Chapter II: The Nymphæum or “secret Fountain” (1)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.”