannati,
to be beyond the power of description. Writing to a friend in Padua,
soon after Pope Julius’s death, he describes the entire villa in
extraordinary detail, noting the attitude even of many of the statues;
but when, after pages of description, he has brought his reader to the
lowest court of all, his pen fails him and he says that unless he can
paint a picture of this court and fountain he will never be able to
give his friend “any conception of this, the loveliest, richest, and
most marvellous place in the entire creation.” Amannati saw it in its
first splendor. The caryatides were perfect, white, and gleaming, and
perhaps beautiful. The niches round about were filled with marble boys
carrying urns upon their shoulders from which the water was poured
into the semicircular stream at their feet. It is impossible to tell
from the description of the old pictures what, if any, statue filled
the central niche behind the virgins. At present the niche holds a
great white marble swan, now almost hidden by fern, from whose bill
the water trickles into the black pool beneath. The pavement, made of
every conceivable kind of marble, glowed like a jewel. The balustrade
above held graceful statues and on either side of the court just above
stood a great plane-tree, giving delicious verdure and shade. Then,
as now, the water came from large reservoirs hidden beneath the upper
terrace to the east of the fountain; then, as now, it was carried off
over gentle, rough-paved inclines; then, as now, it fell steeply into
a subterranean cavern--the entire construction producing waves of cool
air and a ripple and murmur of water exquisitely refreshing to both eye
and ear. It is almost necessary to forgive Pope Julius his attack upon
the aqueduct. Never before or since has the Acqua Vergine received such
poetic treatment.
Nothing remains of this beauty but the water and the masonry. Pope
Julius was hardly buried before the spoliation of his villa began.
Like the Pope’s beautiful resting-place behind the public fountain,
the Nymphæum has endured three centuries of vile usage and neglect.
Nowhere in Rome is it more necessary to use imagination than in the
Villa Giulia. The visitor should descend into the lowest court on a
day of brilliant sunshine and, standing before the Fountain of the
Virgins, replace for himself the lost lustre of the columns, the
whiteness of the balustrades, the rich coloring of mural paintings and
stucco, and the gleam of antique statuary. He should see the flickering
shadows cast by the great plane-trees across the marble pavement, and
hear the birds twittering or calling from the aviaries which were in
the loggia wall above the river-gods. He must fancy the fitful music
of stringed instruments, the perfume from the orange groves drifting
over the garden walls where sat the monkeys and brilliant tropical
birds. He must feel the languid stir or deep repose of long, indolent,
luxurious summer days, and through it all, he must be conscious of the
water. Only so will he be able to form some adequate conception of what
the “secret fountain” must have been in the days of Pope Julius III.
The highest charm of the beautiful creation lay in its presentation
of contrast translated into a medium suitable to every sense. It was
an age of contrast, sharp and constant. No feature in the crowded
Italian life of those two centuries is so striking as this. Fame and
obloquy; triumphant health and the lazar-house; honor and exile; the
luxury of an Agostino Chigi and the squalor of the beggar at his doors;
compassion and fiendish cruelty, young Cardinal Borromeo’s sanctity on
the one hand, and on the other unblushing licentiousness; beauty to
which all but divine honors were paid, and hideous deformity; these
lay open to the eye on every side. There seemed to be no transition.
The “secret fountain,” with its light and shade, its rest and motion,
sound and silence, its art and nature, was the poetic expression of
life as it was known by the men for whom it was created.
The records of those days are never free from blood, and at least one
assassination is connected with the building of this house of mirth.
Baronino, an associate of Vignola and Amannati, leaving the villa
with a friend on a certain evening, was set upon as he turned into
the Via Flaminia and stabbed to death. The angle in the walls made
by the public fountain and the fact that it was a natural place for
loiterers probably suggested the choice of the spot. The assassin’s
identity was either never discovered or never revealed and the crime
went unpunished, for Cellini was not the only lucky rascal. Artists
especially carried their lives in their hands, and genius was as open
to violence as it was to fame.
Historians and moralists accord scant justice and no mercy to Julius
III. He is represented by them as spending his life in senseless and
indolent pleasures. Yet he had begun his pontificate with some show of
earnestness. He had reopened the Council of Trent, and had attempted to
play a part in the diplomacy of Europe. That after two years he wearied
of these arduous labors might have been because he had sufficient wit
to perceive that, for his time at least, the Papal See would have to
be a tool in the hands of Austria. His devotion to the creation of
his villa was perhaps the only outlet for the activities of a nature
too slight to cope with the stern and sinister century on which his
lot had fallen. Long days spent with Vignola, Amannati, and Vasari,
and above all, with the aged but undaunted Michelangelo himself, for
whom this Pope felt a loving veneration, must have had a zest and
stimulating quality sufficient to make the Pope’s life in this villa
something more than the sybaritic enjoyment of mere sensuous beauty.
Beyond a doubt, the construction of his villa became an obsession with
the Pope. He gradually abandoned all other avocations and duties. It
was at the villa that he held his audiences, received ambassadors, and
gave his suppers, at which last his wit was said to be of less fine
quality than were his vintages. He even had a medal struck, with his
own head on one side and on the other the front elevation of the Villa
Giulia, with the inscription, “Fons Virginibus.”
One fatal day a pet monkey savagely attacked the Pope. He was rescued
by a lad of sixteen whom he soon after made a cardinal. The scandal was
very great. Prelates and laymen alike felt this to be going too far.
The Pope might lay himself open to censure but not to ridicule. Here
in the midst of the beauty created by Pope Julius, men’s eyes began to
turn toward the slightly grim, ascetic figure of Cardinal della Croce,
great Roman patrician and true saint, who, as if to give the final note
to this life of vivid contrast, moved about in the gay papal court,
reserved, austere, devoted to a life of such sanctity that the Pope
himself felt uncomfortable in his presence.
The villa was still far from finished when Julius III’s short
pontificate came to an end. The Conclave almost unanimously chose as
his successor their saintly brother, Cardinal della Croce.[E] The world
had entered upon a new phase. Northern Europe had brought the spirit
of the Reformation to the gates of Rome, and men were ashamed of Pope
Julius III, whose misfortune it had been to live half a century too
late.
The Villa Giulia passed into the ownership of the popes and remained
there until it was taken over by the state in the present government.
It was eventually finished by Popes Pius IV and Pius V, but the art
treasures were scattered far and wide. During many pontificates it was
used for the stopping place of ambassadors and other great personages
who spent the night there before making their ceremonial entrance into
Rome. Perhaps the presence of so much water and luxurious vegetation
made the place peculiarly sensitive to mould and decay. Even as early
as 1585 it was not considered healthful. Sixtus V, with the restless
caprice of the poor sleeper, wished to spend a night there, but was
forbidden to do so by his physician. As it was papal property, no
private individual ever had the chance to take over the beautiful old
building and gardens and keep them in repair; and those popes whose
tastes might have led them to restore it built pleasure-houses or
palaces for themselves. Gregory XIII began the Quirinal Palace, and
not infrequently for his villegiatura visited the magnificent villa
of Mondragone at Frascati which Cardinal Altemps had already begun
to build. Sixtus V built his Villa Montalto, the new Lateran Palace,
and finished the Quirinal Palace. Clement VIII contented himself with
the Quirinal; but his great cardinal nephew, Peter Aldobrandini,
founded the magnificent Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. The Medici
Leo XI devoted himself to the Villa Medici. Paul V did indeed make a
restoration, using much stucco, which can easily be distinguished from
the beautiful work of the original period, but that Pope’s interest was
really given to the great villa which his nephew, Cardinal Scipione
Borghese, was creating out of the old Villa Cenci.
Finally, late in the eighteenth century, the papal chair was occupied
by a man of culture who felt the charm of the old Cinque Cento villa in
the Valle Giulia, and tried to rescue it from total ruin. This was the
Ganganelli Pope, Clement XIV, the founder of the Clementine sculpture
gallery in the Vatican. Clement XIV’s investigation of Pope Julius
III’s villa showed that the aqueducts were ruined, the walls crumbled
by water, the pavements cracked by fire, while all the wood and iron
work was broken or rusted, and the exquisite paintings, stucco, and
gilding spoiled by smoke and damp.[F] The papal architect, Raphael
Stern, made careful and elaborate drawings from old plans, with a view
to a genuine restoration, as Pius VI (who, in 1774, succeeded Clement
XIV) carried on the work. This Pope also felt the fascination of the
marvellous, all but ruined pleasure-house, and decided to make it his
autumn residence, but it was too late! Pope Pius VI was carried off
by the French Revolutionary forces in 1798 and died a prisoner in the
French fortress of Valence. From that time forward, the villa fell
more and more into decay. Its pitiful condition might have furnished
material for endless sermons on the vanity of life, and the ruin of its
exquisite decorations fills all artists and lovers of the beautiful
with indignant regret. It has been a veterinary hospital, a cavalry
barracks, a storehouse for hay--no desecration has been spared it. At
last the present government rescued what was left of it and converted
it into a museum of antiquities, giving the last ironic touch to its
fate by filling the rooms built to minister to the joy and pride of
life, with ancient coffins and relics of the dead.
COLONNA
[Illustration]
COLONNA
The fountain of the Piazza Colonna might be the “Fountain of Youth,”
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.
The Villa Montalto was eventually finished by the Pope’s nephew,
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
Modern photographs can still be found of the original fountain of the
Lateran. It was the work of Fontana and was placed in this spot after
he had erected the obelisk for Sixtus V. The present fountain is quite
new and most inadequately replaces the old one which had stood there
for over three hundred years. By the close of the nineteenth century
the upper basin of Fontana’s fountain was badly broken, while the
lower one had been held together for some time by iron clamps. The
carving was so worn and defaced that the dolphins and eagle were quite
shapeless, and the figure of St. John writing in a scroll upon his
knee and looking to Heaven for inspiration had long since disappeared.
Maggi’s engraving of this fountain made in 1618 shows it to have
been one of the richest ever designed by Fontana. A curious feature
in this old fountain was the blending of the insignia of three popes.
The pears of Sixtus V were carved in heavy festoons under the huge
supporting scrolls of the mostra (which was a screen made low so as to
bring the figure of St. John in simple and high relief against one of
the square sides of the pedestal), the Borghese eagle poured the water
into the shell-shaped upper basin; and finally the Aldobrandini bar of
continuous Maltese crosses was used as frieze.
The obelisk of the Lateran was set in its present place by Fontana
only two years before the death of Sixtus V, and it is quite probable
the fountain was not erected until some years later. Sixtus V rushed
the work on the Lateran at top speed; and this obelisk was no sooner
in place than Fontana was commissioned to transport its companion
to the Piazza del Popolo. The Lateran obelisk was erected in 1588.
In August, 1590, Sixtus V died. Four popes followed him in rapid
succession--Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX, all dying so
soon that by January 20, 1592, Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) had become
Pope; and Fontana may have finished this fountain during the first
years of Clement’s pontificate, before he fell under that pontiff’s
displeasure. The frieze on the fountain must have been originally the
Montalto or Peretti frieze, which forms so beautiful a finish to the
Lateran Palace; but Fontana, while keeping the star of Montalto (one of
Sixtus V’s emblems) in the corners under the cornice of the screen,
changed the design of the intervening space into the Aldobrandini bar.
It was a small detail, and the change was a mere matter of custom
and policy and involved no disloyalty to the great past in Fontana’s
life. This would account for the Aldobrandini frieze. The eagle seems
at first more difficult to explain. From the accession of Paul V the
eagle denotes the Borghese family; but Paul V did not become Pope until
1605, and Fontana left Rome for Naples in 1596. Therefore, the eagle
of this fountain cannot have any connection with the Borghese family.
Why did Fontana use it instead of the lion’s head, which was another of
Sixtus V’s emblems and would have made a better architectural outlet
for the water? It must have been because the eagle is the emblem of
St. John. In Michelangelo’s fresco of the Fourth Evangelist in the
Sixtine Chapel the eagle stands with bent head and folded wings close
against the figure of the saint who, seated upon the ground, is writing
in the scroll supported by his knee. Fontana, or the sculptor who
carved for him the figure on the top of the mostra of this fountain,
was undoubtedly inspired by Michelangelo’s creation. The St. John of
the fountain was, according to the old engravings, a beautiful and
youthful figure looking to Heaven for inspiration and writing in the
scroll held upon his knee. The eagle was wanting, but Fontana placed
him just below the cornice between the curving tails of the dolphins,
and adapted him to the purposes of a fountain. The design was original
and extremely interesting, as it shows both Sixtus V and Fontana in a
new and unusual light. They were dominated by the place. The great new
Lateran Palace which they had built, the ancient obelisk which they
had set up, the fountain which supplied the invaluable Acqua Felice,
were all subservient to the venerable basilica of St. John. The piazza
and all that it contained were dedicated to St. John, and had been so
for seven hundred years. Pope and architect may have felt that in this
fountain the insignia of any pontiff were more fittingly kept in a
purely subordinate position.
The mostra of the old fountain rested, as the present one does, on the
base of the obelisk; and the fine Piranesi engraving of the Piazza of
the Lateran shows its position and proportions as well as the admirable
balance which it gives to the entire scene.
