Chapter II: The Nymphæum or “secret Fountain” (3)

The villa is at its loveliest in May and October. On every Thursday and Sunday of this latter month it used to be the custom for the Prince Borghese to receive all Rome within his gates. Forty to fifty thousand people would sometimes come to these garden-parties, all classes mingling yet preserving their identity with the admirable dignity and self-respect of the Romans. The young Princess Gwendolin Borghese was seen for the last time at one of these great fêtes. Her saintly young spirit adds a breath as of incense to the Borghese gardens, and it is more easy to think of her presence here than among the ponderous marbles of the Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore where she lies buried.

Yet another Princess Borghese has left her memory within these gates. Canova has portrayed her as Venus Victrix, and she takes her place among the antique marbles by the right of flawless beauty. The flesh-and-blood original of Canova’s masterpiece, Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, cared but little for her beautiful villa. The ilex groves were gloomy and the fountains were insignificant compared with those of Versailles. She wearied of palace, prince, and villa, and spent as much time as possible with her own kin. It is recorded that the prince, her husband, was far more jealous of Canova’s statue of his wife than of his wife’s person. The Princess Pauline Borghese passed away like a summer cloud, but the Venus Borghese remains.

The personality of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is preserved in the two magnificent busts still standing in the picture-gallery of the Casino. It is difficult to believe that such vitality as Bernini has here portrayed could ever have quite faded from the earth, and surely his ghost must at times return to these gardens of his creation.

LA BARCACCIA

LA BARCACCIA

At the foot of the great stone stairway, known in Italian as _La Scalinata_ and in English as the Spanish Steps, which leads down from the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti to the Piazza di Spagna lies the singular fountain called La Barcaccia. The design of this fountain is that of a quaintly conventionalized boat, fast sinking under the water which is pouring into it. To this effect it owes its name; for “barca,” being the Italian for boat, and “accia” a termination of opprobrium, Barcaccia means a worthless boat. The boat is supposed to commemorate an event which occurred during the great flood of 1598. On Christmas Day of that year the Tiber rose to its highest recorded level. All this part of the city was submerged to a depth of from seventeen to twenty-five feet; and here in the Piazza di Spagna a boat drifted ashore, grounding on that slope of the Pincian Hill, which is now covered by the Spanish Steps. For a long time the design of this fountain was supposed to commemorate this event, and it is quite possible that this may have been the case. Still there are other fountains of this design, the work of Carlo Maderno, and as one is in the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the other in the Villa Aldobrandini, it is also quite possible that Carlo Maderno and the creator of the Barcaccia may have had yet another idea when they constructed their stone boats with a fountain amidships and lying in basins not much larger than the boats themselves. For the Romans of this time knew much and surmised still more about the mysterious boats lying at the bottom of Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, not more than seventeen miles distant from Rome. These boats had been discovered first during the pontificate of Pope Eugenius IV, and had been rediscovered in Paul III’s time, in 1535, or about a hundred years before Carlo Maderno employed this design for a fountain. At each date an attempt had been made to raise the boats, but these efforts as well as all subsequent attempts proved unsuccessful. However, in 1535 measurements had been computed and many objects belonging to the vessels had been brought to the surface to excite the wonder and admiration of the Roman world. It was discovered that the boats when once raised and floated would all but fill the tiny lake. The decks had been made of concrete and marble, and amidships there had been fountains whose falling waters mingled with those of the lake. The mystery surrounding the purpose and construction of those huge vessels is yet unsolved, but in the seventeenth century it still stirred men’s imaginations with all the force of fresh discovery. Both Maderno and Pietro Bernini could not have been ignorant of it, and they must have seen the exquisite bronzes and lead pipes bearing the stamp of the Emperor Tiberius which had been detached and brought up from the sunken vessels.

The Barcaccia fountain is the last work of Pietro Bernini, the father of Lorenzo. He had been employed to bring a branch of the Trevi Water from its reservoir at the head of the Vicolo del Bottino as far as the foot of the Pincian Hill in front of the Trinità de’ Monti, and the fountain done by order of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644) was the adequate consummation of that work. From whatever cause he derived his inspiration, his design of the Barcaccia fountain is so admirably suited to its position that it explains and almost excuses the popular idea that the fountain was made low in order not to obscure the view of the Spanish Steps. A reference to dates at once shows the absurdity of this last suggestion. In the Keats Memorial House hard by there can be seen an engraving by Falda (born in 1640) showing Pietro Bernini’s completed fountain against the background of the tree-planted slope of the Pincian Hill. The fountain was finished before the death of Pope Urban VIII, which occurred in 1644, and the steps were not begun until 1721, nine pontificates after that of Urban VIII.

On the prow and stern of the boat is carved the coat of arras of the Barberini family, for Urban VIII was the Barberini Pope and the founder of that family in Rome. This pontiff, whose character was a formidable compound of priest, statesman, warrior, and man of letters, delighted in the design of the fountain. Pietro Bernini had placed cannon at either end, thus making his boat into a war-vessel, whereupon Urban VIII composed a Latin distich in its praise:

“Bellica pontificum non fundit machina flammas,
Sed dulcem, belli qua perit ignis, aquam.”

