Fountains of Papal Rome

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.

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.

Standing between the fountains of St. Peter’s is an obelisk, the surpassing interest of whose history adds not a little to the importance of the fountains themselves, and indeed of the entire square. It is, according to Lanciani, undoubtedly the obelisk at the foot of which St. Peter was crucified. Formerly the place of his martyrdom was located on the Janiculum Hill, on the spot where San Pietro in Montorio was built by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to commemorate the event. Lately this location of the site of St. Peter’s crucifixion has been discredited, but it is easy to see how that mistake occurred.

Caligula had brought the obelisk from Heliopolis some time during the four short years of his reign and placed it in the circus he began to build in those gardens of his mother, the noble Agrippina the elder, which lay along the northern side of the plain between the Janiculum and Mons Vaticanus. There it stood on the centre of the spina, the long, straight line stretching down the middle of the arena from the two opposite goals at either end. Caligula was assassinated before he could finish the circus and it was completed some thirteen years later by Nero, under whom it became the scene of those atrocities against the Christians which have rendered his reign infamous. St. Peter was crucified one year before the death of Nero. His cross was raised on the spina of the circus at an exact distance between the two goals—metas—built at either end of the amphitheatre, and therefore, at the foot of the obelisk which stood on that spot.

Christian tradition handed down the description of the place “between the two goals” (inter duas metas). Now meta was a name afterward given to tombs of pyramidal shape, two of which existed in mediæval Rome—one, that of Caius Cestius, still standing next to the present Protestant Cemetery, and the other in the Borgo Vecchio, destroyed later by Alexander VI. A straight line drawn from one of these tombs to the other has its centre in a point on the Janiculum, and therefore this spot was thought to be the exact location of St. Peter’s martyrdom. Even to-day visitors to the exquisite Tempietto of Bramante, erected in the cloister of the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, are shown below its pavement the very stone in which the cross of St. Peter was fixed. The legend of this location for the crucifixion of St. Peter grew up during the Middle Ages, a period in which all knowledge of the authentic site was entirely lost. Modern archæology has recently succeeded in locating this position and its topography can now be easily understood.

When the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity, determined to build a basilica in honor of St. Peter, he planned to erect the edifice so that its centre should rise directly over the tomb of St. Peter, who, according to historical documents, was buried not far from the scene of his martyrdom. To do this, he found himself obliged to build so near the Circus of Caligula and Nero that the southern wall of his edifice corresponded exactly to the northern wall of the Circus. He therefore used this wall of the Circus as the southern foundation wall of his church. This naturally brought the southern side of the old St. Peter’s within a very short distance of the spina of the Circus, on which stood the obelisk, with a chapel before it called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. The Chapel disappeared seven or eight centuries ago, but not before its true significance had been quite forgotten, and men supposed the name to refer not to the crucifixion of St. Peter but to the Crucifixion of Our Lord. An old engraving by Bonanni, antedating the reign of Sixtus V, shows the old Church of St. Peter on its southern side, with the obelisk, still tipped by its Pagan ball, standing in close proximity. When the plan for the new Church of St. Peter was accepted it was seen that the southern side of the great edifice would extend so far beyond the limits of the original church that it must entirely cover the spot on which the obelisk was standing; and as the connection of the obelisk with the martyrdom of St. Peter had long since been forgotten, Pope Sixtus V conceived the idea of moving the obelisk to a more conspicuous and important position.

Thus it came about that the obelisk now forms the central feature in the piazza before the Cathedral of Christendom; while the place of St. Peter’s crucifixion, that site of transcendent interest to all Christians, remains unidentified, buried beneath the masses of masonry composing the Baptistery on the southern side of the vast structure which bears St. Peter’s name.

SCOSSA CAVALLI

This work of Carlo Maderno belongs to that group of fountains which owe their origin to the introduction into Rome of the Acqua Paola. The lower basin stands about three feet above the level of the pavement. It is oblong in shape, the oval broken at both ends by graceful variations in the curve. The secondary basin is much smaller, round and quite shallow. From its centre rises a richly carved cup much resembling a Corinthian capital, this cup being the apex of the central shaft, upon which rests the second basin, and the main stream of water spouts upward from its leaflike convolutions. The proportions of the fountain are excellent. It is neither too low nor too high, and the lower basin is large enough to catch and retain the water which pours over the rim of the upper basin, so that it does not wash over as does the water in Maderno’s much more magnificent fountain in the Square of St. Peter’s. The central shaft of the Scossa Cavalli fountain has a Doric massiveness which gives a background of strength to the whole design and makes all the more delicate the play of the four slender jets of water, about five feet in height, which, rising at equal intervals from the lower basin, form an arch around the upper basin into whose shallow water they fling their spray. The crowned eagle and griffin of the Borghese are still to be discerned on the half-obliterated carving of the central shaft. The kind of travertine out of which this fountain is made is so susceptible to erosion, and has become so blackened by the deposit of the water, that the whole structure appears far older than it is. In reality it has stood here little more than three hundred years, as the Acqua Paola was not brought to Rome until the time of Pope Paul V. This splendor-loving pontiff determined, on his accession in 1605, to emulate and, if possible, surpass Pope Sixtus V, whose brilliant pontificate antedated his own by less than a score of years. Sixtus V had built the first great aqueduct of modern Rome. Paul V determined to build the second. Sixtus V had christened after himself the water which he had brought to Rome, and Paul V gave his name to the stream which, partly by using the all but ruined Aqueduct of Trajan, he had brought from Bracciano and its hills. Domenico Fontana had built for Sixtus V, as the chief outlet for the Acqua Felice, the fine Fountain of the Moses on the Viminal Hill. Giovanni Fontana, brother of Domenico, should design for the Acqua Paola on the opposite slope of the Janiculum a yet more glorious fountain which should dispense five times the amount of water given out by the fountain of Sixtus V. All this was done, and from the heights of the Janiculum the great stream descended in various channels, and was widely spread over the Trastevere or that portion of the city lying on the western side of the Tiber. One channel found another fine outlet in the fountain which Carlo Maderno, nephew of Fontana, also built for Paul V on the northern side of the Square of St. Peter’s. From thence the water was conducted down the Via Alessandrina (now the Borgo Nuovo) to this small piazza of the Scossa Cavalli where Maderno constructed for it this second and very properly less splendid fountain. Thus it will be seen that the water as well as the architectural part of this fountain belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century; but the interest attaching to the buildings surrounding the square in which it stands dates back farther than that, dates back in fact to the crowded days of the High Renaissance, when this prosaic little piazza was a centre of ardent and vivid life.

