Part 9
This obelisk, which is of red granite, was found by accident lying prone and buried in the marshy ground of the Circus Maximus. Near by was another, the one which now stands in the Piazza del Popolo. Fontana employed five hundred men in raising and removing the obelisk of the Lateran. Of these men, three hundred were employed day and night keeping out the water which poured in on all sides. This stream is now thought to have been the brook Crabra, the “goat brook” of Tusculum, described by Frontinus, which, in the general decay of mediæval times, had become one of the “lost waters” of Rome. The difficulties encountered in transporting the obelisk up the rough sides and through the old streets of the Quirinal Hill were numerous. The obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo was removed from the same place and set up on its present site for the sum of ten thousand three hundred and thirty-one scudi; whereas this obelisk of the Lateran cost the papal treasury twenty-four thousand six hundred and eleven scudi.
It was originally brought to Rome in the early days of the Christian era. Twenty-seven years after Constantine had transferred the seat of government to his own new capital of Byzantium, his successor, Constantine II, visited Rome. He visited Rome like any foreign prince and was profoundly impressed by the magnificence and majesty of his discarded capital. A not unnatural instinct prompted him to leave some memorial of himself among the monuments and trophies of his heroic predecessors; and for this purpose he sent for the obelisk which Thotmes III had originally placed before the great temple of Thebes. It was brought to Rome and placed in the Circus Maximus. Its subsequent history and the causes of the fall of this last of the imperial obelisks are still lost in the mystery which hangs over so much of mediæval Rome.[H]
The original pedestal had been too damaged by fire to admit of using it again; so Sixtus V gave permission to Domenico Fontana to make the new pedestal out of the materials of an old arch which Domenico was to destroy for this purpose. The permission was given in writing, for Domenico Fontana had found that it was necessary to be armed with written instructions from the Pope whenever he began one of his devastating raids upon the antiquities of the city. The city government had endured such pillage and destruction at the hands of the great Pope’s great architect that all the past vandalism of private individuals seemed slight in comparison. They protested in vain against most of the destruction upon which Sixtus V had set his heart, and neither princes nor magistrates could save the old pontifical residence of the Lateran which had stood since the seventh century on this very piazza. It was a marvellous rambling pile of buildings--churches, monasteries, shrines, loggias, colonnades, oratories, banqueting rooms and halls filled with mosaics, pictures, and frescoes--and, according to a great authority, the most wonderful museum of mediæval art that ever existed. This priceless record of the past was ruthlessly demolished and razed to the ground in a few months’ time by order of Pope Sixtus V. It is difficult to understand his motives for this particular action, since it was not the history of Paganism but of his own predecessors that he was destroying. The populace never forgot, or forgave him this destruction, involving as it did the loss of the Oratory of the Holy Cross. An exquisite example of early Christian architecture, built in the shape of a Greek cross, this oratory was held in peculiar veneration by all classes; and the Roman people might not unnaturally conclude that the wanton destruction of anything at once so beautiful and so sacred as this oratory could only be ascribed to the promptings of the devil himself. Posterity can hardly accept Pope Sixtus V’s fountain, even with its obelisk, as an adequate substitute for the three fountains of rare marble in the atrium of this oratory which perished by order of the Pope.
The Church of St. John Lateran was under the protection of the Kings of France, as the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore was under the protection of the Kings of Spain, St. Peter’s under that of the Emperor of Austria, and St. Paul’s Beyond the Walls under the protection of the English sovereign. In the pontificate of Clement VIII, when the papacy began to turn toward France in its foreign policy, the work of embellishing the Lateran cost Rome--and indeed large portions of the surrounding country--untold treasures in costly marbles and gilt bronzes. The first were sawed into slabs for the transept of the Church; and the Altar of the Sacrament owes its magnificence to the many hundred bronzes which, together with portions of the bronze beams of the Pantheon, went to the smelting furnaces. In Sixtus V’s time, however, the old church was still comparatively simple; and it was in this old Church of the Lateran, probably during his pontificate, that Stradella’s prayer (“Pity, oh, Saviour!”) was sung, while hired assassins waited in the outside darkness to take the composer’s life. As the service was long, the bravos stepped inside the church to enjoy the music before committing the murder. There, in the wavering light of the altar candles and under the subtle influence of the incense, they became so impressed by the pathetic beauty of that marvellous _Aria di Chiesa_ that they felt it impossible to put out of existence the man who could write such music; and in the darkness and silence that followed the close of the divine melody they themselves warned Stradella of the plot against his life and abetted his escape.