“_The war-ship of the priest, instead of flames,
Pours water, and the fire of battle tames._”

At both ends of the large basin in which the boat stands are long, flat pieces of travertine. These are the stepping-stones on which any one using the fountain stands while dipping up the water. The Marcia Pia now supplies the houses in this part of the city, but the Romans still prefer to drink Trevi, and the stepping-stones are as much in use as they were in the days when Falda and other artists of that period engraved this fountain, placing in the lower basin figures of men or women in the act of dipping up the water. This quarter of Rome, once a part of the Campus Martius of classical days, has been for a long time given over to the interests of the American and English colonies; but for more than three centuries its foreign associations were chiefly French. Urban VIII was in many ways a French Pope, although he came of a Florentine family. As papal nuncio he had spent many years and made many powerful friends at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII. In the conclave which elected him Pope, France openly and ardently supported his claims. During his residence in France he had known Armand du Plessis, who was to become Cardinal Richelieu. The two great churchmen went up the ladder of preferment side by side. They became, as pope and cardinal minister, respectively, lifelong allies in their tireless and successful efforts to humble the dual power of Austria and Spain, while promoting on the one hand the prestige of France and on the other the stability of the Papal See.

At the accession of Urban VIII, Spain and Austria held the passes of the Alps, thus dominating Europe and threatening the existence of the Papal States. At the close of his pontificate, France was rapidly becoming the first Continental power, and the Papal States had reached their utmost limit of territorial expansion. With his death the French influence in papal politics rapidly declined, but its artistic ascendency still lingered on. Thirteen years later a certain French gentleman, attached to the French embassy at Rome, and named Etienne de Guéffier, left in his will a sum of money for the construction of a great stone stairway which should connect the Piazza of the Trinità de’ Monti, in the centre of which lay the Barcaccia fountain, with the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti, standing far above, on the slope of the Pincian Hill. This gentleman, of whom little is known, must have been the friend of more than one of the great French artists who were living in Rome contemporaneously with himself. Possibly the splendid project of the Scalinata was the result of long hours of comradeship, when he, with his fellow countrymen, watched the sunset from the terrace which Sixtus V had placed before the Church on the Hill, or scrambled down the tree-planted slope before it in order to reach the fountain at its base. Certain it is that Rome owes this most distinctive architectural feature of papal times to the imagination and generosity of a Frenchman. The two Latin inscriptions upon the steps are worthy of attention.[L]

The building of the steps, begun by Alessandro Specchi and completed by Francesco de Sanctis, was not undertaken, as appears from the inscription, till sixty years after the death of De Guéffier and six pontificates later than that of Alexander VII (Chigi), in which De Guéffier died. By that time the Spanish influence had reasserted itself to a marked degree, and as the Spanish embassy had been established in a palace on the western side of the square, the old name of the Piazza della Trinità de’ Monti gradually gave way to the present name, Piazza di Spagna. And so finally the great stone stairway, the gift of a Frenchman in the heyday of French influence at Rome, came to be known as the Spanish Steps.

Yet, after all, the paramount association with the fountain of the Barcaccia is neither French nor Spanish, but belongs pre-eminently to the English-speaking race. This fantastic fountain, with its commonplace background and its limited view of the Scalinata, forms the only outlook from the windows of the house in which the poet Keats spent the last three months of his life; so that from the position of this house the fountain of the Barcaccia is connected for all time with the fate of the “young English poet” who lies buried now these many years in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls. From the windows of his narrow death-chamber he watched the plashing waters in the fountain below him, while above his head the bells in the church, which he could not see, remorselessly rang out the quarter-hours or tolled for some fellow creature the “agonia,” or “passing bell.” During his hours of listlessness or fits of sombre rage, this passing of time and of life was always in his ears, as the futile play of the water was always before his eyes.

It is not difficult to connect the bells and the fountain with the bitter epitaph written, by his own wish, above his grave:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

TRITON

TRITON

“Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”

The exquisite lines rise involuntarily to the lips as one comes suddenly upon Bernini’s old fountain in the Piazza Tritone, which, standing in the centre of one of the busiest and most prosaic thoroughfares of modern Rome, still keeps its own quality of beauty and seems to weave about itself the enchantment of the world of fable. Roman art has created many Tritons, notably the joyous group surrounding Galatea in the Farnesina Palace, but there is about this water-worn old figure such distinction and such emphasis of life that he becomes the prototype of all his race. He is _Il Tritone_.

Triton blows his conch-shell with all his might as he kneels across the hinge of a wide-open scallop-shell, which is supported on the upturned tails of three dolphins massed together in the middle of a large, low-lying basin. The dolphins’ tails are twisted and folded about large papal keys--a Bernini conceit which, suggesting St. Peter both as fisherman and pontiff, must have delighted the Pope. The composition of dolphins, keys, and shell is extraordinarily rich and harmonious.

