Chapter II: Introduction (1)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.