The long, plain, yet dignified building to the south, now called the Ora Penitenzieri, was built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, who was one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV and brother to Pope Julius II, the friend and patron of Michelangelo. To the west, and on the corner made by the square and the street of the Borgo Nuovo, stands the house built by Bramante, and purchased by Raphael. The atelier of the “divine painter” is the corner room on the second floor. Against the wall behind those gloomy windows stood his last picture, “The Transfiguration,” unfinished; and on a bed placed at the foot of that picture, Raphael died.

Another death agony is connected with the history of the square, for in the gardens behind the palace to the north, now called Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia, was held that fatal supper where the Borgias, father and son, fell victims to the poison which they had prepared for the cardinal who was their host and the owner of the palace. Even the legends of classic Rome seem somewhat colorless compared with the memories which haunt this dull little square. Nothing could be more prosaic than its present-day appearance. It is truly “empty, swept, and garnished,” but the devils which have gone out of it have seldom had their equal; its memories belong to a more splendid and to a more shameful past than is the heritage of any other city of our modern world.

In 1492, when Columbus had discovered the Western Hemisphere and Copernicus was revolutionizing the mediæval view of the universe, Rome was still emerging from the shadow under which she had lain while the popes resided at Avignon. In 1471 Sixtus IV began to restore and embellish the city, and with him the Holy See entered upon that long period of secularization which reached its acme of infamy, of magnificence, and of territorial possessions in the respective pontificates of the Borgia, Medici, and Barberini popes. Each of these pontiffs left his mark on some particular quarter of the city; and although in the years following the times of Alexander VI efforts were made to obliterate the memory of the Borgias, the Borgo Nuovo remains forever bound up with their history.

Throughout the Middle Ages the only thoroughfare from the Bridge of St. Angelo to the Square of St. Peter’s was the Borgo Vecchio. It was a narrow and tortuous street and quite inadequate to the traffic and processions and pilgrimages which continually passed between its rows of crowded old houses.

Alexander VI formed the new Borgo by cutting a street through the orchards, gardens, and slums of this quarter, and by granting special privileges to the property owners who, within a specified time would build on it houses not less than forty feet high. The Pope was greatly interested in his new street and christened it for himself, the Via Alessandrina. He was fortunate in having in Rome at that time Bramante of Urbino, who was just launched on that career of popular favor which was only to be surpassed in length of days or in exaggerated estimation by the career of Bernini a century later.

A sure way to please the Pope was to employ some great architect and to erect a noble house upon the new thoroughfare. Raphael, who was amusing himself with architecture, is said to have worked with Bramante in the construction of the palace afterward owned by him, next door to the palace owned by the Queen of Cyprus,A and the great room on the piano nobile, the beautiful wooden ceiling of which had been designed by Bramante, was a stately studio. The room is now divided into two apartments; but it is easy in imagination to sweep away the modern alterations and to see this most beautiful, gracious, and best-loved of all Italian artists at work here among his pupils, or receiving with an exquisite sweetness and modesty the greatest princes of the Church and State.

Rome was at this period the finest marble quarry in the world. It was still a century before the time of Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana; the Farnese had not yet built their great palace from the spoils of the Baths of Caracalla and other noble ruins; the last sack of Rome was still thirty years in the future; and very little building of any importance had been carried on through the long period of the popes’ absence in Avignon. Bramante found the richest marbles ready to his hand, and he built the façade of the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia out of materials taken from the Basilica Giulia and the Temple of Janus. However, already in Sixtus IV’s time the rage had begun for the destruction of old monuments, and in order to build the Via Alessandrina, the Pope had demolished a Pagan tomb which had once been a landmark in the Borgo. During the Middle Ages it was called the Tomb of Romulus, and Raphael has painted it in his “Vision of Constantine.” It was of pyramidal form, like the tomb called the Pyramid of Cestius, which is still standing near the Protestant Cemetery on the road to St. Paul’s Beyond the Walls. Doubtless, its massive blocks went into the construction of the new palaces surrounding the little square, which now took the place of the old tomb as the central point in that quarter of the city. In this square the two chief palaces are connected with two of the greatest of the Pope’s cardinals, each of whom had found it to his advantage to hold a post in foreign lands.

The fiery and forceful Giulio della Rovere, who gave his name to the palace built by his brother Domenico and now known as the Penitenzieri, had been the chief rival of Rodrigo Borgia in the papal election of 1492, and, thereafter, the open enemy of Alexander VI. It is possible he might never have become that Pope’s successor had he not put himself under the protection of Charles VIII of France. On the other hand, Cardinal Adriano Corneto, who built the palace now the Giraud-Torlonia, stood high in the Pope’s good graces. Alexander made him collector of the papal revenues in England, where he was already known as the papal peacemaker between Henry VII and the ill-starred James IV of Scotland. There he made a valuable friend in no less a personage than King Henry VII himself. The Tudor King was not lavish of his money, but, for some reason, he gave large sums to Cardinal Corneto as a personal gift.