This obelisk is still the highest in the world, although the lower end
was so badly broken and damaged (by fire) that Fontana had to shorten
it by three feet. It was also broken in three pieces and Fontana’s
device for mending it, which so pleased the Pope, can be traced in
various places among the hieroglyphics. When the obelisk was at last
erected, Fontana carved his name with his title of knight in Latin on
the base, and the three mounts and the star of Sixtus V were fastened
to the apex. Above everything was placed the huge bronze cross, for
Sixtus V considered the obelisk to be the supreme symbol of divinity
in a great Pagan theology; and by placing the cross on all those which
he re-erected, the Pope felt that he was exhibiting in the most
picturesque and conspicuous manner the triumph of Christianity.
This obelisk, which is of red granite, was found by accident lying
prone and buried in the marshy ground of the Circus Maximus. Near
by was another, the one which now stands in the Piazza del Popolo.
Fontana employed five hundred men in raising and removing the obelisk
of the Lateran. Of these men, three hundred were employed day and night
keeping out the water which poured in on all sides. This stream is now
thought to have been the brook Crabra, the “goat brook” of Tusculum,
described by Frontinus, which, in the general decay of mediæval
times, had become one of the “lost waters” of Rome. The difficulties
encountered in transporting the obelisk up the rough sides and through
the old streets of the Quirinal Hill were numerous. The obelisk of the
Piazza del Popolo was removed from the same place and set up on its
present site for the sum of ten thousand three hundred and thirty-one
scudi; whereas this obelisk of the Lateran cost the papal treasury
twenty-four thousand six hundred and eleven scudi.
It was originally brought to Rome in the early days of the Christian
era. Twenty-seven years after Constantine had transferred the seat
of government to his own new capital of Byzantium, his successor,
Constantine II, visited Rome. He visited Rome like any foreign prince
and was profoundly impressed by the magnificence and majesty of his
discarded capital. A not unnatural instinct prompted him to leave some
memorial of himself among the monuments and trophies of his heroic
predecessors; and for this purpose he sent for the obelisk which
Thotmes III had originally placed before the great temple of Thebes. It
was brought to Rome and placed in the Circus Maximus. Its subsequent
history and the causes of the fall of this last of the imperial
obelisks are still lost in the mystery which hangs over so much of
mediæval Rome.[H]
The original pedestal had been too damaged by fire to admit of using
it again; so Sixtus V gave permission to Domenico Fontana to make the
new pedestal out of the materials of an old arch which Domenico was
to destroy for this purpose. The permission was given in writing,
for Domenico Fontana had found that it was necessary to be armed
with written instructions from the Pope whenever he began one of
his devastating raids upon the antiquities of the city. The city
government had endured such pillage and destruction at the hands of the
great Pope’s great architect that all the past vandalism of private
individuals seemed slight in comparison. They protested in vain against
most of the destruction upon which Sixtus V had set his heart, and
neither princes nor magistrates could save the old pontifical residence
of the Lateran which had stood since the seventh century on this very
piazza. It was a marvellous rambling pile of buildings--churches,
monasteries, shrines, loggias, colonnades, oratories, banqueting
rooms and halls filled with mosaics, pictures, and frescoes--and,
according to a great authority, the most wonderful museum of mediæval
art that ever existed. This priceless record of the past was ruthlessly
demolished and razed to the ground in a few months’ time by order of
Pope Sixtus V. It is difficult to understand his motives for this
particular action, since it was not the history of Paganism but of his
own predecessors that he was destroying. The populace never forgot,
or forgave him this destruction, involving as it did the loss of the
Oratory of the Holy Cross. An exquisite example of early Christian
architecture, built in the shape of a Greek cross, this oratory was
held in peculiar veneration by all classes; and the Roman people might
not unnaturally conclude that the wanton destruction of anything at
once so beautiful and so sacred as this oratory could only be ascribed
to the promptings of the devil himself. Posterity can hardly accept
Pope Sixtus V’s fountain, even with its obelisk, as an adequate
substitute for the three fountains of rare marble in the atrium of this
oratory which perished by order of the Pope.
The Church of St. John Lateran was under the protection of the Kings
of France, as the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore was under the
protection of the Kings of Spain, St. Peter’s under that of the Emperor
of Austria, and St. Paul’s Beyond the Walls under the protection of
the English sovereign. In the pontificate of Clement VIII, when the
papacy began to turn toward France in its foreign policy, the work
of embellishing the Lateran cost Rome--and indeed large portions of
the surrounding country--untold treasures in costly marbles and gilt
bronzes. The first were sawed into slabs for the transept of the
Church; and the Altar of the Sacrament owes its magnificence to the
many hundred bronzes which, together with portions of the bronze beams
of the Pantheon, went to the smelting furnaces. In Sixtus V’s time,
however, the old church was still comparatively simple; and it was
in this old Church of the Lateran, probably during his pontificate,
that Stradella’s prayer (“Pity, oh, Saviour!”) was sung, while hired
assassins waited in the outside darkness to take the composer’s life.
As the service was long, the bravos stepped inside the church to enjoy
the music before committing the murder. There, in the wavering light
of the altar candles and under the subtle influence of the incense,
they became so impressed by the pathetic beauty of that marvellous
_Aria di Chiesa_ that they felt it impossible to put out of existence
the man who could write such music; and in the darkness and silence
that followed the close of the divine melody they themselves warned
Stradella of the plot against his life and abetted his escape.
Of late years this legend has been discredited; but in such a case
as this it is well to remember the attitude taken by the writer of
“The Renaissance in Italy,” “I would rather accept,” says Symonds,
“sixteenth-century tradition with Vasari than reject it with German
or English speculators of to-day. I regard the present tendency to
mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest
sense uncritical.”
Over the door of the Vatican Library is a fresco map of Sixtine Rome.
It portrays not what Sixtus V actually left, but what he at one time
intended to leave. In this fresco a great thoroughfare runs from the
Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Laterano, and at each end of the
magnificent vista stands an obelisk erected by the Pope. Such a street
laid out to-day would lead along the Via Babuino, the Piazza di Spagna
and the Via Due Macelli, and, passing through the tunnel, come out on
the Via Merulana, and reach the Piazza Laterano after traversing the
eastern slope of the Esquiline and the new streets between it and the
basilica. Sixtus V abandoned the idea as the great thoroughfare would
have cut its way directly through the precincts of the Quirinal, and
he had determined to make that spot his own abode, not only because
he loved it but because he recognized the sovereign quality of the
situation of Monte Cavallo in the Rome which he was reconstructing.
The Fontana fountain of the Lateran is not included by Baglioni in
his list of Fontana’s works; but that list which is embodied in his
account of Fontana’s life is manifestly incomplete. The fountain was
engraved in full detail as early as 1618 by Maggi; and later engravings
were made of it by Cruyl, Millotte, and Falda. These designs were so
comprehensive that it would have been an extremely simple matter to
entirely reconstruct the old fountain, more especially as the mostra
and old basins were still in place, and there could have been no
difficulty in ascertaining the proportions. Had this been done, the
pictorial effect and, above all, the historical interest of the Piazza
of St. John Lateran would have been greatly enhanced. The old fountain
disappeared in the general submersion of papal Rome. Its modern
substitute is a mere paraphrase, and the eagle seems intentionally to
represent the eagle of imperial Rome rather than the emblem of St.
John.
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI
[Illustration]
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI
The fountain on the terrace in front of the Villa Medici has been
called by a lover of Rome “The Fountain of the Brimming Bowl.” It is a
happy surname, for the marble vase beneath the formally clipped ilex
trees is nothing more or less than a huge bowl filled to overflowing
with the Acqua Felice. The stream gushes upward in a slender column
until it reaches the spreading branches overhead. There it returns upon
itself in clouds of glistening spray, filling the bowl with circles of
gleaming water, ever widening until they brim over the edge and veil
the marble in a continuous overflow. The octagonal basin which receives
this copious stream is sunk into the ground and its shadowed waters
have all the unobtrusive beauty of a quiet and sequestered pool. There
is no sculpture, no decoration. With unerring taste, the artist has
made his appeal to the eye through fundamental and universal elements
of beauty. Grace of line and of proportion, contrast of solid rock and
flowing water, the impression of abundance and perpetuity, symmetry,
contrast, suggestion--these are the simple qualities out of which he
composed his Fountain of the Brimming Bowl.
Sunlight flickering through the ilex branches overhead and the
crumbling shadows of their dense foliage add a poetic charm, while
the Italian trinity--Art, Time, and Nature--have given to this modest
fountain a background of unsurpassed interest and dignity. The view
from the terrace of the Villa Medici might be described almost exactly
by Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge, and truly
“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.”
Here in Rome “... towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie,” massed
together in that famous quarter of the city known in classic times
as the Campus Martius; and through this architectural maze, spanned
by bridges old and new, the Tiber “floweth at its own sweet will.”
On its farther shore the modern Palace of Justice and a network of
thoroughfares with names relating to the Risorgimento and to Italy of
to-day crowd against the venerable Castle of St. Angelo. Beyond that
lies the densely packed Borgo or Leonine city, surrounded by walls,
while the heights of the Janiculum to the left and those of the Vatican
Hill and Monte Mario to the right give a background of green to all
this masonry. In the very centre of the distance, on the ground once
covered by the Circus of Nero, dominating everything and seeming to
float against the western sky, rises the dome of St. Peter’s.
The terrace leads on the one hand to the gardens of the Pincio and on
the other to the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. From 1544 to 1560,
when Annibale Lippi was working on the Villa Medici, that portion of
the Pincian Hill covered to-day by the Pincian Gardens belonged to the
Augustinian monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The villa stood on the
ground between them and the gardens and convent of the Trinità de’
Monti. The terrace with the fountain was the approach to the cardinal’s
villa and to the precincts of the convent. The old engravings show
the fountain standing quite free from trees, which, however, are
growing along the edge of the hill and down its slope. The fountain
is generally ascribed to Annibale Lippi, but there seems to be no
positive proof that it is his work. It resembles in general outline the
fontanella on the balcony inside the villa, which is by Lippi; and the
fact that the basin is made of bigio marble might put its date as early
as Lippi’s time. The fountains in the first half of the Cinque Cento
were generally made of marble or granite, whereas after Fontana and in
Bernini’s period travertine was used almost exclusively.
The villa was the property of Cardinal Monte Pulciano, but it was
barely finished when Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici began negotiations
for its purchase. Medici, whose childhood had been passed in the
Boboli Gardens, which were created by his father, spent eleven years
in laying out and beautifying the gardens of this villa, where he had
a small zoological collection, and also in making the gallery of Greek
and Roman sculpture which rivalled that already belonging to his old
friend Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. He returned to Florence in 1587,
and some time after the villa passed into the hands of another Medici,
Cardinal Alessandro, who became Pope Leo XI in 1605. This Cardinal
Alessandro de’ Medici also spent much time and money in the decoration
of the villa, and it seems probable that the fountain was constructed
during his tenure of the property, since the introduction of the Acqua
Felice in 1587 had at last made it possible to have fountains on this
hillside. Evelyn, describing this fountain in the last days of Pope
Urban VIII’s pontificate, speaks of the magnificent jet of water
spouting fifty feet into the air. The earliest engravings of it date
from the middle of the Sei Cento and show the water springing from a
large ball of travertine which has long since lost its size and shape
from the constant action of the water. The pedestal and base of this
fountain are also of travertine.
The present Church of the Trinità de’ Monti was erected by Louis XVIII,
of France, to replace the original building which had been destroyed
during the excesses of the French Revolutionary period. But in 1544
the old Gothic church of the Valois King stood looking westward over
the French quarter of the city. This church dated from the year 1495,
when Charles VIII, of France, on his way to reconquer his Neapolitan
territory, entered Rome and paid a visit--half threatening, half
ceremonious--to Alexander VI. He left as a memorial of his stay in Rome
this Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. The church became the nucleus of
French influence in Rome. The French convent of the Sacred Heart grew
up beside its walls, and many famous Frenchmen lived within its shadow.
Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici, who gave his family name to this villa,
as well as to the Venus which, upon its discovery in Hadrian’s Villa,
he immediately bought and placed here, was one of the commanding
figures of his time. Fourth son of Cosimo, first Grand Duke of Tuscany,
he had been made a cardinal at fourteen, in the room of his elder
brother Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who had died at nineteen. The
second Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand’s eldest brother, died in 1587,
leaving no son, and so, after twenty-four years of ecclesiastical
life, Cardinal Ferdinand, who had never taken holy orders, laid by the
red hat to become third Grand Duke of Tuscany. He married Christine
de Lorraine, a granddaughter of Catherine de’ Medici, and therefore a
distant cousin of his own, and had, like his great-grandfather Lorenzo
the Magnificent, and his own grandfather Cosimo I, eight children,
his eldest son succeeding to the grand duchy. It is difficult to
trace in the wise and beneficent grand duke the intractable young
cardinal who had been a handful for even Sixtus V. The old pontiff
had found in him an obstinacy and a craft equal to his own, and he
must have “thanked God fasting” when Medici was no longer a member of
his curia! The Pope was an old man, and the cardinal had the physical
advantage of youth; nevertheless it was a battle royal when this true
chip of the Medicean block interceded with the Peretti Pope for the
life of his old friend, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Sixtus, who was
not to be shaken in his determination, kept track of the time, and
held firmly to his resolution until he was sure that the appointed
hour for Farnese’s death had come and gone; then, knowing that it was
too late, he graciously consented to spare Farnese’s life, to please
his Cardinal de’ Medici. But the cardinal knew his Sixtus V, and had,
before his audience, taken the precaution to set every clock in the
Vatican, outside the Pope’s private apartments, back one hour![I]
The fire still lives in the ashes of this Ferdinand, for, in 1906,
a deputation from Leghorn visited his tomb in the Medici mausoleum
in Florence and laid upon it a bronze wreath as a testimony of their
undying gratitude and affection. Leghorn, a mere fishing village of the
Cinque Cento, had been raised to her position of the second seaport in
Italy by this ex-cardinal, and that chiefly through the operation of
an edict of toleration almost incredible at the period in which it was
promulgated. When the Spanish Armada, the struggle in the Netherlands,
and the religious wars in France kept all Europe in a ferment, Leghorn
rose suddenly and swiftly like an exhalation of the sea through the
peaceful labors of the French, Flemish, and Jewish refugees who, within
her walls and under the powerful protection of her Grand Duke, the
ex-cardinal, found absolute liberty of conscience and security of life
and property. It was this Ferdinand who furnished from his own rich
coffers the sinews of war to Henry of Navarre; it was he who mediated
between Henry and the Pope; and it was his niece, Maria de’ Medici, who
became Queen of France as wife of Henry IV, bringing with her, as Sully
said, such a marriage portion as had never before been brought into the
kingdom.
Five years after this event Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici became Pope;
so the Villa Medici, as well as the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti,
had, in spite of their Italian names, many affiliations with far-off
Paris; and partly on account of these associations, partly for the sake
of the marvellous view, their terraces became the favorite haunt of
those artists who, in the early days of the Sei Cento, began to find
their way to Rome.
In the continuity of the development of art there are few events more
interesting than the appearance of the French art student in Rome.
Gaul had been the first of the northern nations to assimilate Roman
culture, and France was the first to come under the influence of the
Renaissance. Just at the time when the Catholic reaction against
the license of the Cinque Cento had begun to force Italy under the
stultifying influence of Spanish domination, France awoke to the full
consciousness of her æsthetic nature and to her need of those things
which Italy alone could give. The army of Charles VIII had carried back
across the Alps imperishable memories of beauty, and soon afterward
Francis I had enticed to Paris some of the greatest Italian artists
of the time. Even the fierce religious wars of the sixteenth century
could not stamp out the seed sown by the soldiers’ stories and by the
works of art left by homesick Italian masters in Fontainebleau. One
by one the eager French artists crossed the Alps, and they came in
ever-increasing numbers when the genius of Richelieu brought order and
amenity into French life, and when Richelieu’s contemporary, Maffeo
Barberini, for many years papal legate to France, had become Pope Urban
VIII. To reach Rome all of these voyagers had to endure severe physical
hardships, and some of them never returned to France. The greatest
of them--Le Poussin and Claude--died in Rome. Painters, engravers,
sculptors, and architects came to these terraces to worship and to
work, and to this day the galleries and palaces of northern Europe
cherish the pictures planned or sketched about the Fountain of the
Brimming Bowl.
Pope Urban VIII, who died in 1644, was himself half French, not only
by virtue of his temperament and genius, but also by the trend of his
sympathies and his foreign policy. Under his enlightened patronage,
the artists of France found a congenial home in the Eternal City.
This was the beginning of the French Academy of Painting in Rome,
which was formally founded in 1666 by Colbert, the great minister of
Louis XIV. For the first seven years of its existence this institution
had no permanent abode; but in 1673 the Capronica Palace was placed
at its disposal, and later on--in Louis XV’s time--it moved to the
Mancini Palace near the Corso. The slope leading from the Piazza of
the Trinità de’ Monti (now the Piazza di Spagna) to the terraces above
had all this time been a natural hillside, whereon grew trees, grass,
and wild flowers familiar to Rome. The footpaths leading upward must
have been a rather steep climb; but five years before the founding
of the Academy an event occurred which was to make the ascent of the
hillside not only easy but delightful. In 1661 Rome came into the
possession of a large sum of money left to the city by the learned
French gentleman, Etienne de Guéffier, for the express purpose of
constructing a magnificent stone stairway which should cover this slope
of the Pincian Hill, and unite for all time the Campus Martius with
the terraces above. The stairway was long in building, and during its
construction the connection between the Academy in the Mancini Palace
and the old terraces of the Trinità de’ Monti may have been slender;
but in 1725 the Scalinata was opened with great pomp, and once again
French artists could spend long hours on their beloved terraces.
Seventy-six years later Napoleon, with his supreme instinct for effect
(a possession he shared with Julius Cæsar),[J] and not unmindful of
the French association with this quarter of the city, removed the
French Academy from the old Mancini Palace and lodged it permanently
and most impressively where it now is, in the Villa Medici, the villa
built by that family which had given two queens to France. So the
fountain of the Trinità de’ Monti is still a feature in the life of the
French artists at Rome; and it is perhaps a pardonable fancy that, in
this particular fountain, the Acqua Felice plays in French!
VILLA BORGHESE
NOW
VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO
[Illustration]
VILLA BORGHESE
NOW
VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO
A garden where the centuries
Of men have come and none did care
Save for the green grass and the breeze
And shelter from the noontide glare.
But that which makes the garden fair--
The sense of life’s futility,
Is deathless beauty. Born of Death,
It blossoms under cloudless skies--
One’s very dream of Italy.
--_From an unpublished MS._
Such a garden was the Villa Borghese; and such a garden it still is,
in spite of constant desecration. This is the home of the most poetic
of Bernini’s fountains. It stands on the summit of a rising avenue,
yet it does not terminate a vista, it makes itself a part of one, for
the avenue continues after the fountain has been reached. It stands
in full but tempered sunlight, girt about by a circle of box hedges
and ilex trees, with here and there a tall stone pine. The lower basin
lies in the turf, like a natural pool, and the water fills it to the
brim. It reflects the trees and clouds in its quiet depths, or as the
little breeze ruffles the surface, it gives back the sunshine like a
broken mirror. Single shafts of water, spouting upward from between
the forefeet of the sea-horses, fall back into the same basin from
which they rose, curving like the arches of a pergola; yet so steady
is their flow that the tranquillity of the pool is hardly troubled.
Four foam-flecked circles, only, show where the falling water mingles
with the water at rest. Greater peacefulness could not well be given
to any artificial bit of water. Then from the centre of this dreaming
pool there rises a fountain so rich in carving, so beautiful in design
that it seems rather a great and splendid efflorescence than the work
of men’s hands. From its leaf-fringed lower basin there rises a second
and much smaller one, not like another basin but like a corolla within
a corolla, and the flower-like composition terminates in a beautifully
wrought cup resembling the blossom of the campanula. The water gushes
upward from this cup, but not to any height. It falls back at once
over the scalloped edges of the marble, and slipping in and over the
carved foliage of the lower basins finally reaches, in a gentle,
pensive manner, the quiet pool beneath. Sea-horses with tossed
manes and backward curving wings plunge outward from the shelter of
the lower basin. Their tails twine about its stem, and the basin is
close above their heads, but it does not rest upon them; they are free.
It is evident that in one more spring they will be out and away. Yet
they do not take it, and they never will. For once Bernini’s genius
masters his fancy. His fountain is not a fanciful conceit but a rich
and peaceful artistic creation. An enchanter’s wand has checked the
horses in mid-career, and here they remain, motionless, for all their
movement, under the shadow of the leafy basin, part of a beautiful
whole that must never be broken. This is one of those rare compositions
in which the artist has most happily achieved the second essential in a
fountain, that it should be a thing of beauty, a source of delight to
the eye and ear. It is admirably suited to its surroundings, for rich
carving and imaginative sculpture held in subservience to the natural
charm of quiet water, conform exquisitely with a garden where stately
formality enhances the loveliness of wild and simple beauty. The
fountain is of travertine, the natural mellow tone of which has been
rendered even more lovely by centuries of soft Italian weather. It does
not stand out conspicuously in the vista; it detaches itself from the
surrounding trees gently, as if it had grown there among them.
[Illustration: The Fountain of the Sea-Horses.]
On either side of this fountain the ground falls away sharply into
groves of ilex, traversed by natural footpaths. In the gloom of these
wooded spaces there are two other fountains. Great basins catching the
water from tiers of smaller ones in the centre and each surrounded by
a broken circle of curved stone benches. They are the work of Antonio
Vansantio; and, according to drawings by Letarouilly, the back of each
semicircular bench was originally decorated at regular intervals with
statues. Behind these stood a formally clipped box hedge rising some
three feet above the benches, while the larger trees growing behind
the hedge made by their branches a green canopy to this truly charming
bit of garden architecture. Vansantio’s basins and benches are now
in a half-ruined condition, but they are still extremely lovely and
suggest pictures of eighteenth-century garden-parties, where groups
of Watteau’s figures idle away the hours. The fountains are hardly
visible, even at close range. They betray themselves by the sound
of their falling water, which gives to the scene, like the song of
the hermit-thrush, a poignant sense of remoteness and solitude. The
deep shadows and half-hidden waters of Vansantio’s fountains form a
well-conceived contrast to Bernini’s sunlit basins on the slope above.
There are many other fountains in this villa. A large round pool
decorated with a central figure of a nymph, and set about with huge
cactus-filled vases of a shape peculiar to the Villa Borghese, stands
behind the Casino, while at the other end of the gardens the so-called
Fountain of Esculapius fills a shady place with the sound and beauty
of abundant water. This is a beautiful fountain, not because of any
special charm or originality of design in the fountain itself, but
because of its splendid jet of water and the composition of it and
its surroundings. The arch containing the statue of Esculapius stands
on a slight eminence surrounded with tall trees and shadowy foliage.
Beneath and before it, the ground slopes in masses of broken rock and
bowlders, and the fountain, a single round and shallow vase of finished
travertine, stands in the midst of them. The jet of water almost tops
the Arch above the statue, and it falls in great abundance upon the
rocks at its base.
There is also the Fountain of the Amorini--so daintily lovely that the
fact that it is incomplete is hardly noticed. The little Loves still
firmly grasp their frogs and dolphins, but the vase they once carried
on their heads is gone. The moss-grown stone-work of the basin, and
the light and shade of the great ilex trees about it give this little
fountain a peculiar charm. It seems to belong quite consciously to
other days than ours.
There are fountains everywhere in the gardens. They are as common as
the trees and the marbles and the violets. The water seems to play at
will among the lights and shadows, for during three centuries this has
been a Roman pleasure-ground; and to the Roman no pleasure-ground is
worthy the name without the sound and sight of water.
[Illustration]
The Villa Borghese was created by Cardinal Scipione Borghese during
the sixteen years that his uncle held the keys of St. Peter, under
the title of Paul V. The Pope assisted him in every way, for Paul V’s
chief pleasure consisted in advancing and aggrandizing his family.
Marc Antonio Borghese, a second nephew of his, became the founder
of the family in Rome, and Cardinal Scipione had as commanding an
influence over the Pope as had ever been known. Paul V found his model
in Paul III, and so well did he emulate the founder of the Farnese
fortunes that by the close of his pontificate the Borghese had become
the wealthiest and most powerful family that had ever arisen in Rome.
Cardinal Scipione’s annual income alone was one hundred and fifty
thousand scudi--about one hundred and sixty thousand dollars--and Paul
V destroyed the ruins of the Baths of Constantine so as to build for
him what is now called the Rospigliosi Palace. Their habits, charities,
possessions were all but regal. The cardinal endeavored to lessen
the envy which such opulence naturally aroused by a complaisant and
courtly behavior, as well as by benevolence; and he earned for himself
the sobriquet of “the delight of Rome.” This villa he laid out for the
benefit of the people, and it has really existed for them for over
three hundred years. Paul V’s pontificate came to an end in 1621, and
in 1645 Mr. John Evelyn writes in his “Diary” a long account of the
Villa Borghese. The groves and avenues had by that time a generation’s
growth, but the Casino and little temples and the multifarious delights
which enriched them were still in pristine freshness. The taste of the
present day may prefer the gardens as they now are to those of 1645;
they have more of natural beauty and fewer artificial devices, and the
simple fountains are more effective than the spouts of water made to
resemble the shapes of vessels and fruits and the conceit of artificial
rain. Much of the architecture and statuary Evelyn describes has
vanished, but enough remains for the present traveller to recognize the
picture and to feel that he is walking in groves and meadows trodden
by many feet through many years. Since Evelyn’s time eight generations
have also found these pleasure-grounds delightful. As full of memories
as of fragrance, these gardens convey a sense of human life once lived
among them and now forever gone, which is as poignant as the smell of
the boxwood hedges in the hot sunshine.
