Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

FOUNTAINS OF PAPAL ROME

FOUNTAINS OF PAPAL ROME

BY MRS. CHARLES MAC VEAGH

ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN AND ENGRAVED ON WOOD BY RUDOLPH RUZICKA

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published October, 1915

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TO THE MEMORY OF A FATHER AND DAUGHTER

CONTENTS

ST. PETER’S 1

SCOSSA CAVALLI 19

PIAZZA PIA 33

CAMPIDOGLIO 41

FARNESE 61

VILLA GIULIA 81

COLONNA 105

QUATTRO FONTANE 117

TARTARUGHE 133

FONTANA DEL MOSÈ 143

THE LATERAN 153

TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI 167

VILLA BORGHESE, NOW VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO 179

LA BARCACCIA 195

TRITON 205

NAVONA 213

TREVI 227

PIAZZA DEL POPOLO 239

PINCIAN 257

FONTANA PAOLA 267

MONTE CAVALLO 285

APPENDIX 303

CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF AQUEDUCTS MENTIONED, ANCIENT AND MODERN 307

CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF POPES MENTIONED 308

ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, AND ENGRAVERS MENTIONED 310

LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

View of Fountains and Obelisk of St. Peter’s from beneath Bernini’s Colonnade 9

Upper Basin of the Fountain in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli 25

View of the Piazza del Campidoglio from the Left Side of the Cordonata 47

One of the Fountains in the Piazza Farnese 71

Fountain of the Virgins 91

Fountain of the Tartarughe 137

The Fountain of the Sea-Horses 183

The Fountain of the Amorini 191

The Fountain of the Triton 209

The Fountain of the Four Rivers 217

Figure of “Neptune” in the Fountain of Trevi 233

Piazza del Popolo from the West 247

Mostra of the “Fontanone” 279

The Fountain of Monte Cavallo 291

ERRATA

Page 170, line 18, for London read Westminster.

Page 221, line 25, for Leo X read Innocent X.

Page 232, line 22, for Tre-vii read Trevie.

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INTRODUCTION

Rome has been called the most religious city in the world because of the number of her churches. With equal propriety, and perhaps with greater justice, she might be called the cleanest city in the world because of the number of her fountains. Pagan emperors and Christian popes alike have found both profit and pleasure in adding another fountain or in making or repairing one more aqueduct to give a still greater supply of water to the Roman populace. No other people, with the possible exception of the Spanish Moors, have so appreciated the value and the beauty of abundant water.

There are few squares, even in the Rome of to-day, where, at least in the silence of the night, the sound of splashing water may not be heard. The tiny fountain, often fern-fringed, with its ceaseless, slender stream of water, is the one priceless possession in hundreds of old courtyards, where it fills a damp and lonely silence with charm, or redeems by its indestructible quality of beauty the meanness of the squalid life about it. It is impossible to think of Rome without her fountains. Yet, after a few weeks, the eye is hardly aware of their presence. It is as if by their very beauty and omnipresence they had acquired the divine attributes of sunlight; and it requires the silence, as with the sunlight it requires the cloud, to rouse our consciousness to their existence. They take their place among the elemental causes of happiness, since the pain we feel at their loss is the only adequate measure of the pleasure they give us.

It is difficult for the man of to-day to picture to himself the abundance and splendor of the fountains in imperial Rome. Some idea of their character may be obtained from the description gathered from various sources of Nero’s fountain on the Cælian. The mingled waters of the Claudian and the Anio Novus aqueducts were brought thither over the Neronian arches. A wall fifty feet in height, faced with rare marbles and decorated by hemicycles and statues, formed the background of the first cascade. At the foot of this wall a huge basin received the stream, which then fell into another basin ten feet below the first, and thence flowed into the great artificial lake, described by Suetonius as like unto a sea, which filled all that space now occupied by the Coliseum. Of great magnificence also was the fountain of Severus Alexander on the Esquiline which served to introduce the Acqua Alexandrina, the eleventh and last water-supply of imperial Rome. A coin of the period gives a representation of this fountain, and in it can be traced a certain resemblance to the Fontana Paola which stands at the present day on the Janiculum, and which in its size and quantity of water reproduces faintly the fountains of the past.

