Part 14
In Maggi’s book on the fountains of Rome, printed in 1618, there is an engraving of this fountain. It is represented as having four griffins and two eagles spouting water into the basins as do the lions in Sixtus V’s Fountain of the Moses. This device is not shown in Falda’s engraving a generation later, nor does Piranesi show it. It is probable that this feature existed only on paper in the original design for the fountain. Under the two side niches of the actual fountain the water spouts from lions’ mouths. From the three centre niches it simply pours in three cascades, equal in size, and of really magnificent force and volume. The effect of this water in full sunshine is dazzling in the extreme, and both in sight and sound the fountain must have been as conspicuous as Paul V could have wished it to be. Paul V never saw it completed, for he died in 1621, ten years after the fountain was begun. It was finished by Alexander VIII in 1690, eight pontificates later. It was, therefore, seventy-eight years in building, whereas Domenico Fontana built and unveiled the Fountain of the Moses for Sixtus V within that Pope’s own pontificate, which lasted only five years! The Fontana Paola is--to translate sight into sound--an echo of the Fountain of the Moses. It has the characteristics of an echo--it is magnified and meaningless. Giovanni Fontana and Maderno could not free themselves from the taste and traditions of the greater and more forceful Domenico. They did not mar the effect of their great fountain by an absurd colossus, like the Moses, but they made a mistake of another kind; they left the central niche above the cascade absolutely empty, yet failed to secure an adequate background for the eye to rest upon, so that the structure, for all its size and magnificence, gives a disagreeable sense of vacancy and incompleteness. However, as one studies the Fontanone, as this fountain is commonly called, it becomes apparent that its mostra must be regarded not as a façade, nor as a screen, but as a great water-gate. It is a triumphal arch through which the water of the Pauline Aqueduct makes its formal entry on the Janiculum in the sight of all Rome. It is also built to hold before the eyes of all Rome the inscription which sets forth the history of Pope Paul V and the construction of the aqueduct. The inscription is certainly the most successful part of the mostra. It is adequately supported, its dimensions are noble, and the lettering is remarkably beautiful. The entrance of the water, on the other hand, is not sufficiently imposing. The three streams are not great enough in themselves to justify their right to so pretentious a setting, and they require a background which would augment their importance. Through the huge arches, which were certainly never intended to hold statuary, the eye should see the approach of the water either in a series of cascades or in one broad flood like the serried ranks of a great army. But to produce this effect it would be necessary for the channel of the aqueduct to approach the fountain directly from the rear and to have the castellum or receiving tank immediately behind the mostra. It is noticeable that neither in this fountain nor in the other two great fountains of Rome--the Moses and the Trevi--is this done. In all three the castellum is at the side of the mostra, and the water falls into the basins at a right angle to the direction in which it enters the fountain from the castellum. This position of the castellum was obligatory in the case of Trevi, as that fountain backs against the Poli Palace, but when the Moses and Paola fountains were constructed they stood free from all other buildings on open hillsides, and the castellum in either instance could be located at will. In the Paola fountain the castellum lies to the left of the mostra, as it faces the city, and the aqueduct comes underground down the hill forming the boundary between the gardens now belonging to the Villa Chiaraviglio, which is a part of the American Academy, and a small villa owned by the Torlonia family, so that the stream approaches the fountain obliquely. The ground directly back of the Paola fountain is occupied by a modern villa with a small garden, and the entrance to the house as well as the trees in the garden are clearly seen through the arches of the mostra, which thus has more or less the appearance from the front of a huge screen before a shrine of no signification, while the view of it in profile is too thin. The entire fountain seems to require a solid background such as Giovanni Fontana gave to his truly noble and beautiful fountain of the Ponte Sisto. There the immense niche is placed against a massive wall, and the gloom of the vaulted space is lighted by a gleaming cascade which issues not at the base of the niche but high up in the very spring of the arch. This cascade falls into a projecting vase, also near the roof, and thence descends in heavy spray to the black pool beneath. On either side this pool jets of water spouting from the Borghese griffins cross like flashing rapiers--a natural enough fancy to an artist living in an age when the thrust and parry of the rapier were known to all men. This most artistic of all the Fontana fountains was also erected for Paul V. It used to stand on the other side of the Tiber, opposite the Strada Giulia, but in recent years, when the Tiber embankment was constructed, the fountain was taken down and set up in its present position at the head of the Ponte Sisto. If the waters of the Fontanone had received some such treatment as this, Paul V’s greatest fountain might have indeed rivalled those of ancient Rome.