Triton, kneeling upon this noble support is, from the waist upward, a severely simple figure, almost uncouth and somewhat out of keeping with the rest of the design. This effect is entirely accidental. It has been brought about by the ceaseless flow of the water, which for two and a half centuries has been thrown upward in a slender jet of great height, returning upon itself with such precision that Triton’s face and shoulders have been worn and blurred into shapeless surfaces of travertine. Triton has suffered from a sculptor’s point of view, but as a work of imaginative art it is, perhaps, all the better for Nature’s modelling. The shapeless head and shoulders have in them something of the formlessness and blurred masses of the elements, and the water-creature becomes more real to the imagination in proportion as he suggests--but does not entirely resemble--a man. The entire design is on a colossal scale and has a dignity and harmony rarely to be found in Bernini’s creations. This is because the central idea is the only idea, and no subsidiary and fantastic inventions are presented to bewilder the eye and brain.

This fountain was done by Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Urban VIII. It stands near the Barberini Church of the Capuchins, and was intended to adorn the approach to the Palazzo Barberini. This third of the trio of the great palaces of the nepotizing Popes--Farnese, Borghese, and Barberini--was built by Urban VIII in order to invest his house with an importance equal to that enjoyed by the families of Paul III and Paul V. As the fountain was an adjunct of the palace, it had to bear upon it in some way the emblem of the Barberini--the colossal bee--and this explains why Bernini united the curving bodies of his dolphins by escutcheons carrying three bees and the papal arms.

Another fountain, contemporaneous with the Triton, once stood in this same piazza, at the corner of the Via Sistina; and this fountain, also made for Urban VIII by Bernini, was in itself the emblem of the Barberini, for it represented merely a great shell into which the bees spouted water. In some way this second fountain has disappeared, but the piazza still remains the Barberini quarter of the city; and the Triton, as well as the magnificent palace, recalls the days when the power and rapacity of that family brought upon it the unforgettable pasquinade:

“What the Barbarians spared,
The Barberini took.”

NAVONA

NAVONA

Before the genius of Valadier moulded the isolated buildings and waste spaces of the Piazza del Popolo into a noble symmetry, the Navona was considered the finest and most important piazza in Rome. In length and breadth it is a reproduction of the stadium of Domitian, for the houses, churches, and palaces which line the Piazza Navona are based squarely upon the seats and corridors of that old Roman playground. This part of the city, not far from the Pantheon or old Baths of Agrippa, is low, and it has always been easy to flood it with water. The ancient Romans were so keen for shows of every kind that when the great Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) was closed for repairs, Domitian found it necessary to provide a second place of amusement where the gladiatorial combats and the _naumachiæ_ or sea fights could go on without interruption.

It was a rule strictly enforced under the empire that no one could open new baths in the city without providing a fresh supply of water. Something more than a century after Domitian, Alexander Severus--having brought the Acqua Alessandrina to Rome--was able to repair Domitian’s old stadium and to use it once more for the _naumachiæ_. In modern times there does not appear to have been any fountain here until the pontificate of Gregory XIII, and at that time the passion for fountain-building in modern Rome really began.

Pius IV, the Pope last but one preceding Gregory XIII, had repaired the old aqueduct of the Acqua Virgo, originally brought to the city by Marcus Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, so that that water, which for a long time had been running only intermittently in the fountain of Trevi, could now be obtained in a continuous stream. It is impossible to throw Virgo Water to any great height, and the fountains of the Piazza Navona have had to be constructed with reference to this limitation.

The two end fountains, designed for Gregory XIII by Giacomo della Porta, are simply great basins of Porta Santa marble standing in still larger Carrara basins of exactly the same shape and sunk into the ground. The beauty of these fountains consists in their elegant shape, the fineness of the marble, and in their air of simple distinction. The great basins hold the limpid Trevi Water as a Venetian goblet holds wine: the receptacle and that which it contains enhance each other’s beauty, and any further decoration seems superfluous and unfortunate. This, however, was not the taste of the seventeenth century, at which time there were added the various figures now crowding the upper basin of the south fountain. On one side of the piazza stands the fine palace built for Innocent X (Pamphili, 1644–1655) by Rainaldi. It was occupied during the Pope’s lifetime by his sister-in-law, Donna Olympia Maidalchini, who, for that period, became the most important person of the papal court. She filled the palace with art treasures and, in order to make its exterior still more imposing, Bernini was commissioned to decorate della Porta’s fountain, which stood directly in front of the palace. The central figure, called the Moor, was modelled by Bernini himself, and it was sculptured for him by Gianantonio Mari. It is in travertine. The Carrara masques and marine creatures are by various pupils of Bernini. Toward the close of the last century the originals of these side groups, which had become badly disfigured, were removed and replaced by those of the present day, which were sculptured by Amici after the old models. This fountain since Bernini’s time has been called the fountain of the Moor. The fountain at the other end went from the earliest times by the name of the Fountain of the Scaldino, probably because of the shape of the small vase in the centre which resembled a classic scaldino or brazier. It can be seen in an engraving by Piranesi, for the fountain was left undisturbed until the close of the last century when the Scaldino was removed and replaced by the figure of Neptune. This figure was carved by Bitta Zappalà from a model of Bernini’s found in the Villa Montalto. The figures around the edge are Zappalà’s own, and they as well as the Neptune are of Carrara. All this wedding-cake decoration has spoiled the original effect of della Porta’s work, and the best that can now be said for the side fountains is that they are in harmony with the fountain in the centre. In justice, however, to the genius of della Porta and to the taste of an earlier day, an attempt should be made to think of these fountains without their more modern excrescences. It is a pity that the Roman municipality has found it necessary to surround them with a high iron fence. If these fountains could be left free like the side fountains in the Piazza del Popolo their charm could be and would be much better appreciated.