Of late years this legend has been discredited; but in such a case as this it is well to remember the attitude taken by the writer of “The Renaissance in Italy,” “I would rather accept,” says Symonds, “sixteenth-century tradition with Vasari than reject it with German or English speculators of to-day. I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical.”
Over the door of the Vatican Library is a fresco map of Sixtine Rome. It portrays not what Sixtus V actually left, but what he at one time intended to leave. In this fresco a great thoroughfare runs from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Laterano, and at each end of the magnificent vista stands an obelisk erected by the Pope. Such a street laid out to-day would lead along the Via Babuino, the Piazza di Spagna and the Via Due Macelli, and, passing through the tunnel, come out on the Via Merulana, and reach the Piazza Laterano after traversing the eastern slope of the Esquiline and the new streets between it and the basilica. Sixtus V abandoned the idea as the great thoroughfare would have cut its way directly through the precincts of the Quirinal, and he had determined to make that spot his own abode, not only because he loved it but because he recognized the sovereign quality of the situation of Monte Cavallo in the Rome which he was reconstructing.
The Fontana fountain of the Lateran is not included by Baglioni in his list of Fontana’s works; but that list which is embodied in his account of Fontana’s life is manifestly incomplete. The fountain was engraved in full detail as early as 1618 by Maggi; and later engravings were made of it by Cruyl, Millotte, and Falda. These designs were so comprehensive that it would have been an extremely simple matter to entirely reconstruct the old fountain, more especially as the mostra and old basins were still in place, and there could have been no difficulty in ascertaining the proportions. Had this been done, the pictorial effect and, above all, the historical interest of the Piazza of St. John Lateran would have been greatly enhanced. The old fountain disappeared in the general submersion of papal Rome. Its modern substitute is a mere paraphrase, and the eagle seems intentionally to represent the eagle of imperial Rome rather than the emblem of St. John.
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI
[Illustration]
TRINITÀ DE’ MONTI
The fountain on the terrace in front of the Villa Medici has been called by a lover of Rome “The Fountain of the Brimming Bowl.” It is a happy surname, for the marble vase beneath the formally clipped ilex trees is nothing more or less than a huge bowl filled to overflowing with the Acqua Felice. The stream gushes upward in a slender column until it reaches the spreading branches overhead. There it returns upon itself in clouds of glistening spray, filling the bowl with circles of gleaming water, ever widening until they brim over the edge and veil the marble in a continuous overflow. The octagonal basin which receives this copious stream is sunk into the ground and its shadowed waters have all the unobtrusive beauty of a quiet and sequestered pool. There is no sculpture, no decoration. With unerring taste, the artist has made his appeal to the eye through fundamental and universal elements of beauty. Grace of line and of proportion, contrast of solid rock and flowing water, the impression of abundance and perpetuity, symmetry, contrast, suggestion--these are the simple qualities out of which he composed his Fountain of the Brimming Bowl.
Sunlight flickering through the ilex branches overhead and the crumbling shadows of their dense foliage add a poetic charm, while the Italian trinity--Art, Time, and Nature--have given to this modest fountain a background of unsurpassed interest and dignity. The view from the terrace of the Villa Medici might be described almost exactly by Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge, and truly
“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.”
Here in Rome “... towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie,” massed together in that famous quarter of the city known in classic times as the Campus Martius; and through this architectural maze, spanned by bridges old and new, the Tiber “floweth at its own sweet will.” On its farther shore the modern Palace of Justice and a network of thoroughfares with names relating to the Risorgimento and to Italy of to-day crowd against the venerable Castle of St. Angelo. Beyond that lies the densely packed Borgo or Leonine city, surrounded by walls, while the heights of the Janiculum to the left and those of the Vatican Hill and Monte Mario to the right give a background of green to all this masonry. In the very centre of the distance, on the ground once covered by the Circus of Nero, dominating everything and seeming to float against the western sky, rises the dome of St. Peter’s.