Paul V (Borghese), surnamed by the friends of the Aldobrandini “the Grand Ingrate,” succeeded to the papacy in 1605. His immediate predecessor had been the Medici pontiff, Leo XI, but Leo died twenty-six days after his election, so that Paul V’s real forerunner was Clement VIII (Aldobrandini).
[Illustration: Mostra of the “Fontanone.”]
The Borghese family came originally from Siena. When the Spaniard took that heroic and beautiful city, Philip II handed her over to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and many Sienese families emigrated, rather than submit to the rule of the Medici. Camillo Borghese, the father of Paul V, emigrated to Rome, where his son Camillo, the future pontiff, was born. This was in 1552, Julius III being then Pope. Camillo’s career began in the law, as has been the case with so many of those who have risen to the See of St. Peter. He studied in Perugia and Padua; was sent on a mission to Spain, and, proving successful there, was given the Red Hat in 1596 by Clement VIII, he being at that time forty-four years of age. Living as cardinal, quietly and unobtrusively among his books and documents, he had seemed to Peter Aldobrandini, who was the all-powerful nephew of Clement VIII, the very man to carry on Clement’s steady policy of restoring the French influence at Rome and of keeping his own family in power. The Aldobrandini had left Florence from hatred of the Medici, as the Borghese had left Siena, and Peter felt that in the case of Camillo Borghese he could rely upon feelings similar to his own to back up the coalition of himself and France against Spain. With the premature death of Leo XI all the complicated machinery of the conclave had had to be put in motion once again, and in this second conclave the nephew of Clement VIII was the most powerful of the forces at work. He threw his influence for Cardinal Borghese, and Paul V undoubtedly owed his election to that fact. Peter Aldobrandini had been a very great papal nephew, indeed, and he expected from the Borghese pontiff a proper recognition of his services. Even with the keenest sense of humor in the world, Cardinal Aldobrandini would have found it hard not to feel resentment when he learned that Cardinal Borghese, now Paul V, considered his unsought-for election to the papal chair entirely due to the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, and that in consequence he owed nothing whatever to earthly aid. It was because Paul V carried this idea so far on the one hand, and on the other poured such lavish favors upon his own kin, that he won for himself the name of “the Grand Ingrate.” Looking upon himself as divinely appointed in a marked and special degree, the quiet, unassuming cardinal became the opinionated and inflexible pontiff. He administered the papal power, temporal and spiritual, with the arrogance of a despot, the intolerance of an inquisitor, and the formality of the jurist. During the sixteen years of his pontificate he succeeded in rousing bitter hostility on all sides. The aged Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had lived through nine pontificates and had known both Sixtus V and Clement VIII, complained that this Pope judged of the world as he would of one of the towns belonging to the papal territory where everything was done according to the letter of the law, and went on to say that in this respect there would soon have to be a change. The year before his election the gunpowder plot had fanned England into a white heat of patriotism, and a new oath of allegiance was required by Parliament. Paul V was the Pope who forbade the English Catholics to take it. He also was the Pope who so mishandled the Gallican Church that he forced the States General of 1614 to declare that the King of France held his power from God alone; and, finally, it was Paul V who spent the first two years of his pontificate in such a quarrel with Venice as threatened to involve all Christendom. The Republic so unflinchingly endured excommunication and interdict that the Pope even thought of subduing her by arms. He was brought to his senses only by the fear that Venice in her extremity might call Protestant powers to her aid and thus bring confusion and disaster not only upon Italy but upon all Catholic countries. In this grave crisis France took it upon herself to mediate, and the dispute was finally settled, but with little honor to the papacy. It was a Venetian ambassador who has recorded of Clement VIII that when he found he could not reform Florence without great trouble he reformed his own mind. But Paul V did not, like the wise Clement VIII, “look to his predecessors” when in difficulties. Paul V had certainly no cause to love the Venetians, and it is one of the quaint tricks of history that his magnificent fountain on the Janiculum was at last finished by a Venetian Pope.
Although the Fontanone was built in the seventeenth century, its most interesting associations are connected with modern Rome. It is pre-eminently the fountain of the Risorgimento, for the last stand in Garibaldi’s three months’ defense of the Roman Republic was made upon the terraces surrounding this water, and it was just above here that the worst fighting occurred.
The second stage of the siege consisted of the nine days’ defense of the Aurelian wall, behind which Garibaldi was intrenched.
