Part 11

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

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

[Illustration: The Fountain of the Triton.]

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

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

“What the Barbarians spared, The Barberini took.”

NAVONA

[Illustration]

NAVONA

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

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

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

[Illustration: The Fountain of the Four Rivers.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

TREVI

[Illustration]

TREVI

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

[Illustration: Figure of “Neptune” in the Fountain of Trevi.]

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

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