The terrace leads on the one hand to the gardens of the Pincio and on the other to the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. From 1544 to 1560, when Annibale Lippi was working on the Villa Medici, that portion of the Pincian Hill covered to-day by the Pincian Gardens belonged to the Augustinian monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The villa stood on the ground between them and the gardens and convent of the Trinità de’ Monti. The terrace with the fountain was the approach to the cardinal’s villa and to the precincts of the convent. The old engravings show the fountain standing quite free from trees, which, however, are growing along the edge of the hill and down its slope. The fountain is generally ascribed to Annibale Lippi, but there seems to be no positive proof that it is his work. It resembles in general outline the fontanella on the balcony inside the villa, which is by Lippi; and the fact that the basin is made of bigio marble might put its date as early as Lippi’s time. The fountains in the first half of the Cinque Cento were generally made of marble or granite, whereas after Fontana and in Bernini’s period travertine was used almost exclusively.
The villa was the property of Cardinal Monte Pulciano, but it was barely finished when Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici began negotiations for its purchase. Medici, whose childhood had been passed in the Boboli Gardens, which were created by his father, spent eleven years in laying out and beautifying the gardens of this villa, where he had a small zoological collection, and also in making the gallery of Greek and Roman sculpture which rivalled that already belonging to his old friend Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. He returned to Florence in 1587, and some time after the villa passed into the hands of another Medici, Cardinal Alessandro, who became Pope Leo XI in 1605. This Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici also spent much time and money in the decoration of the villa, and it seems probable that the fountain was constructed during his tenure of the property, since the introduction of the Acqua Felice in 1587 had at last made it possible to have fountains on this hillside. Evelyn, describing this fountain in the last days of Pope Urban VIII’s pontificate, speaks of the magnificent jet of water spouting fifty feet into the air. The earliest engravings of it date from the middle of the Sei Cento and show the water springing from a large ball of travertine which has long since lost its size and shape from the constant action of the water. The pedestal and base of this fountain are also of travertine.
The present Church of the Trinità de’ Monti was erected by Louis XVIII, of France, to replace the original building which had been destroyed during the excesses of the French Revolutionary period. But in 1544 the old Gothic church of the Valois King stood looking westward over the French quarter of the city. This church dated from the year 1495, when Charles VIII, of France, on his way to reconquer his Neapolitan territory, entered Rome and paid a visit--half threatening, half ceremonious--to Alexander VI. He left as a memorial of his stay in Rome this Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. The church became the nucleus of French influence in Rome. The French convent of the Sacred Heart grew up beside its walls, and many famous Frenchmen lived within its shadow.
Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici, who gave his family name to this villa, as well as to the Venus which, upon its discovery in Hadrian’s Villa, he immediately bought and placed here, was one of the commanding figures of his time. Fourth son of Cosimo, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, he had been made a cardinal at fourteen, in the room of his elder brother Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who had died at nineteen. The second Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand’s eldest brother, died in 1587, leaving no son, and so, after twenty-four years of ecclesiastical life, Cardinal Ferdinand, who had never taken holy orders, laid by the red hat to become third Grand Duke of Tuscany. He married Christine de Lorraine, a granddaughter of Catherine de’ Medici, and therefore a distant cousin of his own, and had, like his great-grandfather Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his own grandfather Cosimo I, eight children, his eldest son succeeding to the grand duchy. It is difficult to trace in the wise and beneficent grand duke the intractable young cardinal who had been a handful for even Sixtus V. The old pontiff had found in him an obstinacy and a craft equal to his own, and he must have “thanked God fasting” when Medici was no longer a member of his curia! The Pope was an old man, and the cardinal had the physical advantage of youth; nevertheless it was a battle royal when this true chip of the Medicean block interceded with the Peretti Pope for the life of his old friend, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Sixtus, who was not to be shaken in his determination, kept track of the time, and held firmly to his resolution until he was sure that the appointed hour for Farnese’s death had come and gone; then, knowing that it was too late, he graciously consented to spare Farnese’s life, to please his Cardinal de’ Medici. But the cardinal knew his Sixtus V, and had, before his audience, taken the precaution to set every clock in the Vatican, outside the Pope’s private apartments, back one hour![I] The fire still lives in the ashes of this Ferdinand, for, in 1906, a deputation from Leghorn visited his tomb in the Medici mausoleum in Florence and laid upon it a bronze wreath as a testimony of their undying gratitude and affection. Leghorn, a mere fishing village of the Cinque Cento, had been raised to her position of the second seaport in Italy by this ex-cardinal, and that chiefly through the operation of an edict of toleration almost incredible at the period in which it was promulgated. When the Spanish Armada, the struggle in the Netherlands, and the religious wars in France kept all Europe in a ferment, Leghorn rose suddenly and swiftly like an exhalation of the sea through the peaceful labors of the French, Flemish, and Jewish refugees who, within her walls and under the powerful protection of her Grand Duke, the ex-cardinal, found absolute liberty of conscience and security of life and property. It was this Ferdinand who furnished from his own rich coffers the sinews of war to Henry of Navarre; it was he who mediated between Henry and the Pope; and it was his niece, Maria de’ Medici, who became Queen of France as wife of Henry IV, bringing with her, as Sully said, such a marriage portion as had never before been brought into the kingdom.