The Villa Borghese has pre-eminently this subtle quality, and therefore
it has become the loveliest as well as the best beloved of all Roman
villas; and it is precisely because it is a Roman garden that its
memories are so compelling. The men and women who have walked in
these long avenues and lingered about these fountains have been the
aristocracy of mankind. England, France, and Germany come here to
gather memories of their great men. Statues to Goethe and Victor Hugo
are not needed. Hugo and Goethe and many more of these noble ghosts
come back, together with a long line of splendid popes and brilliant
cardinals, to haunt the sun-warmed yet shadowy places, never jostling
or disturbing the living but felt by the living in some strange and
undefinable way.
[Illustration: The Fountain of the Amorini.]
These groves and fountains have been the setting for many scenes in
Life’s dramas. There has been a Napoleonic interlude with dancing,
masquerading, and somewhat boisterous merrymaking; and here, amid the
loveliness of an alien civilization, began the last act in the tragedy
of the Stuart Kings. The son of the exiled James II of England lived
and died in Rome, and his children--Prince Charlie and the little Duke
of York--played beneath these trees, as scores of other brothers of
less fateful history have played before and since.[K] Here they came
every morning with their fowling-pieces. High-spirited English lads,
they made of the Italian groves a Sherwood Forest of their own. It was
a far cry at that time to Culloden, and a long way to the cathedral of
Frascati, where the younger brother was to read the funeral service
over the elder. Time means so little in Rome that here in the villa
where the Stuart Princes played, the “adventure of the ’45” seems to
have happened only yesterday.
The villa is at its loveliest in May and October. On every Thursday and
Sunday of this latter month it used to be the custom for the Prince
Borghese to receive all Rome within his gates. Forty to fifty thousand
people would sometimes come to these garden-parties, all classes
mingling yet preserving their identity with the admirable dignity and
self-respect of the Romans. The young Princess Gwendolin Borghese was
seen for the last time at one of these great fêtes. Her saintly young
spirit adds a breath as of incense to the Borghese gardens, and it
is more easy to think of her presence here than among the ponderous
marbles of the Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore where she lies
buried.
Yet another Princess Borghese has left her memory within these
gates. Canova has portrayed her as Venus Victrix, and she takes her
place among the antique marbles by the right of flawless beauty. The
flesh-and-blood original of Canova’s masterpiece, Pauline Bonaparte,
Princess Borghese, cared but little for her beautiful villa. The ilex
groves were gloomy and the fountains were insignificant compared with
those of Versailles. She wearied of palace, prince, and villa, and
spent as much time as possible with her own kin. It is recorded that
the prince, her husband, was far more jealous of Canova’s statue of his
wife than of his wife’s person. The Princess Pauline Borghese passed
away like a summer cloud, but the Venus Borghese remains.
The personality of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is preserved in the two
magnificent busts still standing in the picture-gallery of the Casino.
It is difficult to believe that such vitality as Bernini has here
portrayed could ever have quite faded from the earth, and surely his
ghost must at times return to these gardens of his creation.
LA BARCACCIA
[Illustration]
LA BARCACCIA
At the foot of the great stone stairway, known in Italian as _La
Scalinata_ and in English as the Spanish Steps, which leads down from
the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti to the Piazza di Spagna lies the
singular fountain called La Barcaccia. The design of this fountain
is that of a quaintly conventionalized boat, fast sinking under the
water which is pouring into it. To this effect it owes its name; for
“barca,” being the Italian for boat, and “accia” a termination of
opprobrium, Barcaccia means a worthless boat. The boat is supposed
to commemorate an event which occurred during the great flood of
1598. On Christmas Day of that year the Tiber rose to its highest
recorded level. All this part of the city was submerged to a depth of
from seventeen to twenty-five feet; and here in the Piazza di Spagna
a boat drifted ashore, grounding on that slope of the Pincian Hill,
which is now covered by the Spanish Steps. For a long time the design
of this fountain was supposed to commemorate this event, and it is
quite possible that this may have been the case. Still there are other
fountains of this design, the work of Carlo Maderno, and as one is in
the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the other in the Villa Aldobrandini,
it is also quite possible that Carlo Maderno and the creator of the
Barcaccia may have had yet another idea when they constructed their
stone boats with a fountain amidships and lying in basins not much
larger than the boats themselves. For the Romans of this time knew much
and surmised still more about the mysterious boats lying at the bottom
of Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, not more than seventeen miles distant
from Rome. These boats had been discovered first during the pontificate
of Pope Eugenius IV, and had been rediscovered in Paul III’s time,
in 1535, or about a hundred years before Carlo Maderno employed this
design for a fountain. At each date an attempt had been made to raise
the boats, but these efforts as well as all subsequent attempts proved
unsuccessful. However, in 1535 measurements had been computed and many
objects belonging to the vessels had been brought to the surface to
excite the wonder and admiration of the Roman world. It was discovered
that the boats when once raised and floated would all but fill the tiny
lake. The decks had been made of concrete and marble, and amidships
there had been fountains whose falling waters mingled with those of the
lake. The mystery surrounding the purpose and construction of those
huge vessels is yet unsolved, but in the seventeenth century it still
stirred men’s imaginations with all the force of fresh discovery. Both
Maderno and Pietro Bernini could not have been ignorant of it, and they
must have seen the exquisite bronzes and lead pipes bearing the stamp
of the Emperor Tiberius which had been detached and brought up from the
sunken vessels.
The Barcaccia fountain is the last work of Pietro Bernini, the father
of Lorenzo. He had been employed to bring a branch of the Trevi Water
from its reservoir at the head of the Vicolo del Bottino as far as
the foot of the Pincian Hill in front of the Trinità de’ Monti, and
the fountain done by order of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644) was the
adequate consummation of that work. From whatever cause he derived
his inspiration, his design of the Barcaccia fountain is so admirably
suited to its position that it explains and almost excuses the popular
idea that the fountain was made low in order not to obscure the view
of the Spanish Steps. A reference to dates at once shows the absurdity
of this last suggestion. In the Keats Memorial House hard by there can
be seen an engraving by Falda (born in 1640) showing Pietro Bernini’s
completed fountain against the background of the tree-planted slope of
the Pincian Hill. The fountain was finished before the death of Pope
Urban VIII, which occurred in 1644, and the steps were not begun until
1721, nine pontificates after that of Urban VIII.
On the prow and stern of the boat is carved the coat of arras of the
Barberini family, for Urban VIII was the Barberini Pope and the founder
of that family in Rome. This pontiff, whose character was a formidable
compound of priest, statesman, warrior, and man of letters, delighted
in the design of the fountain. Pietro Bernini had placed cannon at
either end, thus making his boat into a war-vessel, whereupon Urban
VIII composed a Latin distich in its praise:
“Bellica pontificum non fundit machina flammas,
Sed dulcem, belli qua perit ignis, aquam.”
“_The war-ship of the priest, instead of flames,
Pours water, and the fire of battle tames._”
At both ends of the large basin in which the boat stands are long,
flat pieces of travertine. These are the stepping-stones on which any
one using the fountain stands while dipping up the water. The Marcia
Pia now supplies the houses in this part of the city, but the Romans
still prefer to drink Trevi, and the stepping-stones are as much in use
as they were in the days when Falda and other artists of that period
engraved this fountain, placing in the lower basin figures of men or
women in the act of dipping up the water. This quarter of Rome, once a
part of the Campus Martius of classical days, has been for a long time
given over to the interests of the American and English colonies; but
for more than three centuries its foreign associations were chiefly
French. Urban VIII was in many ways a French Pope, although he came of
a Florentine family. As papal nuncio he had spent many years and made
many powerful friends at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII. In the
conclave which elected him Pope, France openly and ardently supported
his claims. During his residence in France he had known Armand du
Plessis, who was to become Cardinal Richelieu. The two great churchmen
went up the ladder of preferment side by side. They became, as pope and
cardinal minister, respectively, lifelong allies in their tireless and
successful efforts to humble the dual power of Austria and Spain, while
promoting on the one hand the prestige of France and on the other the
stability of the Papal See.
At the accession of Urban VIII, Spain and Austria held the passes of
the Alps, thus dominating Europe and threatening the existence of the
Papal States. At the close of his pontificate, France was rapidly
becoming the first Continental power, and the Papal States had reached
their utmost limit of territorial expansion. With his death the
French influence in papal politics rapidly declined, but its artistic
ascendency still lingered on. Thirteen years later a certain French
gentleman, attached to the French embassy at Rome, and named Etienne
de Guéffier, left in his will a sum of money for the construction of
a great stone stairway which should connect the Piazza of the Trinità
de’ Monti, in the centre of which lay the Barcaccia fountain, with
the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti, standing far above, on the slope
of the Pincian Hill. This gentleman, of whom little is known, must
have been the friend of more than one of the great French artists
who were living in Rome contemporaneously with himself. Possibly the
splendid project of the Scalinata was the result of long hours of
comradeship, when he, with his fellow countrymen, watched the sunset
from the terrace which Sixtus V had placed before the Church on the
Hill, or scrambled down the tree-planted slope before it in order to
reach the fountain at its base. Certain it is that Rome owes this most
distinctive architectural feature of papal times to the imagination and
generosity of a Frenchman. The two Latin inscriptions upon the steps
are worthy of attention.[L]
The building of the steps, begun by Alessandro Specchi and completed
by Francesco de Sanctis, was not undertaken, as appears from the
inscription, till sixty years after the death of De Guéffier and six
pontificates later than that of Alexander VII (Chigi), in which De
Guéffier died. By that time the Spanish influence had reasserted itself
to a marked degree, and as the Spanish embassy had been established in
a palace on the western side of the square, the old name of the Piazza
della Trinità de’ Monti gradually gave way to the present name, Piazza
di Spagna. And so finally the great stone stairway, the gift of a
Frenchman in the heyday of French influence at Rome, came to be known
as the Spanish Steps.
Yet, after all, the paramount association with the fountain of the
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.
The fountain consists of a vast semicircular basin, sunk so far below
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.
In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which
brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more
than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile,
more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. This is
the obelisk which the Emperor Hadrian and his Empress Sabina raised
to the memory of their beloved Antinous--the most beautiful youth
the world has record of--who drowned himself in the Egyptian river,
under the impression that his voluntary death would avert calamity
from his benefactor the Emperor. After all these eighteen hundred
years it is still possible to feel the passion of Hadrian’s grief.
His biographer calls it “feminine”! But the gifted Emperor, lover
of all things beautiful in art and nature, and a student of men and
character, understood the value of his treasure and knew full well
the irreparableness of his loss. He brought back to Rome all that
was left of that beauty--an urnful of ashes--and placed it in the
Emperor’s own tomb, now called the Castle of St. Angelo; and on the
_spina_ of the circus by the tomb, Hadrian and Sabina erected this
obelisk whose hieroglyphics, only quite recently deciphered, relate the
deification of their favorite and give the information concerning his
place of burial. The obelisk must have been removed by a later Emperor,
probably Heliogabalus, for it was found in 1570, near Santa Croce in
Gerusalemme, in the gardens of the Varian family, to which family that
Emperor belonged. Bernini, in the century following its discovery,
moved it to the Barberini Palace, which he was erecting and beautifying
for the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII. Later on, a Princess Barberini
presented it to Pope Pius VI, who set it up in the Giardino della Pigna
in the Vatican, that temporary resting-place for so many treasures, and
finally, in 1822, Pius VII and Valadier erected it where it now stands
in full view of Hadrian’s Tomb, they being quite unconscious, however,
that there was any connection between it and that great mausoleum.
Not far from the fountain of Moses stand two umbrella-pines, their
great boles shooting high up through all the foliage about. A hundred
years ago they marked the exit into a side lane from the vineyard where
they had been planted, for until that time these Gardens of the Pincio
had been for centuries the vineyard belonging to the Augustinian monks
of Santa Maria del Popolo, the same order from which, about 1494, young
Cardinal Farnese bought the property by the Tiber, on which he built
the Farnese Palace.
The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo had been built by the Roman
people in the twelfth century, and from that time on it and the
Augustinian convent beside it became the first hospice and sanctuary
to the pilgrims from beyond the Alps. This was because the church
and convent stand close to the Porta del Popolo, the gateway to the
Flaminian Road, which is the great highway leading to the north.
With these Augustinian monks stayed young Martin Luther when business
connected with that order had brought him to Rome. The German
seminarist who threads his way to-day among the Pincian alleys must
often cross those vanished paths in the vineyard once trodden by the
sandalled feet of his great fellow countryman, since Luther’s northern
feeling for nature would surely have carried him at dawn or sunset
to the convent’s vineyard. There the voices of the birds and the
well-trained vines could soothe a spirit dazed and disquieted by the
splendors and vices of Rome. The history of the German Reformation may
well have had its earliest beginnings in the thoughts which thronged
the mind of that young monk, as he leaned upon the vineyard wall and
gazed with eyes that saw and saw not at the papal city, where old
St. Peter’s--the church in which Charlemagne had been crowned--was
being made over by Bramante into its present form; and beside it the
huge pile of the Vatican housed the fighting Pope, Julius II, and a
hierarchy of utter worldliness.