In the centre of the piazza, immediately opposite the church, Bernini erected for Innocent X the Fountain of the Four Rivers. The obelisk of red Oriental granite which surmounts it was brought from the Circus of Maxentius, and tipped with the bronze dove and olive-branch, the emblem of the Pamphili family, to which Innocent X belonged. Bernini placed the obelisk on four flying buttresses of white granite, crossing each other at right angles. The obelisk rests upon the arch thus formed, and the space beneath it is left as a grotto with four openings. This gives the obelisk the appearance of resting upon nothing, an effect which was greatly admired by the artist’s contemporaries. The bases of these flying buttresses are broadened and flattened so as to receive the recumbent figures of four river-gods carved in Carrara. They represent respectively the Ganges, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. The obelisk and its base stand in the centre of a basin some seventy-eight feet in circumference, which is sunk into the pavement, and which receives the water flowing from the four rocky projections where the river-gods lie. Beneath the grotto additional jets of water spout upward, while a river-horse dashes furiously through one archway as if in terror of a lion which is coming out of another to drink of the water under the shade of a palm-tree cut in high relief against the rocks. On top of one of the rocks crawls a serpent, and a mass of cactus grows upward from behind one of the rivers. In the lower basin two monstrous travertine fish are disporting themselves in characteristic Bernini contortions. Escutcheons bearing the arms of Innocent X (three fleur-de-lis and a dove with an olive-branch) of course are not wanting. All this sculpture is in travertine.

This fountain has been called Bernini’s masterpiece, and it deserves that title as an example of the utmost length to which the Bernini idea of artistic invention can be carried. From an æsthetic standpoint it shows both in execution and design the faults and excesses into which he was led by his popularity, and the boundless fertility of his genius. The extravagances and absurdities of this fountain and its debased execution arouse curiosity both as to the artist and to the taste and character of the seventeenth-century Romans for whom it was erected and by whom it was so greatly admired. Bernini came in with the seventeenth century and lived through eighty years of it. The pompous epitaph under his bust, which is let into the wall in the Palazzo Mercede, speaks no more than the truth. Princes and popes did bend before him, from Paul V, who recognized his precocious genius, to Louis XIV, who enticed him to Paris. Charles I sent his Van Dyck portraits to Rome, that Bernini might use them as guides in making his portrait bust of the Stuart King, and Urban VIII thanked a gracious Providence that Bernini lived during his pontificate. His journey to Paris was a triumphal progress. The few clouds which marred his long and prosperous day were due not to any waning of popular appreciation but to the inevitable jealousy of less fortunate men. Yet his best work was done in his youth under the enlightened patronage of Paul V and Urban VIII. By the time Innocent X (a mediocre man) could command his services his faults had obscured his genius, and the great days of Rome were definitely over. With the death of Urban VIII, the Pope immediately preceding Innocent X, the last trace of vigorous artistic life had disappeared; for as the French influence in the papal court declined and the Hapsburg ideas regained and held the ascendancy spontaneous and free expression of thought and feeling were rigorously repressed. Men were made to live on the surface of things, and in proportion as they became formal and superficial in themselves they demanded excitement and extravagance in their art. This was the secret of Bernini’s immense success. He was exactly fitted to his time. Men wanted “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and he gave it to them in full measure.

In this fountain he strove to produce the effect of a wild concourse of waters. He wished to reproduce in stone the tumult of the falls of Tivoli. Confusion, rapidity of movement, and noise are the qualities which he attempted to embody in his sculpture. That the effect should be bathos and not grandeur was inevitable. The ideas which Bernini strove to express cannot be portrayed. Music is the only artistic medium by which they can be rendered, and in looking at the Bernini sculpture as well as architecture it is impossible not to wish that this artist of such undeniable genius and immense facility had been a musician. As the composer and interpreter of great _brio_ music Bernini might have given no less pleasure to the men of his time and have secured from posterity a kindlier appreciation.[M] But in the seventeenth century secular music as an art was still in its infancy, and it was inevitable that Bernini should express himself in sculpture, or in the “frozen music” of architecture. As the Borgo holds its memories of the Borgias, and the Via Sistina and its vicinity recall the power of Sixtus V, and the Piazza di Spagna the versatility of Urban VIII, so the Piazza Navona brings back the times of Innocent X. The greatest gift which the Pamphili family has left to Rome is the Villa Pamphili, which was built by the Pope’s nephew, but here in the Piazza Navona stand the Pamphili Palace, the Collegio Innocentium and the Church of St. Agnes, whose new façade dates from his pontificate.