That fine phrase, “la nostalgie de la civilisation,” nowhere finds a more perfect illustration than in the attitude of the Western world toward Rome. Some homing instinct of the human heart has for centuries carried thither men of every nation and of every sort of belief or unbelief; and the conviction that it will bring them thither in the future as in the past is implied in that other name by which we know her. She is the Eternal City. Every one can feel but no one can explain the charm which she has over the spirits of men. Here the psychic forces of the world’s great past are stored in imperishable memories. Here each individual finds spiritual influences which seem to have been waiting through the ages for his own peculiar appropriation. King Theodoric, in the sixth century, spoke not only for himself but for all succeeding generations of Northmen when he said that Rome was indifferent to none because foreign to none. It seems as if the feeling for Rome were an instinct congenital with our appetites and our passions. It requires no justification and it admits of no substitute. It is dateless and universal. The Gothic king of the past finds a spiritual brother in the schoolboy of to-day who caught his mother’s arm on the Terrace at Frascati to say, with an uncontrollable tremor in his voice: “See there; that little spot over there! That is Rome, and she was once the whole world!” King and schoolboy might have met familiarly in some sunny portico of the classic city. Both were members of the great freemasonry of the lovers of Rome, which stretches its network far and wide over our civilization.

In this company there are not a few who find themselves in Rome, yet not able to see Rome--to see it, that is, as the historians, artists, archæologists, and their own minds call upon them to see it. Their right to tread the Roman streets depends upon their obedience to some law compelling an existence lived entirely in the open air and in the broad sunshine. To such the gates of Paradise seem closed. To be forbidden the galleries and churches and catacombs and the hidden recesses of the old ruins appears an intolerable fate. Yet even to these, who have made the great acceptance and are living upon the half-loaf of life--even to these, Rome is kind. Little by little, in easy periods, they can get back into the days of the Renaissance, of the Counter-Reformation, of the Napoleonic Era, and of the great Risorgimento. This can be done under the conditions of open air and sunshine; for it is in such surroundings that we find the fountains, and the fountains of Rome are in themselves title-pages to Roman history.

ST. PETER’S

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ST. PETER’S

“Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the late Renaissance,” and those which stand on either side of the great Square of St. Peter’s show that Symonds’s statement should be enlarged so as to include the century which followed that period. Mr. John Evelyn, the accomplished English traveller of the seventeenth century, saw the fountain of Paul V soon after its completion and describes it in his diary as the “goodliest I ever saw”. Since his day the twin fountains both of Trafalgar Square and of the Place de la Concorde have been erected, but Evelyn could still give the superlative praise to the great Roman model. Although the two fountains in the Square of St. Peter’s are exactly alike they are not of precisely the same date. The conception of the design belongs to Carlo Maderno, who executed the fountain on the right of the approach to the basilica for Pope Paul V (Borghese, 1605–1621), while the fountain to the left was copied from this for Pope Clement X (Altieri, 1670–1676), some sixty years later. Clement’s courtiers had observed that whenever His Holiness walked in the direction of Paul V’s great fountain his eyes continually turned toward it. At length Clement ordered his architect, Carlo Fontana, nephew of Carlo Maderno, to make an exact copy of Maderno’s work and to erect it on the south side of the obelisk. The double fountain not only enhances the magnificence of the entire scene, but so changes it by introducing the additional element of balance that Clement X’s order for the second fountain was in reality an order for a new composition. The coat of arms cut upon the octagonal support of the upper basins and half hidden and obliterated by the falling water is, on the right-hand fountain, that of the Borghese family (the crowned eagle above the dragon); and on the left-hand fountain, that of the Altieri family, an inverted pyramid of six stars. The latter fountain looks as if it were the older, for, as it is situated in the southeast corner of the wide piazza, it is exposed to the full sweep of the Tramontana, or north wind, which has fretted and worn in no small degree the surface of the travertine. It may have been the more sheltered position of the northeast corner which determined the location of Paul V’s fountain, the earlier of the two. In the spring the Altieri fountain is the more beautiful because at that time that portion of the Colonnade which forms its background reveals vistas of foliage, while the moss web woven about the crown of the shaft is of a more brilliant green and the lower basin is full of the same aquatic growth swaying with the motion of the water.

The Acqua Paola, which feeds these fountains, comes, in the last instance, from the summit of the Janiculum, and therefore their central jets are flung upward to a height of sixty-four feet, far above the balustrade crowning Bernini’s lofty colonnades, which form the background of the piazza. This height exceeds by from twenty-four to thirty-four feet the height of the English and French fountains; and whereas in the fountains of London and Paris the supply and force of the water varies with the season of the year and the time of day (the Trafalgar Square fountains in summer play thirteen hours out of the twenty-four and in winter only seven), the abundance and power of the water in these great Roman fountains is unfailing and unchanging. At midnight, at high noon, in summer, in winter, they are always flowing, and the splash and wash of the water makes them akin to the cascades of Nature.