The monks retained possession of their Pincian vineyard during the
three following centuries, or until 1809, at which time Napoleon
annexed the Papal States to his Empire, banished the recalcitrant Pope,
Pius VII, and set about making Rome over to suit himself. He found
the architect who had worked for Pius VI and Pius VII equally ready
to serve him, and it was to this architect, Giuseppe Valadier, that
Napoleon intrusted the conversion of the old convent vineyard into the
Pincian Gardens of the present day. The work was not begun until 1812,
and before it was finished Pius VII was back in Rome, and Napoleon was
eating out his heart in St. Helena. In that long dying, when this last
of the world’s great conquerors had time to remember even all that he
himself had done, Napoleon must have often thought of Rome. The old
mother who had always believed in him, yet never looked up to him,
still lived there in her sombre palace under the shadow of the Austrian
Legation and the Austrian hate. His favorite sister, Pauline, was a
princess of one of the greatest of the Roman families; and the little
son, who was to grow up as the Austrian Duke of Reichstadt, was still,
to his father, the King of Rome. Did he ever think of the instructions
he had given to Valadier about a public garden for the Romans? There
was time to think of everything as the seasons came and went and the
remote seas washed the crags beneath his feet, while his English
jailers watched him from a distance with hard, uncomprehending eyes.
It is something of a shock to find Napoleon’s bust in that company of
great Italians which Mazzini placed here. In these Pincian Gardens,
as elsewhere in the world, he surely belongs in a niche by himself!
However, the Roman episode was of small importance in his life, and
he would not have grudged the honorable position to Valadier, whose
bust stands alone facing the principal promenade of the Pincian. That
architect lived to welcome back the exiled Pius VII and to finish for
him the gardens begun by order of Napoleon.
One explanation of Rome’s charm may be found in her power of
suggestion. Although the things to be seen in the Eternal City are of
transcendent interest, the things which are only apprehended have a
still stronger hold upon the imagination. The actual loveliness of the
Pincian Gardens is forgotten as the archæologists build up from buried
marbles and scattered inscriptions the life lived here in centuries
gone by. Where now is Valadier’s casino there stood in the second
century of our era a great Roman dwelling, the home of a patrician
family, Christian in faith, its members holding from generation to
generation high offices of state and called by historians “the noblest
of the noble.” The grounds about this house of the Acilii included not
only the present public gardens but also the precincts of the Villa
Medici, the garden and convent of the Sacred Heart, and a part of the
Villa Borghese. It would be impossible to find nowadays in any land
the exact counterpart of this Roman dwelling. Its comfort, splendor
and universal perfection of detail could not be surpassed, perhaps not
equalled. Its artificially heated bathrooms, the cool, dark recesses
of the wine-cellars, the courts and offices and state apartments, the
devices for garden and foundation building, everything which made
up this perfect specimen of the highest domestic civilization the
world has known, has been discovered on the Pincian Hill. The great
buttresses which this private family built to sustain the northwestern
boundaries of their terraced garden still support the public gardens
of to-day, and were incorporated by the Emperor Aurelian into the
great wall with which he surrounded the city. Surely no stories of
the Pincian can ever give so good an idea of the power, solidity, and
grandeur of Rome as do these archæological discoveries, which show
in fullest detail the domestic life of the Roman patrician under the
Antonines. Of all this the northwestern buttresses of the Pincian Hill
and the immortality of Nature alone remain.
Napoleon was only following in the footsteps of another Emperor,
when he created these gardens; for the Emperor Aurelian made the
grounds--which had been the estate of the Acilii--into a public park.
So whether owned by private individuals or by Emperor, church, or
municipality, the Pincian has always been known as the Hill of Gardens;
and the water which now feeds its public fountains is once more the
Acqua Marcia--the same water which supplied the fountains, baths, and
fish-ponds of the great Antonine villa.
FONTANA PAOLA
[Illustration]
FONTANA PAOLA
Throughout Roman history the Janiculum has suffered many alternations
of peace idyllic and of sanguinary strife, for it is a natural garden,
and it is also the key to Rome. Whoever can hold the terraces of San
Pietro in Montorio and the heights to the north and south has the
city at his mercy. At the present day the Villa Pamphili-Doria and
the Villa Garibaldi crown its summit, and stretch downward toward
the west, and its southeastern slope, leading toward the Tiber, once
contained the gardens of Julius Cæsar--those gardens where he received
Cleopatra and which he left by his will to the Roman people. One of the
earliest chapters in Roman history tells how Lars Porsena came over
the Janiculum to reinstate the Tarquins, and one of the latest recounts
the struggle carried on across its heights and terraces in Garibaldi’s
defense of the Mazzinian Roman Republic. Like the gardens of Ischia and
the vineyards on Vesuvius, which are forever threatened by earthquake
or eruption, the Janiculum villas will have, so long as war lasts, a
precarious existence; but with villas, gardens, and vineyards, so great
is the fertility of the soil and so enchanting the prospect, while the
world endures men will take the risk.
The water for this part of the city was brought to Rome by the Emperors
Augustus and Trajan. Trajan built the aqueduct bearing his name;
and this aqueduct, like that of the Virgo, has, in spite of many
vicissitudes continued to supply Rome with a varying quantity of water
from that time until the present day. The Emperor brought the water
thirty-five miles from Lake Bracciano to the Janiculum. It was almost
the last water brought to Rome and entered the city at the level of
two hundred and three feet above the sea. The first water (the Appian)
had entered Rome fifty feet under ground. Trajan used the water from
the springs about Lake Bracciano, not from the lake itself, because
the spring-water was much purer and the ancient Romans were fastidious
in the water they used. Alsietina water, for instance, brought to Rome
by Augustus, was considered fit only for baths and the _naumachiæ_;
and Frontinus says that, as a matter of fact, the water was intended
for that purpose only and for the irrigation of the gardens across
the Tiber. Christian Rome was far from being so particular, and its
inhabitants drank Tiber water as late as Michelangelo’s time. During
the “Golden days of the Renaissance in Rome” Virgo water, which was to
be had intermittently from the Trevi fountain, and a remnant of this
Acqua Traiana still flowing in the fountain of Innocent VIII were the
only pure waters. Meantime many Romans of that period preferred the
Tiber water; and Petrarch coming to Rome gave special instructions
to a friend to have a quantity of Tiber water which had stood for a
day or two, to settle, ready for his use. Paul III took with him, on
his journey to Nice to meet the Emperor Charles V and King Francis
I of France, a supply of Tiber water, so that he might not miss his
customary beverage! When, therefore, Pope Paul V bethought him of
reconstructing the Trajan Aqueduct he had nothing to hinder him from
collecting the water from every available source. He used Trajan water
from the springs, water from Lake Bracciano, and water from Lake
Alsietina as well. By this means the united water now called the Acqua
Paola, although not so pure as the former Acqua Traiana, is yet good
enough, and it forms a supply of magnificent quantity and force. Paul
V’s intention was to surpass the Acqua Felice, brought to Rome some
twenty years previously by Sixtus V. No one could forget Sixtus V and
the Acqua Felice. Was not the water always before men’s eyes as it
gushed out of the great fountain of Moses on the side of the Viminal
Hill; and did not every Roman know that Cavaliere Domenico Fontana had
brought it there by order of Sixtus V? The Borghese pontiff determined
to erect another fountain, across the Tiber, on the Janiculum, which
was a still more commanding position, and to build another aqueduct
for Rome, so that there should be an Acqua Paola as well as an Acqua
Felice, and men should remember Paul V even as they remembered Sixtus V.
Domenico Fontana had just died in Naples, rich and honored by the
Neapolitans, but there were others at hand of that renowned family of
architects. Fontana’s elder brother Giovanni was still alive, and had
great skill in hydraulics; and Carlo Maderno, his nephew, was also
to be had. So in 1611 Paul V employed these two to build his great
fountain on the Janiculum. This fountain is made of travertine, adorned
with six Ionic columns of red granite taken from the Temple of Minerva
in the Forum Transitorium. Other portions of the same beautiful ruin
were sawed into slabs and used in the decoration of the fountain.
The design is that of a church façade in the style of the florid and
debased Renaissance. It consists of five arches, three colossal ones in
the middle, directly under the great inscription which they support,
and on each side smaller arches. The three centre cascades fall into
a huge semicircular basin, which is sunk into the ground, while the
arches on the side have small individual basins in which to receive the
water. The inscription, which is a magnificent example of Renaissance
caligraphy, gives the history of the Paola Aqueduct and the pontifical
dates. A smaller inscription describes the final completion of the
fountain under Alexander VIII.
PAVLVS · QVINTVS · PONTIFEX · MAXIMVS
AQVAM · IN · AGRO · BRACCIANENSI
SALVBERRIMIS · E · FONTIBVS · COLLECTAM
VETERIBVS · AQVAE · ALSIETINAE · DVCTIBVS · RESTITVTIS
NOVISQVE · ADDITIS
XXXV · AB · MILLIARIO · DVXIT
ANNO · DOMINI · MDCXII · PONTIFICATVS · SVI · SEPTIMO
ALEXANDER · VIII · OTTHOBONVS · VENETVS · P · M
PAVLI · V · P · PROVIDENTISSIMI · PONT · BENEFICIVM
TVTATVS
REPVRGATO · SPECV · NOVISQVE · FONTIBVS · INDVCTIS
RIVOS · SVIS · QVEMQVE · LABRIS · OLIM · ANGVSTE
CONTENTOS
VNICO · EODEMQVE · PERAMPIO · LACV · EXCITATO · RECEPIT
AREAM · ADVERSVS · LABEM · MONTIS · SVBSTRVXIT
ET · LAPIDEO · MARGINE · TERMINAVIT · ORNAVITQVE
ANNO · SALVTIS · MDCLXXXX · PONTIFICATVS · SVI
SECVND...
_This water, drawn from the purest of springs, in the neighborhood of
Bracciano, was conducted by Pope Paul the fifth, thirty-five miles from
its source, over ancient channels of the Alsietine aqueduct, which he
restored, and new ones, which he added._
_In the year of the Lord 1612, and of Paul’s Pontificate the seventh._
_Pope Alexander the eighth, Ottoboni, of Venice, in protection of
the beneficent work of that most far-sighted pontiff, Paul the
fifth, recleaned the channel, admitted water from new sources, and
constructed a single capacious reservoir for the common reception of
the several streams which had formerly been strictly confined each to
its own channel. To prevent the wearing away of the hill, he paved the
surrounding area, surrounding and beautifying it with a marble coping.
In the year of Salvation 1690, and of Alexander’s pontificate the
second._
* * * * *
The Borghese griffins and eagles compose the decoration of the mostra,
and the whole structure is surmounted by the papal insignia and the
arms of Paul V, the escutcheon being guarded by two angels.
In Maggi’s book on the fountains of Rome, printed in 1618, there
is an engraving of this fountain. It is represented as having four
griffins and two eagles spouting water into the basins as do the lions
in Sixtus V’s Fountain of the Moses. This device is not shown in
Falda’s engraving a generation later, nor does Piranesi show it. It
is probable that this feature existed only on paper in the original
design for the fountain. Under the two side niches of the actual
fountain the water spouts from lions’ mouths. From the three centre
niches it simply pours in three cascades, equal in size, and of really
magnificent force and volume. The effect of this water in full sunshine
is dazzling in the extreme, and both in sight and sound the fountain
must have been as conspicuous as Paul V could have wished it to be.
Paul V never saw it completed, for he died in 1621, ten years after
the fountain was begun. It was finished by Alexander VIII in 1690,
eight pontificates later. It was, therefore, seventy-eight years in
building, whereas Domenico Fontana built and unveiled the Fountain
of the Moses for Sixtus V within that Pope’s own pontificate, which
lasted only five years! The Fontana Paola is--to translate sight into
sound--an echo of the Fountain of the Moses. It has the characteristics
of an echo--it is magnified and meaningless. Giovanni Fontana and
Maderno could not free themselves from the taste and traditions of the
greater and more forceful Domenico. They did not mar the effect of
their great fountain by an absurd colossus, like the Moses, but they
made a mistake of another kind; they left the central niche above the
cascade absolutely empty, yet failed to secure an adequate background
for the eye to rest upon, so that the structure, for all its size and
magnificence, gives a disagreeable sense of vacancy and incompleteness.
However, as one studies the Fontanone, as this fountain is commonly
called, it becomes apparent that its mostra must be regarded not as a
façade, nor as a screen, but as a great water-gate. It is a triumphal
arch through which the water of the Pauline Aqueduct makes its formal
entry on the Janiculum in the sight of all Rome. It is also built to
hold before the eyes of all Rome the inscription which sets forth
the history of Pope Paul V and the construction of the aqueduct. The
inscription is certainly the most successful part of the mostra. It is
adequately supported, its dimensions are noble, and the lettering is
remarkably beautiful. The entrance of the water, on the other hand,
is not sufficiently imposing. The three streams are not great enough
in themselves to justify their right to so pretentious a setting, and
they require a background which would augment their importance. Through
the huge arches, which were certainly never intended to hold statuary,
the eye should see the approach of the water either in a series of
cascades or in one broad flood like the serried ranks of a great army.
But to produce this effect it would be necessary for the channel of
the aqueduct to approach the fountain directly from the rear and to
have the castellum or receiving tank immediately behind the mostra.