England proved a safe and agreeable asylum for the accomplished cardinal, and when he was finally recalled he must have returned to Rome with some misgivings. He found the Curia, as well as the city, living under that spell of terror which the Borgias, father and son, had woven about them. Strange stories, horrible suspicions, and mysterious crimes were the order of the day; and the cardinal, returning from his bishopric of Bath and Wells and the frankness and simplicity of the English court, must have found the change little to his liking. Very probably it was to secure the Pope’s friendship that he engaged the services of Bramante and began to build a magnificent palace on the Pope’s new thoroughfare. But while Alexander VI loved splendor, he also coveted money. The new palace was slow in building, and before it was completed, the Pope could see that all the gold which the cardinal had collected in England had not gone into the papal coffers. In short, he comprehended the fact that his Cardinal Adriano Corneto was a very rich man; and in the summer of 1503 he sent him a message that His Holiness and the Duke of Valentino (Cesare Borgia) would honor him by taking supper with him on the night of August 12. It is easy to understand the consternation with which the message was received, the look of frozen horror on the cardinal’s face as he already saw himself dying in sudden convulsions or fading slowly away with a fatal and mysterious malady. No time was to be lost, and a large share of the cardinal’s English gold bought over the Pope’s majordomo to his side. Possibly some of the deadly work had already begun before the bargain was struck. Possibly the majordomo thought it best to appear to have obeyed the Pope’s orders, even at the risk of a little torture to the cardinal, for although Cardinal Corneto survived that fatal supper, it was said that the skin fell from him in strips. The Pope died within ten days, the monstrous appearance of the corpse terrifying all who beheld it. Only Cesare Borgia’s almost superhuman vitality saved him from a like fate.

Years after, when he had been shut out forever from Rome, Cesare told his friend and admirer Machiavelli that the results of this supper in the gardens of the cardinal’s palace had frustrated all his plans. Cesare had fully determined that his father’s successor should not humiliate and despoil him as his father had despoiled and humiliated the nephews of his predecessor, Pope Sixtus IV. He had made every arrangement to make himself master of Rome as soon as his father should die. He had, so he told the author of “Il Principe,” foreseen and provided for every possible difficulty. The one thing he had not been able to foresee was that he himself should be too ill to leave his bed.

The Borgias passed away from Rome. Cardinal della Rovere was made Pope, and men set about to obliterate all memories of that brood whose crimes had made Rome a stench in the nostrils of Christendom. Gradually, but effectively, the work was accomplished. Alexander VI’s tomb was built without any monument. The Fountain of the Gilded Bulls, the emblem of the Borgias, which stood before St. Peter’s was destroyed. The Borgia apartments in the Vatican were walled up, and remained so for centuries. The nude figure of the beautiful Giulia Farnese on the tomb of her brother Pope Paul III in St. Peter’s was covered with painted metal draperies. Even the Via Alessandrina became the Borgo Nuovo.

Cardinal Adriano Corneto lived through the pontificate of Pope Julius II and into that of Pope Leo X; but the fame of his riches did at last work his undoing. Leo X, who needed money as much as Alexander VI, insisted that the cardinal was privy to a conspiracy against his life. Corneto was deprived of his cardinalate, even degraded from the priesthood, and was obliged to make his escape from Rome. He died in obscurity, leaving his beautiful palace, still unfinished, to his benefactor King Henry VII, who made it the residence of the English ambassador.

A century later, when Maderno built the fountain of the Scossa Cavalli for Pope Paul V, Cardinal Corneto’s palace had again passed into the hands of the Romans, where it has remained. The Reformation had swept over England, and there was no longer an English ambassador to the Papal See.

PIAZZA PIA

No one can walk the Roman streets without perceiving, and almost at once, that here time is of no importance. It is, in fact, an absolutely negligible quantity. Buildings and monuments dating from widely diverse periods stand side by side, and it is in no wise incongruous from the Roman standpoint to find at the head of the Borgo (the ancient Leonine city) one of the very latest fountains of papal Rome. It is a charming little creation, quite consciously harking back to the great days of the papacy and rebuking by its sober, yet imaginative sculpture those geometrical designs or extravagant ebullitions of fancy—the fountains of the present régime. It stands in the Piazza Pia, against that narrow façade which blunts the point of the long angle or wedge-shaped block of buildings lying between the Borgo Vecchio and the Borgo Nuovo. Its Fontanesque mostra is composed of two beautiful white Carrara columns with Corinthian capitals supporting a pediment and entablature on which is an inscription to the effect that the fountain was erected by Pius IX in the sixteenth year of his pontificate, which would make it the year 1862. The sculptural part of the fountain bears a certain resemblance to the work of Luigi Amici and Bitta Zappalà, the artists who not many years later executed the modern figures in the side fountains of the Piazza Navona.

The Piazza Pia fountain might also be ascribed to Tenerani, a distinguished sculptor of Pius IX’s pontificate, who, in his devotion to the Pope, did not disdain to design some of the triumphal devices with which Rome welcomed back Pio Nono after Gaeta. But Tenerani’s bust is among the “Silent Company of the Pincio,” and if the little fountain were indeed his work, the fact would be known. As it is, the sculptor’s name seems, for the present, at least, to have been forgotten in the confusion attendant upon the transformation of papal into Italian Rome.

The fountain originally held Paola water, and the charming little vase and dolphins composed of white Carrara have become through the deposits of this water so black that the beauty of the fountain is distinctly marred. This fountain takes the place of an earlier one executed by Carlo Maderno and called the Mask of the Borgo. The design was a large mask from which water flowed into a pilgrim shell over which perched the Borghese eagle, while two lions’ heads on either side spouted additional streams. As this first fountain was in travertine it had in all probability succumbed to the disastrous effects of the Paola water, which seems to disintegrate as well as to discolor some varieties of that stone.

