Part 6
Louis XIV, for whom careful plans of the villa were drawn, wisely made no attempt to copy the enchanted palace of Italy. Versailles makes up in size for the beauty of color, architecture, vegetation, and art treasures here formed into one beautiful whole by Pope Julius III. The shape of the Villa Giulia is significant. It is a series of gardens, loggias, and courts, one enclosing the other, each richer in ornamentation, more ravishing in beauty than the last, until finally the heart of the creation is reached, and the “secret fountain” of the Acqua Vergine is discovered flowing out of the shadow and from a hidden source into a sunlit Nymphæum of marvellous beauty and again mysteriously disappearing into the shadow. The Fountain of the Virgins, as it came to be called, was felt by its creator, Amannati, to be beyond the power of description. Writing to a friend in Padua, soon after Pope Julius’s death, he describes the entire villa in extraordinary detail, noting the attitude even of many of the statues; but when, after pages of description, he has brought his reader to the lowest court of all, his pen fails him and he says that unless he can paint a picture of this court and fountain he will never be able to give his friend “any conception of this, the loveliest, richest, and most marvellous place in the entire creation.” Amannati saw it in its first splendor. The caryatides were perfect, white, and gleaming, and perhaps beautiful. The niches round about were filled with marble boys carrying urns upon their shoulders from which the water was poured into the semicircular stream at their feet. It is impossible to tell from the description of the old pictures what, if any, statue filled the central niche behind the virgins. At present the niche holds a great white marble swan, now almost hidden by fern, from whose bill the water trickles into the black pool beneath. The pavement, made of every conceivable kind of marble, glowed like a jewel. The balustrade above held graceful statues and on either side of the court just above stood a great plane-tree, giving delicious verdure and shade. Then, as now, the water came from large reservoirs hidden beneath the upper terrace to the east of the fountain; then, as now, it was carried off over gentle, rough-paved inclines; then, as now, it fell steeply into a subterranean cavern--the entire construction producing waves of cool air and a ripple and murmur of water exquisitely refreshing to both eye and ear. It is almost necessary to forgive Pope Julius his attack upon the aqueduct. Never before or since has the Acqua Vergine received such poetic treatment.
Nothing remains of this beauty but the water and the masonry. Pope Julius was hardly buried before the spoliation of his villa began. Like the Pope’s beautiful resting-place behind the public fountain, the Nymphæum has endured three centuries of vile usage and neglect. Nowhere in Rome is it more necessary to use imagination than in the Villa Giulia. The visitor should descend into the lowest court on a day of brilliant sunshine and, standing before the Fountain of the Virgins, replace for himself the lost lustre of the columns, the whiteness of the balustrades, the rich coloring of mural paintings and stucco, and the gleam of antique statuary. He should see the flickering shadows cast by the great plane-trees across the marble pavement, and hear the birds twittering or calling from the aviaries which were in the loggia wall above the river-gods. He must fancy the fitful music of stringed instruments, the perfume from the orange groves drifting over the garden walls where sat the monkeys and brilliant tropical birds. He must feel the languid stir or deep repose of long, indolent, luxurious summer days, and through it all, he must be conscious of the water. Only so will he be able to form some adequate conception of what the “secret fountain” must have been in the days of Pope Julius III. The highest charm of the beautiful creation lay in its presentation of contrast translated into a medium suitable to every sense. It was an age of contrast, sharp and constant. No feature in the crowded Italian life of those two centuries is so striking as this. Fame and obloquy; triumphant health and the lazar-house; honor and exile; the luxury of an Agostino Chigi and the squalor of the beggar at his doors; compassion and fiendish cruelty, young Cardinal Borromeo’s sanctity on the one hand, and on the other unblushing licentiousness; beauty to which all but divine honors were paid, and hideous deformity; these lay open to the eye on every side. There seemed to be no transition. The “secret fountain,” with its light and shade, its rest and motion, sound and silence, its art and nature, was the poetic expression of life as it was known by the men for whom it was created.
The records of those days are never free from blood, and at least one assassination is connected with the building of this house of mirth. Baronino, an associate of Vignola and Amannati, leaving the villa with a friend on a certain evening, was set upon as he turned into the Via Flaminia and stabbed to death. The angle in the walls made by the public fountain and the fact that it was a natural place for loiterers probably suggested the choice of the spot. The assassin’s identity was either never discovered or never revealed and the crime went unpunished, for Cellini was not the only lucky rascal. Artists especially carried their lives in their hands, and genius was as open to violence as it was to fame.