It was during his lifetime that the festas of the “Lago of the Piazza Navona” were inaugurated. Every Sunday in July and August the outlets of the great central fountain were stopped and the water was permitted to flood the entire piazza, which was at that time much lower than it is at present. Then the carriages of the nobility and gentry drove around the piazza, the water reaching up as far as the middle of the smaller wheels. The owners of the houses and palaces invited friends to witness the spectacle from their windows, refreshments were served, and bands of music played on stands erected at various parts of the piazza. The fact that only people owning carriages could drive in the procession and that only the inhabitants of the houses and palaces could invite their guests, limited the number and regulated the quality of the participants in these curious pageants. In the earlier days much license was permitted, and the entertainments lasted through the night, but in Clement XIII’s time, or about 1760, the number of hours was curtailed. With the ringing of the Ave Maria the piazza was drained and the waters once more confined to the basin of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers.

These harmless midsummer carnivals which came to an end during the pontificate of Pope Pius IX were as much relished by the Romans as were the _naumachiæ_ held fourteen hundred years earlier in the same place.

TREVI

TREVI

One hundred and fifteen years after Agrippa brought the Acqua Virgo into Rome the Emperor Nerva appointed as commissioner of the water-works of the city a man of extraordinary integrity and energy who was possessed of many accomplishments and had had a long training in the practical experience of government and war. Fortunately for posterity, he was able to write as well as govern, and in his book, “The Water Supply of the City of Rome,” a copy of which has been preserved in the monastery of Monte Cassino for more than thirteen centuries, there is an account, true beyond the shadow of doubt, of the earliest history of the Trevi Water. Frontinus says that the water was shown to some Roman soldiers by a young maiden who guided them to the springs near her father’s home, that a small temple was erected near the springs containing a picture of the incident, and that the name of Virgo, or maiden, which still endures, commemorates the event. Agrippa at once brought the water to Rome and its delightful purity as well as its abundance must have given it immediate popularity. Suetonius relates that about this time the Romans complained to Augustus of the expense and scarcity of wine, whereupon the Emperor sent word to them that his son-in-law, Agrippa, had sufficiently provided for their thirst by the ample supply of water which he had brought to Rome. The springs of the Virgo rise in the valley of the Anio and are not more than eighty feet above sea-level. They are on land which once belonged to Lucullus. The veteran adversary of Mithradates, who had suffered all the privations of far-eastern warfare, knew from personal experience the immense value of pure and abundant water. It is not improbable that he was aware of his priceless possession and that he kept it for his own private use during those years of his peaceful old age passed in his gardens on the Pincian Hill. When, a generation after Lucullus’s death, Agrippa constructed the Virgo Aqueduct he brought it underground through the old gardens of Lucullus to a reservoir beneath the hill, and from there the water was carried to the Campus Martius, and thence distributed throughout the city, whose gardens and fountains it still supplies. Cassiodorus, prime minister to that Gothic King, Theodoric, who, from 493 to 526, governed the Romans with such extraordinary sympathy and intelligence, felt for the Virgo Water the admiration and love of a veritable Roman. The true origin of the name had already been forgotten, and Cassiodorus supposes that “Virgo’s stream is so pure that the name, according to common opinion, is derived from the fact that those waters are never sullied, since, while all the others give evidence of the violence of rain-storms by the turgidity of their waters, Virgo alone ever maintains her purity.” It was quite a natural supposition, for the Virgo Water has never had a filtering or settling reservoir. Those who have the good fortune to drink it receive it from its Roman fountains exactly as it comes from its springs on the Via Collatina. This aqueduct was cut off from the city in 537 by the Goths and Burgundians, and, though in the same year Belisarius restored the aqueducts of Claudius and Trajan, the Virgo seems to have remained entirely unused for the next two hundred years. During that period the popes were not sufficiently powerful to undertake any great public works, but when Charlemagne visited Rome in 778 he gave the needed support to the head of the church, and thereafter the popes began the restoration and the maintenance of the Roman aqueducts. The Virgo was restored in 1447 by Nicholas V, in whose pontificate Constantinople was taken by the Turks and the Wars of the Roses began in England. He was a great Pope and repaired the aqueduct so thoroughly that it remained in use for thirty years. There must always have been a main fountain for the Virgo Water, but the records of the modern “Fountain of Trevi” begins with the fountain which Vasari says was rebuilt by Nicholas V’s architect, Leon Batista Alberti. After a short period the aqueduct was again restored and the fountain enlarged by “The Great Builder,” Sixtus IV. Then occurs a period of various vicissitudes, and finally, in 1570, Pius V restored the Virgo Aqueduct effectively and rebuilt Sixtus IV’s fountain, making what is now known as the “old Trevi fountain.” This fountain stood not where the present one stands, but to the west of it, in the little Piazza Santa Crocifere. The old engravings show it to have been a huge semicircular pool into which the water poured from three great apertures made in massive stone piers.