There is in the Piazza Mastai another fountain erected by Pius IX. And he also instituted several washing troughs in the Trastevere among the poor, for whom he had always a sincere and profound sympathy. Those who would render justice to this last “Papa Re” should drive up the magnificent approach to the Quirinal Palace. This modern driveway and masonry were erected, as can be seen from the tablet on the sustaining wall of the terrace, for Pius IX by his great architect and engineer Virginio Vespignani. They give the finishing touch of magnificence to the Piazza of the Quirinal, originally laid out on its present grade and in its fine proportions by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V (some two hundred and eighty years earlier). This approach to the Quirinal and the great buttress walls of the Coliseum might easily be enough to prove Pius IX’s care for the city; but, as with those of his predecessors who had the welfare of their people most at heart, his chief claim upon the memory of the Romans lies in the interest which he took in the city’s water supply. Pius IX gave his permission to an English company to introduce into Rome the rediscovered springs of the Marcian water. These springs had been first brought to Rome by the Marcian aqueduct in the years 144–140 B. C. This aqueduct was the first of the true high-level aqueducts, and covered its path of fifty-eight miles on great arches which brought it to Rome at the Porta Maggiore one hundred and ninety-five feet above sea-level. The two aqueducts which antedated it—the Appian and the Anio Vetus—ran most of the distance underground, the Anio Vetus appearing above ground for only eleven hundred feet, while the Appian (the first of all the Roman aqueducts) was carried overground on low arches for three hundred feet, and actually entered the city fifty feet below the surface of the earth. The springs of the Marcia are now called the Second and Third Serena and are situated in the Valley of the Anio above Tivoli, on the north side of the stream, near Agosta. The original Marcian aqueduct had been destroyed by Fontana when he was collecting material to build the Acquedotto Felice. A portion, however, of the ancient masonry remains, and although to-day the Marcian water comes to Rome chiefly through modern iron pipes, some parts of its passage lead through the old stone channels. The water now enters Rome through the Porta Pia at an altitude of two hundred feet; thus it ranks next to the Paola, which is two hundred and three feet above the sea-level. The Marcia ranks next to the Virgo in abundance, and at present supplies most of the dwelling houses in Rome. Its history is embodied in its full name, Acqua Marcia Pia.

Pius IX made his last public appearance as sovereign pontiff when this water was introduced into Rome. This occurred on September 18, 1870, just two days before the famous “Venti Settembre,” when the Italian troops entered Rome through a breach in the Porta Pia. The fountain which was destined to be the last fountain of papal Rome stood in the Piazza delle Terme,—not where the present one stands, but off to one side, for the city was still papal Rome and the great Villa Negroni (formerly Montalto) of Pope Sixtus V then covered the site now occupied by the present railway station. Within the gardens of that villa many of the original Acqua Felice fountains were still flowing, and one latter-day inhabitant of the villa tells how, as a child, she often looked down at night from her nursery windows upon an old fountain about which stood a circle of little Campagna foxes drinking from its cypress-guarded waters. The Pope drove to the inauguration of his Marcia Pia amid a vast concourse of people who strewed flowers and shouted: “King, King!” There were, however, few distinguished people at the ceremony. He drank a cup of the water, praised its purity and freshness and thanked the magistrates for giving it his name. It was the last public act of his sovereign pontificate, and derives both significance and dignity from that long list of popes who, since the time of Hadrian I had constituted themselves guardians and builders of Roman aqueducts.

The fountain which Pius IX thus inaugurated has been swept away to make room for the present bronze affair. But the Acqua Marcia Pia now flows in the Pope’s pretty fountain of Piazza Pia, so that here in the Borgo, the ancient “Porch of St. Peter’s,” we find the last water and, with the exception of the fountain in the Piazza Mastai, the last fountain, of papal Rome.

CAMPIDOGLIO

The three fountains of the Campidoglio have one fundamental characteristic in common—that of being a part of Rome from a period of great antiquity. Like those families who “were there when the Conqueror came,” the sculptures which adorn these fountains have been in Rome since Christian Rome began. All the statues have occupied their present positions a comparatively short time, and have passed through many vicissitudes before reaching the places they now hold. In fact, each fountain of the Campidoglio is a fountain with a past. The sculptural part of each is a survival of some artistic design or idea antedating to a remote period the time of its conversion into the fountain of to-day.

The general view of the Campidoglio comprises the stairway called “La Cordonata,” the piazza at its summit crowned by the Palace of the Senators, with the Museum of the Capitol to the left and the Palace of the Conservatori on the right; and it is so impressive in its architectural majesty that the fountain which is a part of it all keeps its true place in the great composition, and is recognized only as a note in the general harmony of proportion, design, and decoration. This is, of course, as it should be—as Michelangelo meant it to be when, some three hundred and seventy-five years ago, the vision of the Campidoglio as it now stands unfolded itself in his brain. Not that every detail of the magnificent reality is as he planned it. The fatality which followed him, spoiling or changing nearly all his great designs, has been at work here; and it is the fountain which has suffered.

This fountain, which is a part of the approach to the Senate House, was to have as its central statue a figure of Jove. Vasari, who is quite carried away with Master Michelangelo’s beautiful design, describes the fountain as if it were already done,—Jove in the centre and the two river-gods on either side. But Michelangelo and the enthusiastic Vasari had been dead for years when Sixtus V brought the Acqua Felice to the Campidoglio and finally erected the fountain. He placed in the noble niche where a colossal and majestic Jupiter should have stood, the antique statue of a Minerva done over to represent Rome. The white marble head and arms of this statue are modern restorations, but the porphyry torso was found at Cori, and its air of undeniable antiquity is all that saves this curiously inadequate figure from utter insignificance. It is too small for the niche it occupies, and is so out of proportion to its surroundings and on so different a plane of artistic treatment that it would quite spoil any creation less triumphantly dominant than is this whole staircase and façade.