Historians and moralists accord scant justice and no mercy to Julius III. He is represented by them as spending his life in senseless and indolent pleasures. Yet he had begun his pontificate with some show of earnestness. He had reopened the Council of Trent, and had attempted to play a part in the diplomacy of Europe. That after two years he wearied of these arduous labors might have been because he had sufficient wit to perceive that, for his time at least, the Papal See would have to be a tool in the hands of Austria. His devotion to the creation of his villa was perhaps the only outlet for the activities of a nature too slight to cope with the stern and sinister century on which his lot had fallen. Long days spent with Vignola, Amannati, and Vasari, and above all, with the aged but undaunted Michelangelo himself, for whom this Pope felt a loving veneration, must have had a zest and stimulating quality sufficient to make the Pope’s life in this villa something more than the sybaritic enjoyment of mere sensuous beauty.
Beyond a doubt, the construction of his villa became an obsession with the Pope. He gradually abandoned all other avocations and duties. It was at the villa that he held his audiences, received ambassadors, and gave his suppers, at which last his wit was said to be of less fine quality than were his vintages. He even had a medal struck, with his own head on one side and on the other the front elevation of the Villa Giulia, with the inscription, “Fons Virginibus.”
One fatal day a pet monkey savagely attacked the Pope. He was rescued by a lad of sixteen whom he soon after made a cardinal. The scandal was very great. Prelates and laymen alike felt this to be going too far. The Pope might lay himself open to censure but not to ridicule. Here in the midst of the beauty created by Pope Julius, men’s eyes began to turn toward the slightly grim, ascetic figure of Cardinal della Croce, great Roman patrician and true saint, who, as if to give the final note to this life of vivid contrast, moved about in the gay papal court, reserved, austere, devoted to a life of such sanctity that the Pope himself felt uncomfortable in his presence.
The villa was still far from finished when Julius III’s short pontificate came to an end. The Conclave almost unanimously chose as his successor their saintly brother, Cardinal della Croce.[E] The world had entered upon a new phase. Northern Europe had brought the spirit of the Reformation to the gates of Rome, and men were ashamed of Pope Julius III, whose misfortune it had been to live half a century too late.
The Villa Giulia passed into the ownership of the popes and remained there until it was taken over by the state in the present government. It was eventually finished by Popes Pius IV and Pius V, but the art treasures were scattered far and wide. During many pontificates it was used for the stopping place of ambassadors and other great personages who spent the night there before making their ceremonial entrance into Rome. Perhaps the presence of so much water and luxurious vegetation made the place peculiarly sensitive to mould and decay. Even as early as 1585 it was not considered healthful. Sixtus V, with the restless caprice of the poor sleeper, wished to spend a night there, but was forbidden to do so by his physician. As it was papal property, no private individual ever had the chance to take over the beautiful old building and gardens and keep them in repair; and those popes whose tastes might have led them to restore it built pleasure-houses or palaces for themselves. Gregory XIII began the Quirinal Palace, and not infrequently for his villegiatura visited the magnificent villa of Mondragone at Frascati which Cardinal Altemps had already begun to build. Sixtus V built his Villa Montalto, the new Lateran Palace, and finished the Quirinal Palace. Clement VIII contented himself with the Quirinal; but his great cardinal nephew, Peter Aldobrandini, founded the magnificent Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. The Medici Leo XI devoted himself to the Villa Medici. Paul V did indeed make a restoration, using much stucco, which can easily be distinguished from the beautiful work of the original period, but that Pope’s interest was really given to the great villa which his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, was creating out of the old Villa Cenci.