This perpetual flow has been a characteristic of the Roman fountains since the days of the Emperors. Frontinus, writing in the reign of Trajan, says that all the great fountains were constructed with two receiving-tanks, each from a separate aqueduct, so that no accident or emergency should diminish or stop the supply of water. The later popes were also careful to preserve this uninterrupted flow, and since the close of the Cinque Cento their fountains have played unceasingly. The lowest basins of both fountains (twenty-six feet in diameter) are of travertine with a rim of Carrara marble. The middle basins (fifteen feet in diameter) are of granite. That in the right-hand fountain is of red Oriental granite, and that in the left-hand fountain of gray granite. The inverted basins at the summit, on which the water falls, are of travertine, as are also the massive shafts, which, however, Maderno adorned with a slight moulding of Carrara marble just above the water-line in the lowest basins. The entire structures have been so transformed in color by three hundred years’ deposit of the Acqua Paola that they have the appearance of bronze. The water in each fountain rises in a crowded mass of separate jets from the summit of the central and single shaft, and falls at first on an inverted basin covered by deep carving, the richness of which gains in beauty from the green web woven about its curves and angles by the fall of the water. This upper carving seems to be a part of the fantastic action of the wind-tossed spray. The lower basins which receive the water are severely plain, the design following Nature’s scheme of development, from a fretted and turbulent source to the broad surfaces of the full stream. But the architectural values of these fountains are incalculably affected by the wonderful play of the water. It leaps upward as if to meet the sun; it falls back in tumult and foam; it drenches all about with its far-flung spray and wasteful overflow. It is the very triumph of vitality and joy.

The fountains of St. Peter’s might be said to bear toward the vast piazza of which they are a part the same relation as that of the eye to the human countenance: without them the noble spaces would seem cold and inanimate. This gleaming, tossing water endlessly at play with the wind and the sun, instinct with a power and a beauty not of man’s making--this it is which gives to the world-famous scene the touch of life.

Pope Paul V has not only the honor of having erected the first of these two modern fountains, but he has also that of having himself discovered the original manuscript of a poem in which mention is made of the first fountain connected with the Church of St. Peter. This poem dates from the fourth century and was written by Pope Damasus (366–384). This pontiff was, like the Emperor Hadrian, a Spaniard; and, like Hadrian, he was not only a ruler of men, but gifted with many and varied talents. He was an archæologist, a civil engineer, theologian, and poet. He presided over that Ecumenical Council by which the second great heresy threatening the church was condemned, as the first had been at the Council of Nicæa.

St. Jerome, after years of friendship, became secretary to the then care-worn and ailing pontiff, among whose many labors had been the restoration of the Catacomb of St. Calixtus, and other tombs of the early Christians and martyrs, some of which he marked with metrical inscriptions of his own composition. It must have been while engaged upon this pious work of reconstruction in the Vatican Hill that he came upon those springs that, for lack of a proper channel, had damaged the tombs upon the hillside and were threatening to undermine his great basilica (the first Church of St. Peter) within less than fifty years of its erection by Constantine. He drained the ground in the vicinity, building a small aqueduct, “neatly in the old Roman style of masonry,” to lead these unshepherded waters to definite localities where they could be a benefit and not a danger to their surroundings. The water thus collected is called the Acqua Damasiana, and to this day the private apartments of the Pope are supplied from this source. The feeding springs of this water are located at Sant’ Antonio, to the west of the church, and the aqueduct of Pope Damasus lies at a depth of ninety-eight feet. Pope Damasus himself describes this in the poem which was discovered in 1607, more than twelve hundred years later, by Pope Paul V.

Pope Damasus says: “The Hill” (Vatican Hill) “was abundant in springs, and the water found its way to the very graves of the saints. Pope Damasus determined to check the evil. He caused a large portion of the Vatican Hill to be cut away, and by excavating channels and boring _cuniculi_ he drained the springs so as to make the basilica dry and also to provide it with a steady fountain of excellent water.” Of this steady fountain there is no description, and therefore the fountain of Pope Symmachus (498–514) becomes the first fountain recorded in the history of St. Peter’s.

[Illustration: View of fountains and obelisk of St. Peter’s from beneath Bernini’s Colonnade.]

Pope Symmachus was a Corsican. He evidently had a passion for building every kind of structure connected with water as a cleanser and as a beautifier of man’s civic life. His fountain, built at a time when civilization and art in Rome were at a low ebb, was a quaint and exquisite structure, composed of a square tabernacle supported by eight columns of red porphyry with a dome of gilt bronze. Peacocks, dolphins, and flowers, also of gilt bronze, were placed on the four architraves, from which jets of water flowed into the basin below. The border of the basin was made of ancient marble bas-reliefs, representing panoplies, griffins, and other graceful devices. On the top of the structure were semicircular bronze ornaments worked “à jour,” that is, in open relief, without background, and crowned by the monogram of Christ. In the centre of the tabernacle and under the dome stood a bronze pine-cone. This fountain stood, not in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, but in the atrium, or the square portico, which stood in front and on the right hand of the old basilica.