The two river-gods which also adorn this fountain are very old. Together with Marforio, now to be found in the Museum of the Capitol, they have the distinction of never having been buried since the downfall of Rome. Once they stood before “that most magnificent of all Roman temples”—Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. Later they belonged to the Mediæval Museum of Statues, a collection kept in or near the old papal palace of the Lateran, where they had been called Bacchus and Saturn. The Nile, who should have been unmistakable because of his emblem of the Sphinx, has now his proper designation; but the other statue has a curious history. It was originally the River Tigris, a river familiar to the Romans since the wars with Mithradates. When, under Paul III, Michelangelo placed these statues in their present position, some influential person suggested that the Tigris, no longer of any interest to the Romans, should be changed into the Tiber. The emblem of the Tigris—a tiger—was then altered to represent the Roman Wolf, and the Twins were added. Pirro Ligorio tells the story, and goes on to say that the fingers of one of the Twins were originally a part of the Tiger’s fur.

The erection of the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre of the piazza was the first step in the design of the Campidoglio of to-day, for Michelangelo’s admiration of the statue had been shared by Paul III, and the Pope brought it hither in 1538 when the embellishment of Rome, originally begun in honor of the visit in 1534 of Charles V, had become with both Pope and citizens a great and permanent interest. This statue also had been a part of that Mediæval Museum in the Lateran which was probably one of the places to visit when Charlemagne came to Rome to be crowned in old St. Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800. The façade of the Senate House, which forms the background to the piazza and its statues, is built in great part of travertine, so the structural part of the fountain is of the same material. This consists of a huge niche, sixteen and a half feet in height, sunk into the foundation of the terrace before the main entrance to the Senate House. On either side of the niche is a pair of Doric pilasters, which support the floor of the terrace and its beautiful balustrade. A great stairway, down which the balustrade continues, connects this entrance of the Senate House with the piazza below; and the foundation of these steps, forming triangular wings to the niche, serves as a background to the river-gods. These figures lie one on either side of the semicircular basins containing the water. The simplicity of the design partakes of the inevitable. Considering it from any point of view, it is not only impossible to think of anything better, it is impossible to think of anything else. If it is not the work of Michelangelo, there must have been two Michelangelos in 1538!

In Piranesi’s engraving of the Campidoglio a fine balustrade like the one on the stairway surrounds the fountain. It follows the contour of the lower basin and stands at some three or four feet distant from it. This balustrade, which has disappeared, enhanced distinctly the beauty of the fountain, bringing it more into harmony with the entire composition.

The river-god is one of the earliest sculptural personifications of natural phenomena. In these days comparatively little heed is paid to the smaller water-ways, so the modern spirit fails to see the significance of these conventionalized figures. To the ancients, however, the statues personified that physical object upon which all civilized life depended—a great stream of unfailing water. The rivers of Greece were small, while the Roman Empire contained some of the largest in the world; but the ideas they represented were the same. The river, small or great, made the city. The river gave food and drink to the inhabitants, connected them with the outside world, brought trade, turned the mills, defended the city from invasion, carried away pestilence, cleansed, purified, and supported all the works of men; and therefore Father Tiber and his brothers were to be worshipped and to be honored, and statues were to be set up to them in public places, so that men should remember what they owed to their river. The river is always personified as a benign and majestic figure in the full strength of mature manhood, with long and abundant hair and beard. The lower limbs are draped, so that the mystery of partial concealment hangs about him. On one arm he bears a horn of plenty; while with the other he reclines upon some support, which is usually the characteristic emblem of the particular stream which he represents.

Power, abundance, and calm strength are the qualities of a great river; and these qualities the ancients most adequately expressed in their own peculiar medium, which was sculpture. Men of to-day put their ideas into music, or more explicitly into prose or verse, and there are still those who appreciate the significance of the river. Washington Irving’s epithet of the “lordly Hudson” proves the hold that great river had over his perception and imagination; and not any statue of a river-god can give the conception of a river which is to be found in Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum”:

The nearest approach which the Romans have left us to such grandeur as this is to be found in their statue called Marforio. The north wing of the Campidoglio group is known as the Museum of the Capitol, and it is in the entrance court of this edifice that Marforio is now to be seen. If this most majestic of all river-gods ever represented any particular river, the name of that river was forgotten centuries ago. His title of Marforio was given him long since, because he once poured the water into a fountain which stood in a small square to the left of the Senate House, where Augustus had erected the Martis Forum. There he seems to have remained throughout the darkest days of Rome’s decadence, surviving every vicissitude, and always respected by the half-barbarous Romans of that time. Gregory XIII (Boncompagni, 1572–1585) is responsible for removing Marforio from this classic position and for separating him at that time from the huge granite basin into which flowed the water from the urn on which he is leaning. Thenceforth the basin has a history of its own, while Marforio’s odyssey (he wandered for some time after leaving his old home) finally brought him to the Campidoglio. Sixtus V then placed him on the left side of the piazza, facing the south wing. This south wing, known as the Palazzo dei Conservatori, was the first of the present group of buildings to be erected, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri—a Roman gentleman and one of Michelangelo’s few intimates—having had charge of its construction in Michelangelo’s lifetime. The north wing, or the Museum of the Capitol, was not done until the architect Rainaldi erected it for Innocent X (Pamphili), twelve pontificates after the reign of Paul III. During a period of one hundred and sixty years Marforio remained where Sixtus had placed him, and then Clement XII (Corsini) installed him in the court of the Capitoline Museum, and again he was given a fountain to feed and protect.