It is noticeable that neither in this fountain nor in the other two
great fountains of Rome--the Moses and the Trevi--is this done. In all
three the castellum is at the side of the mostra, and the water falls
into the basins at a right angle to the direction in which it enters
the fountain from the castellum. This position of the castellum was
obligatory in the case of Trevi, as that fountain backs against the
Poli Palace, but when the Moses and Paola fountains were constructed
they stood free from all other buildings on open hillsides, and the
castellum in either instance could be located at will. In the Paola
fountain the castellum lies to the left of the mostra, as it faces the
city, and the aqueduct comes underground down the hill forming the
boundary between the gardens now belonging to the Villa Chiaraviglio,
which is a part of the American Academy, and a small villa owned by
the Torlonia family, so that the stream approaches the fountain
obliquely. The ground directly back of the Paola fountain is occupied
by a modern villa with a small garden, and the entrance to the house as
well as the trees in the garden are clearly seen through the arches of
the mostra, which thus has more or less the appearance from the front
of a huge screen before a shrine of no signification, while the view
of it in profile is too thin. The entire fountain seems to require
a solid background such as Giovanni Fontana gave to his truly noble
and beautiful fountain of the Ponte Sisto. There the immense niche is
placed against a massive wall, and the gloom of the vaulted space is
lighted by a gleaming cascade which issues not at the base of the niche
but high up in the very spring of the arch. This cascade falls into
a projecting vase, also near the roof, and thence descends in heavy
spray to the black pool beneath. On either side this pool jets of water
spouting from the Borghese griffins cross like flashing rapiers--a
natural enough fancy to an artist living in an age when the thrust and
parry of the rapier were known to all men. This most artistic of all
the Fontana fountains was also erected for Paul V. It used to stand on
the other side of the Tiber, opposite the Strada Giulia, but in recent
years, when the Tiber embankment was constructed, the fountain was
taken down and set up in its present position at the head of the Ponte
Sisto. If the waters of the Fontanone had received some such treatment
as this, Paul V’s greatest fountain might have indeed rivalled those of
ancient Rome.
Paul V (Borghese), surnamed by the friends of the Aldobrandini “the
Grand Ingrate,” succeeded to the papacy in 1605. His immediate
predecessor had been the Medici pontiff, Leo XI, but Leo died
twenty-six days after his election, so that Paul V’s real forerunner
was Clement VIII (Aldobrandini).
[Illustration: Mostra of the “Fontanone.”]
The Borghese family came originally from Siena. When the Spaniard took
that heroic and beautiful city, Philip II handed her over to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany, and many Sienese families emigrated, rather than
submit to the rule of the Medici. Camillo Borghese, the father of Paul
V, emigrated to Rome, where his son Camillo, the future pontiff, was
born. This was in 1552, Julius III being then Pope. Camillo’s career
began in the law, as has been the case with so many of those who have
risen to the See of St. Peter. He studied in Perugia and Padua; was
sent on a mission to Spain, and, proving successful there, was given
the Red Hat in 1596 by Clement VIII, he being at that time forty-four
years of age. Living as cardinal, quietly and unobtrusively among his
books and documents, he had seemed to Peter Aldobrandini, who was the
all-powerful nephew of Clement VIII, the very man to carry on Clement’s
steady policy of restoring the French influence at Rome and of keeping
his own family in power. The Aldobrandini had left Florence from hatred
of the Medici, as the Borghese had left Siena, and Peter felt that in
the case of Camillo Borghese he could rely upon feelings similar to his
own to back up the coalition of himself and France against Spain. With
the premature death of Leo XI all the complicated machinery of the
conclave had had to be put in motion once again, and in this second
conclave the nephew of Clement VIII was the most powerful of the forces
at work. He threw his influence for Cardinal Borghese, and Paul V
undoubtedly owed his election to that fact. Peter Aldobrandini had been
a very great papal nephew, indeed, and he expected from the Borghese
pontiff a proper recognition of his services. Even with the keenest
sense of humor in the world, Cardinal Aldobrandini would have found it
hard not to feel resentment when he learned that Cardinal Borghese,
now Paul V, considered his unsought-for election to the papal chair
entirely due to the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, and that
in consequence he owed nothing whatever to earthly aid. It was because
Paul V carried this idea so far on the one hand, and on the other
poured such lavish favors upon his own kin, that he won for himself the
name of “the Grand Ingrate.” Looking upon himself as divinely appointed
in a marked and special degree, the quiet, unassuming cardinal became
the opinionated and inflexible pontiff. He administered the papal
power, temporal and spiritual, with the arrogance of a despot, the
intolerance of an inquisitor, and the formality of the jurist. During
the sixteen years of his pontificate he succeeded in rousing bitter
hostility on all sides. The aged Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had lived
through nine pontificates and had known both Sixtus V and Clement VIII,
complained that this Pope judged of the world as he would of one of
the towns belonging to the papal territory where everything was done
according to the letter of the law, and went on to say that in this
respect there would soon have to be a change. The year before his
election the gunpowder plot had fanned England into a white heat of
patriotism, and a new oath of allegiance was required by Parliament.
Paul V was the Pope who forbade the English Catholics to take it. He
also was the Pope who so mishandled the Gallican Church that he forced
the States General of 1614 to declare that the King of France held
his power from God alone; and, finally, it was Paul V who spent the
first two years of his pontificate in such a quarrel with Venice as
threatened to involve all Christendom. The Republic so unflinchingly
endured excommunication and interdict that the Pope even thought of
subduing her by arms. He was brought to his senses only by the fear
that Venice in her extremity might call Protestant powers to her aid
and thus bring confusion and disaster not only upon Italy but upon all
Catholic countries. In this grave crisis France took it upon herself to
mediate, and the dispute was finally settled, but with little honor to
the papacy. It was a Venetian ambassador who has recorded of Clement
VIII that when he found he could not reform Florence without great
trouble he reformed his own mind. But Paul V did not, like the wise
Clement VIII, “look to his predecessors” when in difficulties. Paul
V had certainly no cause to love the Venetians, and it is one of the
quaint tricks of history that his magnificent fountain on the Janiculum
was at last finished by a Venetian Pope.
Although the Fontanone was built in the seventeenth century, its
most interesting associations are connected with modern Rome. It is
pre-eminently the fountain of the Risorgimento, for the last stand in
Garibaldi’s three months’ defense of the Roman Republic was made upon
the terraces surrounding this water, and it was just above here that
the worst fighting occurred.
The second stage of the siege consisted of the nine days’ defense of
the Aurelian wall, behind which Garibaldi was intrenched.
This bit of wall runs northwest and southeast on the eastern slope of
the hill, and within the walls of Pope Urban VIII. At its northern
end it is at about an equal distance from the Fontanone and the
Porta San Pancrazio. When this defense broke down, the French troops
entered the city through a breach in the Urban walls to the southwest
of the fountain. The narrow lane leading from this point to Porta
San Pancrazio was soon choked with the dead and dying. The Italians
and French fought hand to hand in the darkness, along the road in
front of the Villa Aurelia, that road which is to-day so quiet and so
clean! During the previous eight days bursting shells from the French
batteries erected on the walls and near the Villa Corsini and the
Convent of San Pancrazio had wrought far-reaching havoc.
The Church of San Pietro in Montorio was used by Garibaldi as a
hospital, but its roof had collapsed, and on the slopes above it all
the great villas were in ruins. To the northwest of the fountain,
just above the Porta San Pancrazio, the Villa Savorelli (now the
Villa Aurelia and the present home of the American Academy) stood up
against the sky, a mere shell of blackened walls. Outside the porta,
the Vascello lay in masses of crumbled masonry, although Medici still
held it for Garibaldi. Farther up the hill, over the spot now occupied
by the triumphal arch, towered the remains of the magnificent Villa
Corsini; before it the body of Masina, still lying where the young
lancer had fallen after his last wild charge up the villa steps. Amid
the general devastation the Fontanone stood unscathed. Its splendid
stream of water flowed unpolluted, and it fulfilled the noblest
functions of a fountain during the heat and carnage of that Roman June.
To those who are familiar with the story of the heroic “Defense” a
visit to Paul V’s great fountain on the Janiculum is not a bit of
sight-seeing--it has become a pilgrimage.
MONTE CAVALLO
[Illustration]
MONTE CAVALLO
The fountain of the Monte Cavallo is overshadowed both literally and
figuratively by the size and importance of the objects which surround
it. Without it the obelisk, which forms its background, and the great
groups of the Dioscuri, which flank it on either side, would be
sufficiently imposing and significant, either separately or together,
to form the central decoration of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, or of
any piazza in any city; but the fountain is not entirely superfluous.
Its magnificent jet of water, thrown upward between the heads of the
rearing horses and swept hither and thither at the will of the wind,
binds together the otherwise disjointed and inharmonious group.
This fountain is not the first one to be erected on Monte Cavallo,
but the first fountain was as subservient as the present one to the
colossal groups which have given the name “Cavallo” to this entire
district. The Dioscuri were once a part of a kind of open-air museum
which, during the earliest days of the papacy, existed on the slope
of the Quirinal Hill. Gregory XIII had them removed to the Capitol,
but when Sixtus V had purchased from the heirs of Cardinal Caraffa the
site and the partly erected buildings of the Quirinal, he brought them
back again and subjected them to a thorough restoration, using for this
purpose the material from the base of one of them.
There has existed a villa on this spot antedating Pope Sixtus V’s time
by many years. It had been called the Villa d’Este, but it should not
be confused with the Villa d’Este, at Tivoli, although it was built by
the same Cardinal Ippolito of that family.
Sixtus V was extremely fond of this portion of the city and with
Fontana’s assistance he created the magnificent palace and surroundings
which ever since his day have been associated with sovereign power in
Rome. Fontana enlarged the piazza before the palace in order to make it
“commodious for consistories,” and he also lowered the grade in order
to bring hither the Acqua Felice.
There must have been many discussions between Pope Sixtus V and his
architect with regard to the fountain on the Quirinal. Everything
that Sixtus V did he did thoroughly and magnificently, and it was
quite natural that he should desire a splendid fountain before his own
palace, considering that it was he himself who had made it possible,
by the introduction of the Acqua Felice, to have a fountain in that
place at all. A rare old engraving shows that the fountain, as at first
planned, resembled the Fountain of the Moses. In it the Dioscuri occupy
the niches as does the Moses in the fountain on the Viminal. This plan
was happily abandoned. The great classic figures were erected as they
stand to-day in front of the palace, and Fontana placed between the two
groups, in the same position as the fountain of the present day, the
conventional large basin and central vase which is to be seen in the
old engravings of the seventeenth century. It was certainly neither a
very original nor a very interesting design and it must have relied
for its effect entirely upon the copious supply of water which was
described by Evelyn in 1644 as “two great rivers.”
It is difficult to say when this old fountain of Fontana’s disappeared.
It was probably removed either at the time when Antinori erected the
obelisk for Pius VI or in the following pontificate when the same
architect suggested to Pius VII the idea of replacing it by the present
granite basin. This basin had stood since 1594 in the Campo Vaccino,
the mediæval name for the ruins of the Roman Forum. It had been placed
there during the pontificate of Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) by the city
magistrates on a piece of ground given to them by Cardinal Farnese,
near the three columns of Castor and Pollux and the Church of S.
Maria Liberatrice. They had provided a high travertine base for it,
and it was fed from three jets of the Acqua Felice, which, some eight
or nine years previously, had been brought to Rome by Sixtus V. The
basin was used as a watering-trough for cattle, and by the time Pius
VII rescued it the travertine base had entirely disappeared under the
gradually rising level of the Campo Vaccino--that strange composite
mass of rubbish, earth, and ruins which, up to the second half of the
nineteenth century, covered the old Forum floor to a depth of more than
twenty feet. The basin measures twenty-three metres in circumference,
and when it was thus sunk in the ground it became a pleasant pool
through which the carters walked their horses to refresh them on a warm
and dusty day. The removal of this basin was actually accomplished in
1818, when the architect Raphael Stern (who built for Pius VII the
Bracchio Nuovo) designed the present fountain of Monte Cavallo. He sank
the basin in the pavement between the horse-tamers and erected in the
middle of it a second basin which rests upon a travertine base. The
water of the fountain rises in a copious jet from the centre of the
second basin to a height somewhat below the heads of the horses and,
returning on itself, falls in a generous overflow into the lower basin.
[Illustration: The Fountain of Monte Cavallo.]
To some, the chief interest of this composite group of obelisk,
statuary, and fountain centres in this lower basin, for it is none
other than the granite tazza into which Marforio once poured the water
from his urn, far, far back in the days of Charlemagne, and no one
knows for how many years before that.
The obelisk which forms the centre of this group of antiquities now
clustered together in the Monte Cavallo is one of a pair which flanked
the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Its mate was erected by
Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana near the Church of S. Maria Maggiore.
Pius VI and Pius VII were the two Popes whose pontificates coincide
with the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests.
Their unhappy stories are bound up with the history of the Quirinal
Palace, which fronts upon the Monte Cavallo; and they form a pitiful
contrast to the life of that masterful old Pontiff Sixtus V, in
whose reign the history of the palace and the modern piazza begins.