The name of Trevi is supposed by some writers to be derived from these three streams of water--three ways, Trevie; but there is more reason to believe that the fountain took its name from the mediæval name of that quarter of the city--Regione Trevi, from trevium, because of three roads which converge near the present Piazza of Trevi. Sixtus IV had constructed near the fountain a large public washing-trough, and the whole composition was extremely simple and practical. The Rome of Sixtus V and Paul V became too sumptuous for the old fountain, and as early as 1625 plans were made for its reconstruction. The Barberini Pope, Urban VIII, had his own ideas of magnificence; he proposed to change the fountain from its old site to its present position against the southern façade of the great Poli Palace; and Bernini made for him some beautiful sketches for the new masterpiece. Urban VIII stripped the portico of the Pantheon of its bronze and also carried off a part of the base of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, proposing to construct his fountain out of these materials. The Roman people, whose love for their own antiquities was constantly growing, showed such indignation when the Pope’s project became known that Urban was actually obliged to abandon his scheme, and it was not until eleven pontificates after his time that the work on the new fountain was really begun. Then it was intrusted to the architect Niccolo Salvi by Clement XII (Corsini, 1730–1740), and after the death of this pontiff and his successor, Benedict XIV, and eleven years after the death of Salvi himself, the fountain was at last finished. This was in 1762, under Clement XIII (Rezzonico, 1758–1769). Niccolo Salvi had succumbed prematurely to the hardships of his task. The construction of the fountain necessitated spending much time in the subterranean chambers of the Virgo Aqueduct, and this had proved fatal to Salvi’s health. The tomb of Cecilia Metella was never again attacked, and there is no bronze in the present fountain; in other respects the great scheme of Urban VIII was revived. The fountain was placed against the Poli Palace, and Salvi used for the sculptural part of the fountain Bernini’s beautiful designs.

So severe a critic as Francesco Milizia declares that this fountain is justly considered to be the best work produced in Rome during the eighteenth century. It has elicited extravagant praise from other authorities, and in later times some adverse criticism. It has been woven into many of the romances connected with Rome, and until quite recently there were few American and English visitors to the Eternal City who left her without paying a moonlight visit to Trevi, there to toss a coin into the water while they drank to their certain return. Romans of the eighteenth century often saw Alfieri, the tragic dramatist, crouched beside the fountain, lost in a day-dream evoked by the tumult and beauty of the water; and it is recorded that the day after Michelangelo’s death there was found in his house no wine whatever, but five jars of water, presumably the Trevi, as it was the only pure drinkable water in Rome. The Trevi fountain has become a feature in the city’s life. It is the chief fountain of the one water which modern Rome inherits directly from her great past.

The fountain consists of a vast semicircular basin, sunk so far below the level of the pavement that it is necessary to descend a flight of steps in order to stand beside it. This device, which was rendered necessary by the low head of the water, is excellent from an æsthetic view-point, as the spectator, being on a different grade from the piazza and its surroundings, feels that he is in another world and is able to forget the city and give his entire attention to the scene before him. Looking up, he sees a great ledge of broken rock, over which the water pours in many streams and waterfalls, disappearing and reappearing among the rocks like a veritable mountain torrent. The main stream descends in a series of three quite lovely cascades, their semicircular-shaped basins being prototypes of the great lower basin, into which all eventually flow. Their edges are smooth, as if they had been water-worn, and the force of the water feeding them is so great that it boils and roars among masses of broken rock as it does in a natural waterfall. Above all this finely simulated wildness rises the ornate group of Neptune riding in a chariot made of an enormous sea-shell and drawn by two sea-horses. The horses are placed well to each side of the central cascades, and the group is terminated by Tritons who are restraining the onward dash of the horses and are blowing conches. The background or frame-work to this scene of commotion and tumult is the highly finished conventional façade of a Roman palace; Neptune issues forth not from a rocky cavern but from a Renaissance tribune constructed with four Ionic pillars and a richly carved roof, on the frieze of which runs the following inscription:

CLEMENS · XII · PONT · MAX
AQVAM · VERGINEM · COPIA · ET · SALVBRITATE
COMMENDATAM · CVLTV · MAGNIFICO · ORNAVIT
ANNO · DOMINO · MDCCXXXV · PONTIF: VI

_Pope Clement XII decked out with magnificent ornament the aqueduct of the Maiden, which is recommended for its plenteous flow and for the healthful qualities of its water. In the year of the Lord 1735, and of Clement’s pontificate the sixth._

On either side of this tribune the palace wall breaks into niches containing statues, one of Abundance, the other of Health; and separated from each other by tall columns are panels depicting in high relief the discovery of the water and the construction of the aqueduct. Beyond these sculptures the windows and balconies of the palace frankly make their appearance.

Nothing could be more incongruous and artificial. The design is one which demands a background as an integral part of the composition, but this background has absolutely no connection with the fountain, except the purely physical connection of juxtaposition. Neptune should be appearing from some sea cave, worn in straight, steep cliffs like the cliffs at Sorrento. The architect who could so skilfully mass these rocky ledges and dispose these streams and cascades could have designed quite as well stone palisades and grottos; but the fountain belongs to an age which played “Macbeth” in periwig and ruffles, and it remains a magnificent example of the taste of that period.