Marforio’s career after he had been parted from his basin was a curious one. Bored, perhaps, by the lonely magnificence of his new surroundings, he fell into evil ways. He became the partner of Pasquino! Pasquino, the mutilated torso from an old Greek group of statuary, stands at the farthest corner of the Braschi Palace (now the Ministero dell’ Interno). He had first been set up there in the reign of Alexander VI; and from that time he had become the medium for the popular and anonymous criticisms of the government. His name of Pasquino was taken from a witty tailor or barber who lived near the Palazzo Orsini and whose sallies against those in authority greatly delighted the Roman people. It became the custom to affix anonymous couplets or epigrams to the old torso, which thus obtained the name of Pasquino, and the epigrams came to be known as pasquinades; and from the days of the Borgias to the time of Napoleon, and even later, most of the current witticisms or scathing reflections upon public events or notable personages were ascribed to Pasquino. When Marforio took up his abode in the Piazza of the Campidoglio, he became to the Romans the partner of Pasquino. According to a modern authority, Marforio never originated the sally. His function was to put the question which elicited the witty retort, or to reply in kind to Pasquino’s interrogatories. With Marforio’s incarceration in the court of the Museum the long dialogue came to an end; and a century later the passing of papal Rome brought Pasquino’s career to its final close. Modern freedom of the press leaves no place for Pasquino; and it may be said of him that, Marforio being gone,

This is not strictly true, for, although the statues themselves no longer have a part in the game, it still goes on. One of the most popular of the Roman newspapers still publishes questions and repartee by Marforio and Pasquino.

It is only necessary to study for a short time the various river-gods in Rome, such as those of the Tiber and the Nile, here at the Capitol, or Fontana’s statue in the Quattro Fontane, or the modern work in the western fountain of the Piazza del Popolo, and then to return to Marforio, to appreciate the immense artistic superiority of the latter. Marforio is truly a river-god, a personification of all or any of the earth’s rivers. The ancient and forgotten sculptor has given to the ponderous stone a fluid quality which is really wonderful. To make the hair and beard merge into the god’s breast and shoulders would have been simple both in conception and execution, but only a genius could have secured to the massive and supine figure that appearance of being outstretched in powerful yet melting length along the surface of things. Artists of the Renaissance from Rome and from beyond the Alps always speak of the gran simulacro a giacere, an expression difficult to anglicize, but which is an attempt to describe this singular quality of a static position instinct with continuous and onward flowing movement. Finally, the god’s face is full of genuine power and benignity and is the adequate consummation of the sculptor’s ideal. It is no wonder that Marforio has become a type. Vasari, for instance, speaks of young Baccio Bandinelli making “a Marforio” out of snow, as not long before the youthful Michelangelo had made a faun from the same perishable material.

For a thousand years—and we do not know for how much longer—Marforio has been a part of the city’s life. He has survived the Norman pillage in 1084, as well as the great sack of Rome in 1527. As a kindly god, dispensing water to rich and poor, he has had his part in all the triumphs and disasters, and has shared the ups and downs of life not only with the city but with her children. Roman and barbarian, patrician and plebeian, slave and citizen, Pagan and Christian—all have drunk from his fountain. What has he not seen, and not heard! It was an unerring instinct for the fitness of things which made him Pasquino’s gossip, and his present honorable but unnatural seclusion from the city’s busy streets and squares is commonly attributed not to Pope Clement XII’s lack of imagination but, on the contrary, to his recognition of Marforio’s malicious influence over the popular mind. A tablet has been set up in the house which is built over the site where history finds him, Number 49, Via Marforio. In short, Marforio belongs to that curious class of inanimate things which have developed a personality; injury to him would arouse fierce popular resentment; and were he to be destroyed, the Romans would feel that they had lost not a work of art but a personal friend.

The third fountain in the trio of the Campidoglio is to be found in the upper garden of the Palazzo dei Conservatori—the building to the right hand in the ascent of the Cordonata. It can hardly be called a fountain, since it is merely a large basin of water surrounding some rockwork on which stands an old bit of sculpture of a character manifestly inappropriate to the sentiment of a fountain. It represents a lion tearing out the vitals of a horse which it has sprung upon and borne to the ground. This much-restored fragment is of real importance from an artistic standpoint, while as a Roman antiquity it has extraordinary interest. The marble bears distinct traces of having been subjected to the action of water, and, as a matter of fact, it was found more than a thousand years ago in the bed of the River Almo. Nothing is known of its history previous to that discovery.

The Almo is a little brook in the Campagna not far from Rome, rising in the hills between the Via Appia and Via Latina and emptying into the Tiber. Its modern name is Acquataccio. The Almo was connected with the ancient worship of the goddess Cybele, whose sacred image was ceremonially washed in it each year on the 27th of March by the priests. This religious ceremony, doubtless, preserved the channel of the stream so that it would have been quite possible to hide successfully a great piece of statuary in its depths or in some reedy pool along its banks. River-beds were not uncommon hiding-places for treasures during the Dark Ages which followed the breaking-up of the Roman Empire, and it is quite possible that this group may have been so hidden by its owner whose great villa, situated near the stream, was threatened with pillage or destruction by some barbarian incursion. The high value evidently placed upon it by its original possessor was also given to it by its discoverers. It belonged to that remote museum of antiquities kept in or near the Lateran Palace during the Middle Ages and dating back at least to the days when Charlemagne first visited Rome, in 781, bringing with him his little son Pepin, aged four, to be anointed King of Italy by Pope Hadrian I. This museum contained also the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now standing in the centre of the piazza of the Campidoglio, together with the two river-gods, placed later on by Michelangelo where they now lie—one on either side of the central fountain of the Campidoglio; and other marbles and bronzes of great value. Most of these art treasures were removed from the Lateran to the Capitol when Pope Sixtus IV (Riario, 1471–1484) founded the Capitoline Museum; but long before that time the Lion, as it was always called (the original portion of the horse being merely the body), had been taken from its academic seclusion and set in the midst of things. During three centuries of the turbulent life of mediæval Rome, it stood to the left hand and at the foot of the long flight of steps which, previous to Michelangelo’s time, led up from the Piazza of the Ara Cœli to the Capitol. All about it was held the public market; the city officials, found guilty of misdemeanors, were made to do penance sitting astride the Lion’s back with their hands tied behind them and their faces smeared with honey—the Roman version of the pillory! The ferocity of the Lion was thought to typify the punishment of crime, and the public executions were held before this old fragment. Here, on August 31, 1354, the famous soldier of fortune, Fra Monreale, was beheaded by order of Cola di Rienzi. On October 8 of the same year, Rienzi himself was caught as he was escaping in disguise from the burning palace of the Capitol, and here he stood, during the last hour of his life, leaning against the Lion, turning his head this way and that in vain quest of succor, while the mob which was so soon to tear him to pieces held back in a strange awe, and a silence reigned over everything! That was the greatest of all the tragedies—though there were so many of them—connected with the Lion.