Sixtus, having destroyed, for no reason now known, the old mediæval
papal palace of the Lateran, decided to rebuild it to suit himself,
but found, as the new building progressed, that it was too cold and
uncomfortable for a residence. So the Lateran, which had been the
papal palace since the seventh century, holding its own against the
magnificence and enormous size of the Vatican, was gradually abandoned
as a residence, and Sixtus established himself in the Quirinal.
Sixtus V, for all his detestation of classic statuary, must have shared
with his people the profound respect and admiration always aroused by
the Dioscuri. These colossal groups were among the few rare works of
antiquity which were cherished by the semi-barbarous Romans of the
Middle Ages, and the web of fable spun about them during those dark
years proves the hold they had over the superstitious imagination of
the times. “Nothing is beyond question” about them, says Lanciani,
except that they once adorned the temple which the Emperor Aurelian
built to the sun on his return from the conquest of Palmyra in 272.
This most magnificent of all Roman temples, to quote the same great
modern authority, became a quarry for building materials, even as early
as the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian is said to have taken some
porphyry columns from it to adorn the Church of St. Sophia in his new
capital of Constantinople. The Dioscuri must have been discovered later
in the Baths of Constantine. The relative positions of the horses and
their tamers were ascertained from antique coins. Modern authorities
are of the opinion that they are Roman copies of Greek originals, and
they are counted among the great inheritances from imperial Rome.
It is curious to trace the working of the mediæval intelligence,
groping its way through mysticism and allegory to find some
explanation for the undeniable impression made by these heroic figures
upon the minds of all who behold them. The attempt to read into them
some abstruse ethical meaning was abandoned long ago, and the world of
to-day accepts the Dioscuri frankly for what they are, admiring, with
a wonder not unmixed with despair, the unreclaimable art of ancient
Greece.
“Ye too marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo
Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,
Stand with upstretched arms and tranquil, regardant faces,
Stand as instinct with life, in the might of immutable manhood--
Oh, ye mighty and strange--ye ancient divine ones of Hellas!”
Whatever may have been the lot of the Dioscuri in the unaccounted-for
days of the past, since Sixtus V placed them here they have been in
the very thick of Roman political life. Around and about them have
surged some of the worst mobs of modern Roman history; and under their
“tranquil, regardant faces” crowds of peaceful, expectant citizens
have gathered from time to time during the last two centuries of papal
government. Here they have waited during papal elections to watch for
the smoke from the chimney of the Quirinal which should indicate to the
outside world that no choice had yet been made by the Conclave, since
the cardinals were burning the ballots. Here they have received the
blessing of the newly elected Pope, which was given from the balcony of
the window over the entrance.
Sixtus V died in the Quirinal Palace. His pontificate had lasted but
five years, and it remains to this day one of the most memorable
periods in the development and power of Rome. Never had Pope done
more for his people; yet, when he came to die, the Romans had
already forgotten the benefits of his pontificate and remembered
only the severities. They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was
dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener’s
son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman
mind--superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors
drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to
have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the
silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff
drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the
Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince
of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had
made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus! It was well that he could not know how
the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him!
Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal,
came in 1840 that extraordinary funeral cortège which carried the body
of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese
chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 30,
by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the
priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the
three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S.
Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning
carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman
poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses
but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon
the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession
reached Monte Cavallo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony
over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the
beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there
has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and
benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince
Borghese wished to know the names of those who had drawn the funeral
car, he was only told that they were Romans!
Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their
tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army.
They entered the Quirinal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the
temporal power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply
with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and
brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.
Rome was metamorphosed into a republic, but this obscuration of the
papal power was only temporary. When Pius VI died, at Valence, in
August, 1799, the cardinals held their Conclave at Venice, and on March
14, 1804, elected Pius VII (Chiaramonti, 1804–1823), who returned to
Rome the following July. This was the Pope who, after many misgivings,
consented to crown Napoleon. Five years later, when the Emperor
proceeded to annex the Papal States to his empire, this was the Pope
who excommunicated him.
Few of St. Peter’s successors have been called upon to suffer and
to dare more than the good and gentle Pius VII. His Italian nature
comprehended to an unusual degree the strange character of Napoleon,
enduring with perfect composure the Emperor’s outbursts of histrionic
rage, and daring to bring him back to business by the single word,
“comedian.” He braved no less calmly Napoleon’s genuine anger at the
bull of excommunication, and refused to cancel it. Consequently, on the
night of July 5, 1809, the Emperor’s soldiers broke into the Quirinal
and took the Pope prisoner. For a moment, standing under the stars
which looked down upon Monte Cavallo, Pius VII blessed his sleeping
city, and then was hurried away from Rome to that wandering exile,
depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, which was only brought
to an end by Napoleon’s fall. Then the States of the Church were
restored to the papacy, and the Quirinal Palace once more received the
aged pontiff.
In the quiet sunset of his days, which outlasted by two years the
life of the great conqueror, the Pope had time to erect the fountain
of Monte Cavallo, and to begin or continue the architectural and
archæological projects connected with his name.
In that brief halcyon period immediately following Pius IX’s election
to the Holy See, in 1846, the Quirinal Palace and the Monte Cavallo
were in a state of unwonted and constant activity. Pius played with
all his heart the rôle of the liberal Pope, both he and the Romans
mistaking his amiable disposition for liberal political convictions.
Day after day the Romans thronged the space before the palace, waiting
for their idol, who was sure to appear some time on the balcony over
the entrance. Standing there in his white robe, his dark eyes glowing
with sympathetic emotion, he would bless the people with uplifted hand
and in the most moving and beautiful of voices. If the hour was late,
he might add the injunction to go home to bed! The attitude of the Pope
and people at this time is epitomized in the story of the ragged little
boy who one day found himself in the Quirinal Gardens face to face with
the Holy Father. Dazed and enraptured, he poured forth the pitiful
tale of his hardships to the handsome and compassionate countenance
bending over him, and the wonderful voice comforted him with promises
of redress--promises which both pontiff and child believed in
passionately.
There is about this period of Pius IX’s life, with its visits to the
prisons, its charities and public appearances, a strange atmosphere of
unreality. A factitious glamour blinded the popular mind, and the Pope
lived upon pious and ideal illusions--as Marie Antoinette had played at
simplicity and a return to Nature on the eve of the Revolution.
When the golden charm was broken by the outbreak of the Revolution in
Palermo and the murder of Pellegrino Rossi in Rome, the frightened
pontiff, turning from an angry people, whom in the nature of things
he could not possibly satisfy, appealed to the most reactionary of
all the Italian powers, the King of Naples, or “Bomba.” Then the
Quirinal witnessed the last act which the papacy was to play within
its precincts. The Pope and one attendant escaped from the palace by
a small side door in the garden wall and fled across the frontier to
Gaeta, on Neapolitan territory. He carried with him the pyx which
Pius VII had carried when he also had quitted the Quirinal in haste
thirty-nine years before; but, unlike Pius VII, Pius IX never returned
thither. When he came back to Rome the Vatican received him.
The Quirinal, the third one of the papal palaces, has become a symbol
of the actual sovereignty of Rome, and, in 1871, it passed with the
temporal power from Pope Pius IX to Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy.
The cardinals’ coaches no longer drive about the fountain of Pius VII.
The consistories are held in the Vatican; and on the Monte Cavallo the
Bersaglieri have superseded the papal Zouaves. Over the Quirinal the
pontifical yellow and white has given way to the green and white and
red of United Italy. “Old things are passed away. Behold, all things
have become new”--once again in the city of eternal change.
[Illustration]
APPENDIX
INSCRIPTIONS IN PIAZZA DI SPAGNA ON THE SPANISH STEPS
I
D. O. M.
MAGNIFICAM HANC SPECTATOR QVAM MIRARIS SCALAM
VT COMMODAM AC ORNAMENTVM NON EXIGVVM
REGIO COENOBIO IPSIQ. VRBI ALLATVRAM
ANIMO CONCEPIT LEGATAQ. SVPREMIS IN TABVLIS PECVNIA
VNDE SVMPTVS SVPPEDITARENTVR CONSTRVI MANDAVIT
NOBILIS GALLVS STEPHANVS GVEFFIER
QVI REGIO IN MINISTERIO DIV PLVRES APVD PONTIFICES
ALIOSQVE SVBLIMES PRINCIPES EGREGIE VERSATVS
ROMAE VIVERE DESIIT XXX. IVNII MDCLXI.
OPVS AVTEM VARIO RERVM INTERVENTV
PRIMVM SVB CLEMENTE XI
CVM MVLTI PROPONERENTVR MODVLI ET FORMAE
IN DELIBERATIONE POSITVM
DEINDE SVB INNOCENTIO XIII. STABILITVM
ET R. P. BERTRANDI MONSINAT TOLOSATIS
ORD. MINIMORVM S. FRANCISCI DE PAVLA CORRECTORIS GENLIS
FIDEI CVRAEQ. COMMISSVM AC INCHOATVM
TANDEM BENEDICTO XIII FELICITER SEDENTE
CONFECTVM ABSOLVTVMQVE EST
ANNO JVBILEI MDCCXXV
II
D. O. M.
SEDENTE BENEDICTO XIII
PONT. MAX.
LUDOVICO XV
IN GALLIIS REGNANTE
EIVSQ. APVD SANCTAM SEDEM
NEGOTIIS PRÆPOSITO
MELCHIORE S. R. ECCLESIÆ
CARDINALI DE POLIGNAC
ARCHIEPISCOPO AVSCITANO
AD SACRÆ ÆDIS ALMÆQVE VRBIS
ORNAMENTVM
AC CIVIVM COMMODVM
MARMOREA SCALA
DIGNO TANTIS AVSPICIIS OPERE
ABSOLVTA
ANNO DOMINI MDCCXXV
TRANSLATION OF ABOVE
I
O spectator, this magnificent stairway which you gaze at in wonder,
that it might afford convenience and no small ornament to the city,
the noble Frenchman Etienne Guéffier conceived in his mind, and, money
having been left in his will whence to defray expenses, ordered it to
be built. He conducted himself with distinction in the service of the
King at the courts of several pontiffs and other sublime princes, and
died in Rome the thirtieth of June, 1661.
The work, however, was interrupted by a variety of things, and first
in the reign of Clement XI there were placed before a council many
plans and designs. It was decided upon under Clement XI, and, being
intrusted to the faithful care of the Reverend Father Bertrand Monsinat
of Toulouse, corrector generalis of the lesser order of St. Francis de
Paul, was begun, and finally, Benedict XIII blessedly seated upon the
papal chair, was brought to an end in the year of jubilee, 1725.
II
Benedict XIII sitting in the papal chair as Pontifex Maximus; Louis XV
reigning in France; Melchior de Polignac, Cardinal of the Holy Roman
Church, and Archbishop of Aquitaine, being his minister at the sacred
see; these marble steps, in a manner worthy of such auspices, for the
ornamentation of the sacred temple (the church above) and the beloved
city, and for the convenience of the citizens, were completed in the
year of our Lord, 1725.
FOOTNOTES
[A] The Queen’s palace was in the rear of Raphael’s house and faced the
Borgo Vecchio. Opposite to it was the palace of Cesare Borgia.
[B] Sixtus V was severely criticised for substituting his own arms
for those of his predecessor, Gregory XIII, in the Quirinal Palace,
and after Sixtus’s death the Boncompagni arms were restored to their
original place.
[C] “Ounce” was a mediæval measurement of running water, of which there
were once as many varieties in Italy as there were provinces. Some of
these are still in use. The Roman _oncia d’acqua_, or ounce of water,
was practically equivalent to four times the quantity of water known as
the California “miner’s inch.” This “miner’s inch” amounts to something
like sixteen thousand gallons in twenty-four hours, and therefore the
grant of two Roman “ounces” gave the Colonna the right to draw from
the Fountain of Trevi eight times that amount, or one hundred and
twenty-eight thousand gallons every twenty-four hours.
[D] One of Vignola’s early plans for the Villa Giulia has lately
come to light. It shows the main structure much as it is, but with a
large wing to left and right, and a long garden running down either
side of the central court behind each wing. There are also other
differentiations, and it is evident the plan must have entailed a
larger and more expensive building than that which was finally erected.
The plan measures four by five feet and is beautifully prepared. It is
now in the possession of Mr. Lawrence Grant White, of New York.
[E] This cardinal became Pope Marcellus, for whom Palestrina is said to
have written the Mass of Pope Marcellus.
[F] A curious story related by Wraxall (“Memoirs,” vol. I, p. 183)
shows that the Villa Giulia in its eighteenth century period of
isolation and decay proved a convenient shelter for secret crimes
committed by persons of exalted rank.
[G] The ornamental detail of the “Sixtine lion” looks as if this
fountain, like the Tartarughe, had been finished in the pontificate
following Gregory XIII’s--that is, in the pontificate of Sixtus V.