PIAZZA DEL POPOLO

PIAZZA DEL POPOLO

The fountains in the Piazza del Popolo should not be considered as individual creations; they must be regarded as parts of an architectural composition which includes the piazza as a whole--its shape, dimensions, and location, and the buildings which surround it. This composition is the work of the distinguished Roman architect Giuseppe Valadier, whose life lay within the last thirty-eight years of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth. His bust stands in the place of honor on the Pincian; that is, it stands at the end of and facing the long, broad drive called the Passeggiata, which begins on the terrace before the Villa Medici and runs northward along the western crest of the Pincian Hill. Valadier had been papal architect under Pius VI and Pius VII, and he had laid out for Napoleon the public gardens of the Pincian. Up to that time most of that land had belonged to the Augustinian monks whose convent stands below the hill, close to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. It has been their vineyard, and the story goes that it was while he was walking in this vineyard that Valadier got his first conception of what he might make out of the Piazza del Popolo.

Standing on the brow of the hill, from which is obtained the incomparable view of St. Peter’s at sunset, Valadier looked down upon the Piazza del Popolo as Piranesi had engraved it in his time (1720–1778). A somewhat shapeless area of flat ground stretching in an indeterminate way westward from the base of the Pincian Hill, it seemed to be only the debouchment of the three great thoroughfares running into it from the heart of the city. The twin churches standing one on either side of the Corso, the centre thoroughfare, were the chief architectural features on the south side, while on the north side ran the city wall and the Church of St. Mary of the People. In the centre of this area stood the obelisk as it stands to-day, placed there by Sixtus V in 1589, and with a single fountain at its foot--a huge basin carved by Domenico Fontana out of one solid block of marble taken from the ruins of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. The water supplying this fountain was the Acqua Trevi, the same which fills the fountains of the present day. Such was the Piazza del Popolo as Valadier’s eyes beheld it, but at that point where the Aurelian wall is pierced by the Porta del Popolo (the old Flaminian Gate) he saw something else: He saw the end of the Flaminian Way--the great highroad leading directly from the north. And at that point the actual faded away, and to Valadier there came a vision. He saw the Piazza del Popolo as the magnificent and adequate antechamber to Rome. He saw it approached by this great highroad which, first skirting the shore of the Adriatic, then traversing the breadth of Italy and the watershed of the Appenines, descends thence to the western slopes of Mount Soracte and, crossing the Ponte Molle, comes all the way to Rome from far-off Ariminum, or Rimini, the Roman fortress and frontier town on the Adriatic--two hundred and twenty miles distant--and the key to Cisalpine Gaul. Down this road, which is but a continuation of the still greater Via Emilia, have come all the northern friends and all the northern foes of Rome. Other eyes than Valadier’s can see that procession. Barbarian invaders and imperial armies have covered all the countryside like swarms of locusts--the progress of most of them marked by burning farms and plundered villages. In quieter times there have come pilgrim hosts and companies of merchants; and travelling scholars, and artists “with hearts on fire” for Rome; also ambassadors and foreign prelates, exiles and penitents, great bridal processions like Margaret of Austria’s in 1537, funeral pageants, bandit troops, fugitives of every type, bare-legged friars (among them a Luther), soldiers of fortune, and English noblemen in travelling carriages with postilions; every sort and condition of man whom the north has sent forth to the Eternal City. Down this Flaminian Road they came, passed through the Flaminian Gate, and received their first impression of Rome here in the Campus Martius--the modern Piazza del Popolo. Valadier lived in the period of the First Empire, when the shock of change and of contrast quickened even the most formal imagination. He came down from his “mount of vision” and designed the noble and finely proportioned piazza of the present day. He formed the vast and slovenly-shaped piece of ground into a stately ellipse, whose broadly curving ends, made of Roman brick and travertine, ornamented by sphinxes and allegorical figures, become the retaining walls of the terraced gardens at their rear, so that these long retaining walls seem coped by a line of glistening green foliage. On the side of the Pincian Hill the grass and trees of the Pincian Gardens rise in four tiers of terraces, high against the sky. Behind the retaining wall, opposite the Pincian, the tall cypresses screen the new city which stretches off toward the Tiber. A beautiful small semicircular basin, with a shell-like upper basin, stands in the centre of each of these curving ends. They might be called decorative keystones to recumbent arches. The water gushes through the retaining walls which form their background and falls between the convolutions of the shell in a fringe of steady, slender streams.

It has been truly said that the eighteenth century did not die with the close of the year 1799. It lingered on through the first, and more than the first, decade of the century which followed. Valadier remained an eighteenth-century architect to the end of his life. This is most apparent in the Piazza del Popolo, his work of widest scope and freest fancy and the product of his most mature talent. Elegance, proportion, and formality are the qualities on which Valadier relies. His composition is simple, polished, and formal, and the note of affectation ingrained in the art of that period is given in the Egyptian character of some of the ornaments and accessories. This character was undoubtedly suggested by the obelisk, but it is a curious coincidence that many archæological remains of Egyptian origin have been discovered in this part of Rome.

The allegorical groups placed behind the fountains represent on the side of the Pincian the god Mars in full armor, supported by the river-gods Anio and Tiber, each with his respective emblem, one of the emblems belonging to the Tiber being the figure of Mercury, the god of trade. On the side toward the river the group represents Neptune between two Tritons. These groups are by Valadier, and their mass of elaborate detail proves an admirable foil to the fountains beneath, which in their great simplicity are among the very loveliest in Rome. Small white marble sphinxes, said to be made out of blocks of Greek marble, found under the sea at the time that the bronze vase of Mithradates in the Palazzo dei Conservatori was discovered, mark the descending grades along the curving wall, and, as might be expected, statues of the four seasons adorn its four terminal piers.