The old bit of sculpture continued to hold its sinister place in Roman life, until the pontificate of Paul III (Farnese, 1534–1549). At that time Master Michelangelo (to use Vasari’s phraseology), working for the Pope, remodelled the Capitol and decorated it with many old statues. The group of the horse and lion was then completely, though poorly, restored, and placed in the court of the Palazzo dei Conservatori—this being the first of the three buildings of the Capitol to be built after Michelangelo’s designs. At the same time the place for the public executions was transferred from the piazza of the Ara Cœli to the Piazza di Ponte Sant’ Angelo.

The Lion was placed in its present position in 1903, and Rome of the twentieth century is responsible for the extraordinary taste which converted into a fountain this old fragment, highly interesting as an antiquity but repulsive in itself, and associated chiefly with the bloodiest and least attractive pages in Roman annals.

It is impossible to leave the Campidoglio without a heightened appreciation of the might of the constructive imagination. Only that faculty, developed to its highest power as in Michelangelo, could have produced this magnificent harmony out of the incongruous mass of classic and mediæval survivals with which he had to deal.

FARNESE

“At the entrance to this palace stand two rare and vast fountains made of granite stone and brought from the Baths of Titus.” Thus wrote John Evelyn in November, 1644. The description holds to this day, although the modern sight-seer will substitute Caracalla for Titus.

The fountains were erected by the Farnese family to add the final touch of distinction to their new palace. They owe their unique combination of original classic features and seventeenth-century taste to the genius and opportunities of Paul III and his grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese II, and to a still later descendant Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. The Pope and the earlier cardinal, men of wide culture and enormous wealth, were the first to excavate and exploit the Baths of Caracalla. The treasures they there found might well have been the loot of some fabulous city, and yet the pearls and gold and rubies brought some twenty years later by Francis Drake to his royal mistress were of small significance compared to the works of art found in those great baths—baths which had been the most sumptuous pleasure-house of imperial Rome. It is the glory of Italy that she knew this at the time. Her great churchmen reverently exhumed those masterpieces of Greek and Roman art and made of them the Farnese Collection—according to a well-known authority the rarest collection ever got together by private individuals, and forming to-day the chief interest in the Museum at Naples.

When the Pope, Paul III (Farnese), began the erection of the great new palace which was to bear his name and fitly domicile the princely family he was founding, he, and his descendants after him, used for its decoration the rare marbles and minor artistic trophies from the baths. No doubt, it seemed to them a happy inspiration to turn these gigantic granite tubs into a pair of fountains; for these notable fountains are, in the last analysis, simply huge bathtubs, rendered imposing by their size, and magnificent by the material out of which they are made. They are seventeen feet long and about three feet deep, and are absolutely devoid of decoration except for the lion’s head carved in relief, low down in the middle of each side—and this is merely an ornamental outlet for the water, quite as necessary to the original purpose for which these tubs were made as are the handles carved high up on either side under the curved rim, simulating metal rings through which the bronze staves had been inserted whenever it was found necessary to move the tubs. Carlo and Girolamo Rainaldi, who, in 1612, adapted for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese this furniture of the past to seventeenth-century decorative purposes, could think of no more original design than that of the well-known Italian fountain of their own day. They placed each of the tubs in a large, elegantly curved basin similar to those in the Piazza Navona standing some two feet above the pavement. In the middle of each tub they erected a sumptuous Italian vase, its large, swelling stem, richly carved, upholding an elaborate shallow bowl, oblong in shape, out of which rises as the fountain’s final consummation a highly conventional fleur-de-lis, the emblem of the Farnese family. This is overwrought with fine stone traceries, and sends upward from its centre convolution a single slender stream of water. Additional jets, of no artistic value, rise one on either side in each of the lower basins. This modern work is all in travertine.

The combination of the severely classic lines of the baths with the Gothic carving and mediæval emblem of the fleur-de-lis is not good. It is disastrous to the design as a composition and makes these fountains archæological curiosities rather than artistic creations. Still, the Farnese fountains impose by their qualities of size and strength, and once seen can never be forgotten.

The pleasure derived from the sight of a pair of fountains is not merely double the pleasure that is felt at the sight of one. The two objects, though exactly similar, create by their mutual relation an entirely new set of æsthetic emotions. The feeling for balance and composition is aroused, and this particular pleasure is produced in no small degree by these two fountains. Twin fountains are an unusual feature. There are few of them in the world; and in Rome, whose fountains are perhaps still unnumbered, there are but five—the fountains of St. Peter’s, the side fountains of the Piazza del Popolo, the two end fountains of the Piazza Navona, Vansantio’s fountains in the Villa Borghese, and these of the Piazza Farnese.