[H] The fate of the Roman obelisks presents one of the most baffling
and fascinating problems of archæology. As no satisfactory explanation
of their overthrow and mutilation has ever been given, possibly the
theory that they were destroyed by the Romans of the Dark Ages, in
search of bronze, is as good a working hypothesis as any other. The
idea that they were wrecked by barbarians, and the assumption that they
were thrown down by earthquakes are equally untenable. Much curious
evidence goes to show that some of the principal obelisks were standing
in the sixth and seventh centuries. One stood erect on its pedestal in
Charlemagne’s time, while the fall of another can be placed as late as
the tenth or eleventh century. Three of the principal obelisks show
holes drilled in the shaft for the insertion of levers or crowbars, and
have unmistakable marks of fire about the pedestal. Now, the Romans
generally re-erected the obelisk, not directly upon its pedestal, but
upon bronze crabs (as in the obelisk of the Vatican) or upon brass
“dice” (as in the larger of the two obelisks in Constantinople). The
Egyptians sheathed the pyramidion of the obelisk with “bright metal”
to reflect the rays of the sun, and the Romans crowned the apex,
sometimes if not always, with metal ornaments, like the ball upon the
Vatican obelisk, which, until it was removed by Sixtus V, was supposed
to contain the ashes of Julius Cæsar. The obelisk now in Central Park
had been re-erected by the Romans at Alexandria, in this fashion, and
one of the bronze crabs was brought to New York with the obelisk, and
is now in the Metropolitan Museum. These bronze supports were firmly
attached to the obelisk by heavy bronze dowels, one dowel running
upward into each corner of the shaft, the other going down into each
corner of the pedestal. Between the shaft and the pedestal there was
therefore a space, perhaps some four inches in height, through which
light was visible. This was seen in the Vatican obelisk, which was
still _in situ_ when Fontana drew his plans for changing its location,
and in the Central Park obelisk, as described by an eye-witness of
its removal. Three historians of Rome’s destruction--Fea, Dyer, and
Gibbon--describe the almost incredible ingenuity, labor, and patience
exerted by the Romans of the Dark Ages in their search for bronze
and other metals. Wherever bronze could be obtained, it was stolen,
stripped, or melted, on account of its value and the ease with which
it could be transported. During the same historic period, all pagan
monuments were deprived of whatever protection they had had as objects
of religious veneration. The obelisks standing in spacious and lonely
surroundings would have proved an easy prey to bands of clandestine
or open marauders. The Roman method of blasting consisted in building
a fire against the rock and pouring vinegar, or even water, upon the
red-hot stone which then disintegrated. It would have been an easy
matter to kindle great fires at every corner of the pedestal which,
by the time this kind of destruction became popular, had already lost
much of their original height through the gradual rise of the ground
level. This method of blasting by fire would account for the all but
universal gnawing away, or rough rounding off of the lower corners of
the shaft, in which the bronze dowels were so firmly embedded. After
the disintegration of the granite the partially melted bronze could
be extracted from both shaft and pedestal, but not before the shaft
had been thrown over, and this was evidently helped along by the use
of levers. When the shaft was prone, it became possible to remove any
bronze which had been attached to its summit. With perhaps only one
exception, the fallen shafts were always found broken in three pieces,
but there seems to be no record of any bronze found in Rome, near the
original sites of the obelisks. What bronze there is was on the one
Roman obelisk that had not been thrown down (the Vatican obelisk).
The original site of this obelisk, in the centre of the old circus of
Caligula and Nero, was close to the old Church of St. Peter, and it
was furthermore protected, according to Lanciani, by the chapel at its
base, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. When, in 1586, Fontana
removed this obelisk to its present position in the centre of the
modern Piazza of modern St. Peter’s, he re-erected it upon its original
classic Roman crabs, hiding them by the purely decorative Sixtine lions
of Prospero Bresciano, as they had been hidden in earlier times by the
bronze lions mentioned by Plutarch, and gone since the sack of Rome
in 1527. The obelisk in Constantinople, referred to above, is still
standing on its four brass “dice.”
[I] This story is told in another form. In it Cardinal Farnese employs
the same ruse to save the life of the young Duke of Parma.
[J] Suetonius, Bk. I. “And he (Cæsar) mounted the Capitol by torchlight
with forty elephants bearing lamps on his right and on his left.”
[K] The “Memoirs of Madame d’Arblay” relate a touching incident in the
life of this exiled Stuart.
Daddy Crump, Fanny Burney’s old gossip, while sojourning in Rome
attended a carnival ball at a certain palace, where he saw many
notables, among them King James III, as he was always called in
Rome, and his two young sons--Prince Charles Edward and Henry,
Duke of York. There were numbers of English among the guests, and,
characteristically, they did not mingle with the other nationalities,
but grouped themselves together in a solid mass at one end of the
ballroom. Suddenly, while all were watching the dancers, King James,
taking advantage of his mask and official incognito, crossed the room
and placed himself in the front rank of his fellow countrymen. The
moment was psychic, but the “loyal subjects of the House of Hanover”
“took not the slightest notice of him” while he stood as his forebears
had stood--an English king among his own people. Daddy Crump relates
with smug satisfaction that the “English never moved an eyelid”
during those few minutes when their hereditary sovereign assuaged the
passionate homesickness of his exile heart with a brief and tragic
make-believe.
[L] See Appendix.
[M] Compare the sensations produced by this fountain and those given by
the “Rhapsodie Hongroise.”
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF AQUEDUCTS MENTIONED, ANCIENT AND MODERN
ANCIENT
DATE OF
AQUEDUCT CONSTRUCTION PAGE
Appia 312 B. C. 38, 270.
Anio Vetus 272–269 B. C. 38.
Marcia 144–140 B. C. 38, 125, 266.
Alsietina (Under the 270, 273.
Emperor Augustus)
Virgo 19 B. C. 38, 86, 109, 148, 216, 229–232,
235, 237, 270, 271.
Claudia 38–52 A. D. x, 231.
Anio Novus 38–52 A. D. x.
Traiana 109 A. D. 14, 22, 231, 270, 271.
Alexandrina 226 A. D. 149, 216.
MODERN
Acqua Damasiana (Under Pope
Damasus) 8.
Acqua Vergine di
Trevi 1570 A. D. 14, 38, 90, 97, 98, 107, 109,
128, 141, 199, 200, 216, 219,
230, 232, 236, 242, 276.
Acqua Felice 1587 A. D. 22, 38, 39, 44, 124, 125, 128,
147, 149, 152, 158, 169, 172,
178, 259, 271, 272, 289, 290.
Acqua Paola 1611 A. D. 5, 6, 21, 22, 36, 37, 38, 78, 141,
271, 272, 276.
Acqua Marcia Pia 1870 A. D. 38–40, 200, 266.
CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF POPES MENTIONED
POPE DATE PAGE
Damasus 366–384 7, 8.
Symmachus 498–514 11–14.
Hadrian I 772–795 39, 57.
Celestine II 1143–1144 13.
Honorius III 1216–1227 13.
Eugenius IV 1431–1447 198.
Nicholas V 1447–1455 231, 232.
Sixtus IV 1471–1484 14, 23, 24, 28, 31, 57, 84, 232,
252.
Innocent VIII 1484–1492 14, 15, 271.
Alexander VI 1492–1503 14, 16, 24, 27, 29–32, 53, 77,
173, 253.
Julius II 1503–1513 23, 29, 32, 69, 253, 263.
Leo X 1513–1522 24, 32, 69, 139, 151.
Adrian VI 1522–1523 69.
Clement VII 1523–1534 69, 70, 75, 110.
Paul III 1534–1550 32, 45, 46, 52, 58, 63–79,
109–112, 188, 198, 211, 271.
Julius III 1550–1555 83–104, 109, 145, 148, 278.
Marcellus II 1555 102.
Paul IV 1555–1559 112.
Pius IV 1559–1566 86, 88, 89, 102, 109, 111, 112,
120, 124, 146, 216.
Pius V 1566–1572 86, 102, 109, 120, 126, 132, 232.
Gregory XIII 1572–1585 14, 52, 86, 89, 102, 108, 109,
112–114, 126, 129, 131, 139,
216, 288.
Sixtus V 1585–1590 17, 22, 23, 28, 37, 39, 44, 52,
89, 102, 103, 108, 109, 113,
119–132, 139, 146–152, 155–165,
174, 224, 232, 242, 251, 271,
272, 274, 275, 281, 288–296.
Urban VII 1590 156.
Gregory XIV 1590–1591 156.
Innocent IX 1591–1592 156.
Clement VIII 1592–1605 103, 156, 163, 278, 281, 282,
290.
Leo XI 1605 103, 172, 278, 281.
Paul V 1605–1621 3–18, 22–32, 66, 103, 145, 146,
148, 157, 187–189, 211, 222,
232, 270–284.
Urban VIII 1623–1644 24, 66, 172, 176, 199–201, 211,
222, 224, 235, 262, 283.
Innocent X 1644–1655 52, 219–222, 224.
Alexander VII 1655–1667 202.
Clement X 1670–1676 4.
Alexander VIII 1689–1691 273–275.
Clement XII 1730–1740 52, 55, 235, 237.
Benedict XIV 1740–1758 90, 235.
Clement XIII 1758–1769 225, 235.
Clement XIV 1769–1775 103, 104.
Pius VI 1775–1800 103, 104, 241, 262, 264, 289,
293, 297, 298.
Pius VII 1800–1823 241, 262, 264, 265, 289, 290,
293, 298–300.
Leo XII 1823–1829 109, 115.
Gregory XVI 1831–1846 147, 297.
Pius IX 1846–1878 35–40, 225, 299, 300.
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, AND ENGRAVERS
MENTIONED
NAME DATE PAGE
Alberti, Leon Battista 1404–1472 232.
Amannati, Bartolommeo 1511–1586 84, 87, 88, 94, 95,
97, 100, 101, 127,
145–148.
Amici, Luigi 1813–1897 36, 219.
Antinori fl. ca. 1800 289.
Bandinelli, Baccio 1487–1559 54.
Baronino fl. ca. 1550 100.
Barozzi, Giacomo, da Vignola 1507–1573 84, 87, 94, 100,
101, 112, 252.
Berettina, Pietro da Cortona 1596–1669 120.
Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo 1598–1680 5, 27, 77, 108, 135,
171, 181, 185,
186, 194, 199,
207, 208, 211,
219–225, 235, 250,
252.
Bernini, Pietro 1562–1629 199, 200.
Betti, Bernardino di Pinturicchio 1454–1513 77.
Bitta, della Zappalà 1807– 36, 220.
Bonanni fl. ca. 1570 17.
Brazza, Count (the elder) fl. ca. 1830 259.
Bresciano, Prospero fl. ca. 1585 147, 162.
Buonarroti, Michelangelo 1474–1564 23, 44–46, 49, 52,
54, 57–59, 69, 73,
77, 84, 94, 101,
109, 157, 236,
252, 271.
Canova, Antonio 1757–1822 194.
Cavalieri, Tommaso de fl. ca. 1500 52.
Cellini, Benvenuto 1500–1570 100, 110.
Cruyl 1640 (?) 165.
Falda, Giovanni Battista 1648–1691 108, 114, 165, 199,
200, 274.
Fontana, Carlo 1634–1714 4, 252.
Fontana, Domenico 1543–1607 22, 23, 28, 37, 38,
54, 87, 119, 120,
125–128, 131, 135,
145–150, 155–165,
171, 242, 249,
251, 272, 275,
288, 289, 293.
Fontana, Giovanni 1540–1641 22, 135, 272, 275,
277.
Gelée, Claude Lorraine 1600–1682 176.
Landini, Taddeo –1594 131, 136.
Lazzari Donato, Bramante da
Urbino 1444–1514 16, 23, 27, 28, 30,
263.
Letarouilly 1795–1865 96, 186.
Ligorio, Pirro 1493–1573 45, 88.
Lippi, Annibale fl. ca. 1550 171.
Maderno, Carlo 1556–1629 4, 6, 15, 21, 23,
32, 37, 135, 198,
199, 252, 272, 275.
Maggi 1566–1620(?) 155, 165, 274.
Millotti 165.
Mari, Gianantonio fl. ca. 1648 219.
Picconi, Antonio da Sangallo 1482–1546 69.
Pintelli, Baccio 1420–1480 252.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 1707–1778 49, 93, 124, 146,
158, 220, 242, 274.
Porta, Giacomo della 1541–1604 69, 107, 109, 112,
138, 216, 219, 220.
Porta, Giovanni Battista della 1539–1594 146.
Porta, Guglielmo della –1577 77, 135.
Poussin, Nicholas 1574–1665 176.
Rainaldi, Carlo 1611–1691 52, 65, 219, 252.
Rainaldi, Girolamo 1570–1655 52, 65.
Salvi, Niccolo 1699–1751 235.
Sanctis, Francesco de fl. ca. 1725 202.
Sanzio, Raphael da Urbino 1483–1520 23, 24, 27, 28, 139,
140.
Specchi, Alessandro 1665–1706 202.
Stern, Raphael 1790–1821 96, 103, 290.
Stocchi fl. ca. 1825 109.
Tenerani, Pietro 1789–1869 36.
Vacca, Flaminio 1530–1596 146.
Valadier, Giuseppe 1762–1839 215, 241–255, 262,
264, 265.
Vansantio, Antonio –1710(?) 66, 186.
Vasari, Giorgio 1493–1573 44, 54, 58, 94, 101,
164, 232.
Vespignani, Virginio 1808–1882 37.
Watteau, Antoine 1684–1721 186.
Transcriber’s Notes
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