These conventional figures are the work of various and now little known artists of Valadier’s time or later. The effect of Valadier’s creation has been somewhat marred by the huge monument to King Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. This ponderous and tasteless masonry rises in a series of three tiers, placed one above the other, against the Pincian Hill, and makes a hard and artificial background to the fountains in the square. Besides being far less attractive than the green turf and living foliage, this monument is quite out of proportion to all its surroundings. It occupies the place where Valadier had intended in the first instance to construct a vast fountain, which was to rise in various jets on the summit of the hill now bordered by the esplanade and balustrade, and descend in cascades from terrace to terrace until it gained the level of the piazza. The scheme was abandoned for lack of water. Only the aqueducts of imperial Rome could have furnished the amount required for such a fountain. The design was most imposing, but it is possible that Valadier himself may have relinquished it willingly. He was keenly alive to the beauty of proportion, and the monument to “Il Re Galantuomo” shows how incongruous a Niagara would have been amid such circumscribed and highly finished surroundings.

When the time came to carry out Valadier’s design for the fountains about the obelisk, Domenico Fontana’s massive old basin was removed from its position on the south side of that monument and placed in the gardens of San Pietro in Montorio, now the public gardens on the Janiculum. Then the low stone terrace with its five steps was built around the base of the obelisk, and the four corners of this terrace were marked by miniature pyramids of seven steps, the top of each pyramid supporting an Egyptian lioness couchant carved of Carrara. The water gushes in a copious fan-shaped stream from the mouths of these beasts and falls into four massive travertine basins, each basin set so close against the base of its pyramid that the lower steps of the pyramid project well over a portion of the basin’s rim. The task of providing a modern architectural setting to an Egyptian obelisk is probably an impossible one. It must be conceded, however, that Valadier, while not achieving the impossible, did succeed in producing a design which enhances the dignity and importance of the obelisk, considered as the central architectural feature in a Roman square. More than this could not be expected, and as much as this has not been achieved by any other architect. The obelisk on Monte Cavallo is in no way affected by the objects grouped about it. It is as utterly detached from the Roman fountain and the Greek statues at its base as though it stood by itself at Alexandria. Bernini’s extravaganzas, in which the Egyptian symbol of the mystery of life becomes the meaningless centrepiece for a banal fountain, have long ceased to give pleasure. It is doubtful whether the obelisk was altogether pleasing to the ancient Romans. They could not fail to admire its austere dignity and strength, and they regarded it as the insignia of supreme power, human or divine. Roman Emperors from Augustus onward constantly imported them to Rome to celebrate a victory, to adorn a circus, or to place in pairs, one on either side of the entrance to a tomb. But when the Romans re-erected an obelisk, whether in Rome, in Egypt, or in Constantinople, they frequently, if not always, raised the monolith a perceptible distance above the plinth of the base. On the four corners of this plinth they placed a bronze crab--one of the emblems of Apollo--or, as in Constantinople, a square of metal, and the obelisk itself rested upon these, daylight being distinctly visible between the obelisk and its base. The crabs were fixed into the plinth of the base by huge bronze dowels, and other dowels ran up into the four corners of the obelisk, holding it in place. The obelisk in New York, its mate in London, the larger Constantinople obelisk, and the Vatican obelisk were all re-erected by the Romans in that way. Opinions differ as to the reason for this departure from the original Egyptian method, but the decorative effect of this bold but simple device is at once apparent. It is obvious that an obelisk mounted in this way lends itself more easily to alien architectural surroundings.

This obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo was brought to Rome by young Octavius, afterward the Emperor Augustus, to honor his victory over Mark Antony at the battle of Actium, B. C. 31. Octavius believed that he owed his triumph to Apollo; and this obelisk erected by an Egyptian monarch of the XIXth dynasty before the great temple in Heliopolis, the city of the sun, seemed an altogether appropriate trophy. Octavius erected it in the Circus Maximus, where it stood throughout the greatest days of the Roman Empire. But the fate of the Roman obelisks had overtaken it at some time, for when Domenico Fontana suggested to Sixtus V to remove it to its present position it was lying broken in three pieces under masses of rubbish on the site of the old Circus.

There is no inscription upon the four fountains of the lionesses. They are to be regarded solely as adjuncts architecturally suitable to the obelisk, the interest of which must transcend all minor annals.

In developing his design for the Piazza del Popolo. Valadier had to consider and amalgamate the architectural features of many previous generations; for here in the Piazza del Popolo are grouped the works of a great number of Roman architects--men of the very first distinction in their own time and who have left the imprint of their industry or genius upon a large part of modern Rome. Baccio Pintelli, Michelangelo, Vignola, Carlo Fontana, Rainaldi, and Bernini were at work here in the centuries preceding Valadier, but to this last was given an opportunity of combining the past with the works of his own creation, such as had not fallen to the lot of any other Roman architect since the days when Michelangelo remodelled the Capitol.