Finally, late in the eighteenth century, the papal chair was occupied by a man of culture who felt the charm of the old Cinque Cento villa in the Valle Giulia, and tried to rescue it from total ruin. This was the Ganganelli Pope, Clement XIV, the founder of the Clementine sculpture gallery in the Vatican. Clement XIV’s investigation of Pope Julius III’s villa showed that the aqueducts were ruined, the walls crumbled by water, the pavements cracked by fire, while all the wood and iron work was broken or rusted, and the exquisite paintings, stucco, and gilding spoiled by smoke and damp.[F] The papal architect, Raphael Stern, made careful and elaborate drawings from old plans, with a view to a genuine restoration, as Pius VI (who, in 1774, succeeded Clement XIV) carried on the work. This Pope also felt the fascination of the marvellous, all but ruined pleasure-house, and decided to make it his autumn residence, but it was too late! Pope Pius VI was carried off by the French Revolutionary forces in 1798 and died a prisoner in the French fortress of Valence. From that time forward, the villa fell more and more into decay. Its pitiful condition might have furnished material for endless sermons on the vanity of life, and the ruin of its exquisite decorations fills all artists and lovers of the beautiful with indignant regret. It has been a veterinary hospital, a cavalry barracks, a storehouse for hay--no desecration has been spared it. At last the present government rescued what was left of it and converted it into a museum of antiquities, giving the last ironic touch to its fate by filling the rooms built to minister to the joy and pride of life, with ancient coffins and relics of the dead.
COLONNA
[Illustration]
COLONNA
The fountain of the Piazza Colonna might be the “Fountain of Youth,” for the freshness of its marbles makes it seem to date from yesterday, whereas it is in reality one of the oldest fountains of modern Rome. It was constructed three hundred and twenty-five years ago, and belongs to that period when the Acqua Vergine (Trevi Water) was the only water with which to feed a fountain. As the Acqua Vergine has not sufficient head to rise to any great height, and as its supply is in continuous and wide-spread use for domestic purposes, the designs for the fountains which it furnishes have to be low, and the sculptor or architect must rely for his effect not upon any lavish supply of water but upon the beauty of his materials and his own imagination. The fountains of Giacomo della Porta show the practical difficulties with which he had to contend, and the felicity of his genius in overcoming the limitation. His fountain of the “Tartarughe” is a work of art, and as such can be admired without the aid of the water. The two side fountains in the Piazza Navona, also his creations, were quite lovely before Bernini decorated one and artists of the nineteenth century the other with fantastic sculpture. His fountain of the Piazza Colonna has been less tampered with and, standing in full sunlight or darkened by the vast shadow of the Antonine Column, it remains, in its quiet beauty, a masterpiece among the Roman fountains. It is a graceful, hectagonal receptacle, half basin, half drinking-trough, composed of different kinds of Porta Santa marble. These are joined together with straps of Carrara ornamented by lions’ heads.[G] Its waters come to it from a vase of antique shape standing in the centre. From the shallow bowl of this central vase the water gushes upward to fall over the rim in a soft, unbroken, silvery stream, and through this vestal’s veil the Carrara, to which the waters have given a wonderful surface, gleams in unsullied freshness and beauty. Two tiny jets, set midway on either side between the ends of the fountain and the vase in the centre, bring an additional volume and add to the animation of the pool. The vase in the centre is represented in an old engraving by Falda as being much lower than the present one and carved in crowded leaflike convolutions, like the vase of the Scossa Cavalli fountain.
By 1829 this bit of old travertine sculpture had become so misshapen that the artist Stocchi, by order of Leo XII, replaced it by the present Carrara vase, adding at that time to either end of the trough the small groups of shells and dolphins. These are such dainty bits of fancy, and so frankly an afterthought, that in their first freshness at least they could not have marred the beauty of the original conception. Rather must they have enhanced it, as the white doves which are perched upon its rim make the charm of the “Pliny’s Vase.” Giacomo della Porta is the first fountain builder of modern Rome, and the fountains which he did for Gregory XIII--all constructed for Trevi Water--are still among the loveliest the city holds. The passion for fountain building began in the second half of the Cinque Cento. Julius III rediscovered the immense æsthetic value of water, the Nymphæum in his Villa Giulia being, in fact, the apotheosis of the Acqua Vergine. Pius V’s enlarged fountain of Trevi was a recognition of the importance of water to the city’s welfare. This Pope and his predecessor, Pius IV, as well as his successor, Gregory XIII, all occupied themselves seriously with the restoration, improvement, and upkeep of the Virgo Aqueduct. The return to the water question is the one healthy and hopeful sign in the city’s life during those years which lay between the death of old Paul III and the accession of Sixtus V. Michelangelo died within this period and his great spirit was not more surely departed than was the age of art and learning in which he had moved as king. That outrage to civilization known as the “last sack of Rome” had occurred in 1527, under Clement VII, and Rome, in the person of her pontiff and in that of every citizen, had suffered insult, spoliation, and dishonor.