The history of the construction and destruction of this beautiful fountain of the dark ages is an excellent example of the artistic and architectural methods of those times. Arts and crafts had already sunk to so low a depth that there were no longer any men in Rome capable of casting or carving statues like those of former days, and marble had ceased to be imported into the city. Consequently all monuments or other artistic structures were made up of figures in marble or bronze, panels, columns, friezes, and similar decorations, stolen from the productions of the great days of the Empire. The Arch of Constantine, erected in 315, is composed to such an extent of columns and sculpture from a Triumphal Arch of Trajan that it was surnamed “Æsop’s Crow”; and the Column of Phocas (608), the last triumphal monument to be erected in imperial Rome, consists of a shaft and capital surmounted by a bronze figure, all taken from earlier as well as different structures. Pope Symmachus was only following the established methods when, to ornament his porphyry columns (themselves probably part of some classic temple), he took four of the golden peacocks which had been originally cast for a decoration to the railing of the walk surrounding the Tomb of Hadrian, and, furthermore, placed as the centrepiece a great pine-cone taken from the Baths of Agrippa. These pine-cones were a customary feature of the classic fountain, as the scales of the cone present natural and graceful outlets for the falling water. Symmachus’s fountain was one of the beauties of Rome in the days when the great Gothic King Theodoric ruled and loved the city. Three hundred years later it captivated the fancy of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800; and the fountain afterward erected before his great cathedral at Aix is ornamented with a huge pine-cone like the one which he and his Franks had seen in the exquisite fountain of St. Peter’s.

Three other fountains were placed before the church as the years went by. They are described by Pope Celestinus II (1143–1144), while he was Canon of St. Peter’s, and are set down in his “Ordo Romanus,” or Itinerary, or Guide. They were situated, not in the atrium, where stood the fountain of Symmachus, but below, in that small square or _cortile_ at the foot of the steps of St. Peter’s. One fountain was of porphyry and two of white marble. They would seem to have disappeared quite early. The fountain of Symmachus was described in 1190 by Censius Camerarius, afterward Pope Honorius III, and it stood through more than eleven centuries of the confused and turbulent history of the city. It survived the siege and capture of Rome by Vitiges in 537. It came unscathed through the sack of the city by the Saracens in 886, and that of the Normans in 1084; and stranger still, it was not wrecked by the terrible Lanzknechts of the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. Only when the ages of violence and pillage were passed, did this historic fountain of the early church succumb to a fate similar to that of the Pagan monuments, out of which it had itself been formed. When in 1607 the work on the new Church of St. Peter, which was begun in 1506 at the rear of the old sanctuary and brought forward through the century, had reached the atrium, this “gem of the art of the dark ages” was deliberately demolished by Pope Paul V, who melted the gilded bronze to make the figure of the Virgin now surmounting the Column of Santa Maria Maggiore. Perhaps the metal thus obtained was more than he needed; possibly some artistic or antiquarian compunction visited the pontiff--for two of the peacocks and the great bronze cone were spared. They found their way to the Vatican Gardens, and now they stand in the Giardino della Pigna waiting for the next turn of Fortune’s wheel.

Yet another fountain was once associated with the basilica of St. Peter. It was erected in the old square while the fountain of Symmachus still stood in the atrium to the right of the main entrance to the church. About the year 1492, Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibo) gathered the waters from springs on the Vatican Hill and from the practically ruined Aqueduct of Trajan into this fountain, which was finished by his successor, Alexander VI (Borgia). The design was greatly admired in its day. It consisted of golden bulls, from whose mouths the water fell into a granite basin, and the bull was the emblem of the Borgia family. During the crowded years of the famous Cinque Cento, or until the pontificate of Gregory XIII, this fountain of Innocent VIII, and the old fountain of Trevi (restored by Sixtus IV) supplied Rome with what the present day would call its pure drinking water. They contained the only water brought into the city from distant springs, for mediæval Rome had lost all but two of her great aqueducts, and these were constantly falling into disuse; and all the pontiffs, painters, poets, and architects, as well as the populace of that dramatic period drank the doubtful water of wells and of the Tiber.

This fountain of Innocent VIII was destroyed when the modern Piazza of St. Peter’s replaced the very much smaller one of earlier days. Probably the golden bulls were melted down into other shapes, and the great red granite basin was used by Carlo Maderno for the upper basin of the magnificent new fountain which he designed and executed at that period for Paul V, and which is the northern one of the two fountains of the present day in the Piazza of St. Peter’s.