This bit of wall runs northwest and southeast on the eastern slope of the hill, and within the walls of Pope Urban VIII. At its northern end it is at about an equal distance from the Fontanone and the Porta San Pancrazio. When this defense broke down, the French troops entered the city through a breach in the Urban walls to the southwest of the fountain. The narrow lane leading from this point to Porta San Pancrazio was soon choked with the dead and dying. The Italians and French fought hand to hand in the darkness, along the road in front of the Villa Aurelia, that road which is to-day so quiet and so clean! During the previous eight days bursting shells from the French batteries erected on the walls and near the Villa Corsini and the Convent of San Pancrazio had wrought far-reaching havoc.
The Church of San Pietro in Montorio was used by Garibaldi as a hospital, but its roof had collapsed, and on the slopes above it all the great villas were in ruins. To the northwest of the fountain, just above the Porta San Pancrazio, the Villa Savorelli (now the Villa Aurelia and the present home of the American Academy) stood up against the sky, a mere shell of blackened walls. Outside the porta, the Vascello lay in masses of crumbled masonry, although Medici still held it for Garibaldi. Farther up the hill, over the spot now occupied by the triumphal arch, towered the remains of the magnificent Villa Corsini; before it the body of Masina, still lying where the young lancer had fallen after his last wild charge up the villa steps. Amid the general devastation the Fontanone stood unscathed. Its splendid stream of water flowed unpolluted, and it fulfilled the noblest functions of a fountain during the heat and carnage of that Roman June.
To those who are familiar with the story of the heroic “Defense” a visit to Paul V’s great fountain on the Janiculum is not a bit of sight-seeing--it has become a pilgrimage.
MONTE CAVALLO
[Illustration]
MONTE CAVALLO
The fountain of the Monte Cavallo is overshadowed both literally and figuratively by the size and importance of the objects which surround it. Without it the obelisk, which forms its background, and the great groups of the Dioscuri, which flank it on either side, would be sufficiently imposing and significant, either separately or together, to form the central decoration of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, or of any piazza in any city; but the fountain is not entirely superfluous. Its magnificent jet of water, thrown upward between the heads of the rearing horses and swept hither and thither at the will of the wind, binds together the otherwise disjointed and inharmonious group.
This fountain is not the first one to be erected on Monte Cavallo, but the first fountain was as subservient as the present one to the colossal groups which have given the name “Cavallo” to this entire district. The Dioscuri were once a part of a kind of open-air museum which, during the earliest days of the papacy, existed on the slope of the Quirinal Hill. Gregory XIII had them removed to the Capitol, but when Sixtus V had purchased from the heirs of Cardinal Caraffa the site and the partly erected buildings of the Quirinal, he brought them back again and subjected them to a thorough restoration, using for this purpose the material from the base of one of them.
There has existed a villa on this spot antedating Pope Sixtus V’s time by many years. It had been called the Villa d’Este, but it should not be confused with the Villa d’Este, at Tivoli, although it was built by the same Cardinal Ippolito of that family.
Sixtus V was extremely fond of this portion of the city and with Fontana’s assistance he created the magnificent palace and surroundings which ever since his day have been associated with sovereign power in Rome. Fontana enlarged the piazza before the palace in order to make it “commodious for consistories,” and he also lowered the grade in order to bring hither the Acqua Felice.
There must have been many discussions between Pope Sixtus V and his architect with regard to the fountain on the Quirinal. Everything that Sixtus V did he did thoroughly and magnificently, and it was quite natural that he should desire a splendid fountain before his own palace, considering that it was he himself who had made it possible, by the introduction of the Acqua Felice, to have a fountain in that place at all. A rare old engraving shows that the fountain, as at first planned, resembled the Fountain of the Moses. In it the Dioscuri occupy the niches as does the Moses in the fountain on the Viminal. This plan was happily abandoned. The great classic figures were erected as they stand to-day in front of the palace, and Fontana placed between the two groups, in the same position as the fountain of the present day, the conventional large basin and central vase which is to be seen in the old engravings of the seventeenth century. It was certainly neither a very original nor a very interesting design and it must have relied for its effect entirely upon the copious supply of water which was described by Evelyn in 1644 as “two great rivers.”