The devotion of the Romans to Clement’s successor (the Farnese pontiff, Paul III) was in great part due to their recognition of the fact that his pontificate represented a sustained and gallant attempt to restore to his people their lost prestige--that _figura_ so dear to the Roman heart. With the death of the old patrician the deplorable condition of the city once more asserted itself and men realized more keenly than ever the permanent devastation wrought by the sack. Posterity gains some faint idea of its horrors from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. It is indebted to him for the dramatic description of the death of the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a chance shot from the ramparts when, in the dense fog which enveloped the beleaguered city, he was planting the scaling ladders against the walls. Four days earlier, and during the march on Rome, the other commander of the besieging army, the veteran George Freundsberg, had died of a stroke of apoplexy brought on by the mutinous conduct of his troops; so that, without leaders, forty thousand of the worst soldiery of Europe were turned loose within the city walls--turned loose to recoup themselves for their long arrears of wages out of everything which the taste, learning, and moral sense of civilized man has always held most precious. History records that the Spanish were the most cold-blooded, the Germans the most bestial, and the Italians the most inventive in forms of villainy. The week of unspeakable atrocities, wanton destruction, and wholesale pillage came to an end; but when it did, that marvellous treasure-house of civilization--Rome of the Renaissance--had perished, and the place thereof was to know her no more. It was no wonder that, during the decade which followed, Rome--what was left of her--seemed hardly to breathe. When, during the pontificate of Paul III she began to revive, it was plain to all men that she was not, and could never be, the same. Life came back to her at last, not through æsthetic but through ethical channels.
Thenceforward the popes, whether they wished it or not, were to be serious men. As the Reformation spread through England, the Low Countries, France and Germany, the papacy set its house in order and prepared to fight, not for its temporal supremacy, as in the mediæval struggle with the Emperors, but for its spiritual authority. It was at this point that there came to its aid a new force, a force whose influence has never yet been accurately measured. In 1539, just before the close of Luther’s life, Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. This was in the time of Paul III. Four pontificates later, under Pius IV, the Jesuits, as Calvin was the first to call them, furnished the sensational element in the second sitting of the Council of Trent; and in 1572, when Ugo Boncompagni became Pope, under the title of Gregory XIII, the order made its appearance on the world’s stage as the recognized director of the church militant. The Jesuits were the keepers of this Pope’s conscience, and the history of his pontificate is the first chapter in the history of Jesuit rule. For them the Pope erected the present building of the Collegio Romano, founded in Loyola’s time; for them he founded the German and English colleges at Rome, and, according to Ranke, “probably there was not a single Jesuit school in the world which had not to boast in one way or another of his bounty.” The chief architects of the time were put at their disposal. Vignola designed and built for them the vast Church of “the Gesù”; and as he died while the work was in progress, his distinguished pupil, Giacomo della Porta, turned from the making of beautiful fountains and completed the cupola and façade. The latter also built the high altar in that church, and in its construction showed once more that love of rare marbles which is so distinctive a feature in the Colonna and other fountains of his creation.
Gregory XIII had begun life as a Bolognese lawyer. He had been called to Rome by Paul III the very year Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. He had gone to Spain as Papal legate under Paul IV, had been created cardinal by Pius IV, and at the age of seventy was made Pope. His life had peculiarly fitted him to appreciate Jesuit ideals. His belief in educational institutions, his keen interest in geography and the remote corners of the earth, the correctness of his private life after his elevation, his previous worldliness, and his secular training, all combined to make him the Jesuit Pope. The Roman Church remembers him as the builder of the Gregorian Chapel in St. Peter’s, the reformer of the calendar, the reorganizer of a great body of ecclesiastical law, and the patron of the Order of the Jesuits. To Protestants he remains the Pope who sang “Te Deums” for “the St. Bartholomew.”
The pontificate of Gregory XIII was a deplorable one for the Holy See and for the Romans. Conditions of living sank to a very low level. Banditti terrorized the States of the Church and could not be controlled even in Rome. The great families whose estates Gregory had confiscated to pay for his architectural and ecclesiastical extravagances were in open revolt, and the treasury was empty. Venice had been estranged, and England and the Netherlands were forever lost. Gregory XIII’s successor, Sixtus V, fell heir to this condition of misrule and disaster. No one can be surprised at the grim irony of the new pontiff in ordering masses to be said for the soul of Gregory XIII!