Five years after this event Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici became Pope; so the Villa Medici, as well as the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti, had, in spite of their Italian names, many affiliations with far-off Paris; and partly on account of these associations, partly for the sake of the marvellous view, their terraces became the favorite haunt of those artists who, in the early days of the Sei Cento, began to find their way to Rome.
In the continuity of the development of art there are few events more interesting than the appearance of the French art student in Rome. Gaul had been the first of the northern nations to assimilate Roman culture, and France was the first to come under the influence of the Renaissance. Just at the time when the Catholic reaction against the license of the Cinque Cento had begun to force Italy under the stultifying influence of Spanish domination, France awoke to the full consciousness of her æsthetic nature and to her need of those things which Italy alone could give. The army of Charles VIII had carried back across the Alps imperishable memories of beauty, and soon afterward Francis I had enticed to Paris some of the greatest Italian artists of the time. Even the fierce religious wars of the sixteenth century could not stamp out the seed sown by the soldiers’ stories and by the works of art left by homesick Italian masters in Fontainebleau. One by one the eager French artists crossed the Alps, and they came in ever-increasing numbers when the genius of Richelieu brought order and amenity into French life, and when Richelieu’s contemporary, Maffeo Barberini, for many years papal legate to France, had become Pope Urban VIII. To reach Rome all of these voyagers had to endure severe physical hardships, and some of them never returned to France. The greatest of them--Le Poussin and Claude--died in Rome. Painters, engravers, sculptors, and architects came to these terraces to worship and to work, and to this day the galleries and palaces of northern Europe cherish the pictures planned or sketched about the Fountain of the Brimming Bowl.
Pope Urban VIII, who died in 1644, was himself half French, not only by virtue of his temperament and genius, but also by the trend of his sympathies and his foreign policy. Under his enlightened patronage, the artists of France found a congenial home in the Eternal City. This was the beginning of the French Academy of Painting in Rome, which was formally founded in 1666 by Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV. For the first seven years of its existence this institution had no permanent abode; but in 1673 the Capronica Palace was placed at its disposal, and later on--in Louis XV’s time--it moved to the Mancini Palace near the Corso. The slope leading from the Piazza of the Trinità de’ Monti (now the Piazza di Spagna) to the terraces above had all this time been a natural hillside, whereon grew trees, grass, and wild flowers familiar to Rome. The footpaths leading upward must have been a rather steep climb; but five years before the founding of the Academy an event occurred which was to make the ascent of the hillside not only easy but delightful. In 1661 Rome came into the possession of a large sum of money left to the city by the learned French gentleman, Etienne de Guéffier, for the express purpose of constructing a magnificent stone stairway which should cover this slope of the Pincian Hill, and unite for all time the Campus Martius with the terraces above. The stairway was long in building, and during its construction the connection between the Academy in the Mancini Palace and the old terraces of the Trinità de’ Monti may have been slender; but in 1725 the Scalinata was opened with great pomp, and once again French artists could spend long hours on their beloved terraces. Seventy-six years later Napoleon, with his supreme instinct for effect (a possession he shared with Julius Cæsar),[J] and not unmindful of the French association with this quarter of the city, removed the French Academy from the old Mancini Palace and lodged it permanently and most impressively where it now is, in the Villa Medici, the villa built by that family which had given two queens to France. So the fountain of the Trinità de’ Monti is still a feature in the life of the French artists at Rome; and it is perhaps a pardonable fancy that, in this particular fountain, the Acqua Felice plays in French!
VILLA BORGHESE
NOW
VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO
[Illustration]
VILLA BORGHESE
NOW
VILLA UMBERTO PRIMO
A garden where the centuries Of men have come and none did care Save for the green grass and the breeze And shelter from the noontide glare. But that which makes the garden fair-- The sense of life’s futility, Is deathless beauty. Born of Death, It blossoms under cloudless skies-- One’s very dream of Italy.
--_From an unpublished MS._