It is difficult to say when this old fountain of Fontana’s disappeared. It was probably removed either at the time when Antinori erected the obelisk for Pius VI or in the following pontificate when the same architect suggested to Pius VII the idea of replacing it by the present granite basin. This basin had stood since 1594 in the Campo Vaccino, the mediæval name for the ruins of the Roman Forum. It had been placed there during the pontificate of Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) by the city magistrates on a piece of ground given to them by Cardinal Farnese, near the three columns of Castor and Pollux and the Church of S. Maria Liberatrice. They had provided a high travertine base for it, and it was fed from three jets of the Acqua Felice, which, some eight or nine years previously, had been brought to Rome by Sixtus V. The basin was used as a watering-trough for cattle, and by the time Pius VII rescued it the travertine base had entirely disappeared under the gradually rising level of the Campo Vaccino--that strange composite mass of rubbish, earth, and ruins which, up to the second half of the nineteenth century, covered the old Forum floor to a depth of more than twenty feet. The basin measures twenty-three metres in circumference, and when it was thus sunk in the ground it became a pleasant pool through which the carters walked their horses to refresh them on a warm and dusty day. The removal of this basin was actually accomplished in 1818, when the architect Raphael Stern (who built for Pius VII the Bracchio Nuovo) designed the present fountain of Monte Cavallo. He sank the basin in the pavement between the horse-tamers and erected in the middle of it a second basin which rests upon a travertine base. The water of the fountain rises in a copious jet from the centre of the second basin to a height somewhat below the heads of the horses and, returning on itself, falls in a generous overflow into the lower basin.
[Illustration: The Fountain of Monte Cavallo.]
To some, the chief interest of this composite group of obelisk, statuary, and fountain centres in this lower basin, for it is none other than the granite tazza into which Marforio once poured the water from his urn, far, far back in the days of Charlemagne, and no one knows for how many years before that.
The obelisk which forms the centre of this group of antiquities now clustered together in the Monte Cavallo is one of a pair which flanked the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Its mate was erected by Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana near the Church of S. Maria Maggiore.
Pius VI and Pius VII were the two Popes whose pontificates coincide with the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests. Their unhappy stories are bound up with the history of the Quirinal Palace, which fronts upon the Monte Cavallo; and they form a pitiful contrast to the life of that masterful old Pontiff Sixtus V, in whose reign the history of the palace and the modern piazza begins. Sixtus, having destroyed, for no reason now known, the old mediæval papal palace of the Lateran, decided to rebuild it to suit himself, but found, as the new building progressed, that it was too cold and uncomfortable for a residence. So the Lateran, which had been the papal palace since the seventh century, holding its own against the magnificence and enormous size of the Vatican, was gradually abandoned as a residence, and Sixtus established himself in the Quirinal.
Sixtus V, for all his detestation of classic statuary, must have shared with his people the profound respect and admiration always aroused by the Dioscuri. These colossal groups were among the few rare works of antiquity which were cherished by the semi-barbarous Romans of the Middle Ages, and the web of fable spun about them during those dark years proves the hold they had over the superstitious imagination of the times. “Nothing is beyond question” about them, says Lanciani, except that they once adorned the temple which the Emperor Aurelian built to the sun on his return from the conquest of Palmyra in 272. This most magnificent of all Roman temples, to quote the same great modern authority, became a quarry for building materials, even as early as the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian is said to have taken some porphyry columns from it to adorn the Church of St. Sophia in his new capital of Constantinople. The Dioscuri must have been discovered later in the Baths of Constantine. The relative positions of the horses and their tamers were ascertained from antique coins. Modern authorities are of the opinion that they are Roman copies of Greek originals, and they are counted among the great inheritances from imperial Rome.
It is curious to trace the working of the mediæval intelligence, groping its way through mysticism and allegory to find some explanation for the undeniable impression made by these heroic figures upon the minds of all who behold them. The attempt to read into them some abstruse ethical meaning was abandoned long ago, and the world of to-day accepts the Dioscuri frankly for what they are, admiring, with a wonder not unmixed with despair, the unreclaimable art of ancient Greece.
“Ye too marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement, Stand with upstretched arms and tranquil, regardant faces, Stand as instinct with life, in the might of immutable manhood-- Oh, ye mighty and strange--ye ancient divine ones of Hellas!”
Whatever may have been the lot of the Dioscuri in the unaccounted-for days of the past, since Sixtus V placed them here they have been in the very thick of Roman political life. Around and about them have surged some of the worst mobs of modern Roman history; and under their “tranquil, regardant faces” crowds of peaceful, expectant citizens have gathered from time to time during the last two centuries of papal government. Here they have waited during papal elections to watch for the smoke from the chimney of the Quirinal which should indicate to the outside world that no choice had yet been made by the Conclave, since the cardinals were burning the ballots. Here they have received the blessing of the newly elected Pope, which was given from the balcony of the window over the entrance.