Mr. John Evelyn also describes in his journal the custom of his day for the Roman gentry to take their airing in the Piazza Farnese, driving or walking before the palace and about the fountains, whose water gave to all the architectural magnificence that touch of freshness and charm essential to the Roman idea of a pleasure-ground. That Evelyn was taken to the Farnese Palace the very first day of his sojourn in Rome is significant. The Roman of 1644 evidently considered this palace and its precincts to be Rome’s chief attraction; and this proves that in spite of the efforts of Paul V (Borghese), who had died some twenty years previously (1621), and of Urban VIII (Barberini), then just passing away, the Farnese pontiff, Paul III, dead for a century past, had succeeded in giving and preserving to his family an importance and magnificence hardly to be emulated and impossible to surpass. The bronze and marble tomb of Paul III is in St. Peter’s, to the left of the tribune. It contains the dust of as worldly a person, to quote Ranke, as ever Pope had been. Yet if his actions cannot be said to “smell sweet and blossom in the dust,” his memory survives in the annals of Rome, fragrant with the love and pride of his people. He was an old, old man when he died in 1549. He had been fifteen years Pope and forty years a cardinal. The date of his birth carries the mind back to the years before Columbus. His education, conducted by Pomponeus Lætus, had begun in the full tide of the High Renaissance. In his early twenties he became a member of the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent, at whose table and in whose gardens he had met the most brilliant men of his time and had heard talk that embraced all that was then known or surmised of art and learning. For Constantinople had fallen to the Turk only a generation before that time, and what had survived of Greek culture, fleeing across the seas to Italy, had found its chief shelter and patronage in the household of the great Medici. While in Florence, young Farnese must have heard Savonarola preach; but no trace of the great Dominican’s influence is to be found throughout his long life. The classic spirit enthralled his intellect, and the splendor of the Medici prince captured his imagination. In later years his careful Latinity, his splendid and liberal manner, and his gay and witty conversation, together with his patronage of artists and his passion for the antique, proved how profoundly he had been influenced by the experiences of his early youth. Placed thus in the very heart of a movement which freed the individual from all limitations save those of his own personality and opened the world before him, he early made up his mind to become Pope and to raise his own family, as the Medici had done, to the rank of princes. The ambition was perhaps common, but the ability with which he pursued these aims for upward of sixty years was not common, and their complete achievement was little short of the marvellous. It took him forty years to reach St. Peter’s chair, and he occupied it only fifteen; but before he died one of his grandsons had married a daughter of Charles V, the Emperor of Austria; another was betrothed to the daughter of the King of France; and two more were cardinals and multimillionaires. Later on, his descendants married into the royal houses of Portugal and Spain, and the Farnese family passed out of existence only by being merged by marriage into the royal house of the Neapolitan Bourbons. One grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese II, was the chief art patron of his time, and this in an age when there were many such men; and one great-grandson was that Duke of Parma whose fame as a great captain is written in what were, until the second decade of the twentieth century, the bloodiest annals of the Netherlands. To provide a suitable setting for this princely family, the Pope, some five years before his death, began this Farnese Palace. Antonio da San Gallo, the younger, Giacomo della Porta, and Michelangelo designed its façades and cornice. The great structure was completed long after the Pope’s death by Alessandro Farnese II. It was recognized at once to be the most sumptuous of the Roman palaces. It stands upon the site of the old Palazzo Ferriz, which was at one time the residence of the Spanish ambassador, and had passed into the possession of the Augustine monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The old Ferriz Palace had been on the Tiber bank, for it was not until Julius II’s time that the Strada, or Via Giulia, was cut through, thus separating the palace from the river. Where these fountains now stand as the ornaments of a spacious piazza, there was at that time nothing but a collection of hovels extending as far as the Campo de’ Fiori. The far-sighted young cardinal—the Farnese were thrifty, for all their magnificence—bought the old palace from the monks, and lived there in ever-increasing splendor under the successive pontificates of Julius II, Leo X, and Adrian VI.

Finally, under Clement VII, the great sack of the city caused him to fly to the Castle of St. Angelo. As in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, forty-seven years later, only those Huguenot gentlemen survived who were kept in the King’s closet, so during the horrors of the sack only those cardinals escaped outrage who were sheltered with the Pope in the Castle of St. Angelo. Farnese by this time ranked next to the Pope in importance, and he was, of course, among these. From the Castle he witnessed, with the terrified Clement, the devastation inflicted upon the latter’s exquisite pleasure-house on Monte Mario, an act of wanton vandalism committed by the Colonna to spite the Pope. Some ten years later Cardinal Farnese bought this wrecked palace, restored it, and presented it to his daughter-in-law, Margaret of Austria, who rested there on her triumphal wedding procession into Rome. It is called after her to this day the Villa Madama.

In 1540, when the old Palazzo Ferriz was destroyed to make room for the Palazzo Farnese, the workmen came as usual upon traces of earlier times. Modern archæologists have discovered that the mosaic pavement under the right wing of the palace was a part of the flooring of the Barracks of the “Red Squadron of Charioteers.” It has been generally supposed that the new palace was built of stone from the Coliseum, but its materials came from numerous and varied sources. The great travertine blocks were quarried at Tivoli; and Paul III obtained permission to demolish and use for his building the partly ruined battlemented monastery of St. Lorenzo Outside the Walls. After this quarry was exhausted, his nephews obtained the ruins of Porto, the Baths of Caracalla, and what was still more important the remains of the greatest temple of imperial Rome—Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun, which, at that date still towered one hundred feet above the Colonna gardens.

Contemporary artists sketched these various structures as the masons destroyed them, so that students of the present day can form some idea of their classic grandeur, and can judge for themselves the value of the Farnese Palace on the one hand and on the other that of the imperial baths and temple, and the mediæval monastery, out of which it is built.

The great new palace made necessary the great new square in front of it; but years before this the Pope had begun that regeneration of Rome for which he is so gratefully remembered.

The entry into Rome of Charles V, on the 5th of April, 1534, first aroused the Romans to the deplorable condition of their city, and, under the Pope’s enlightened guidance, the preparations for the imperial visitor took the form of permanent and far-reaching municipal improvements, which improvements were carried on throughout the entire period of Paul III’s pontificate. The enlarging of such great thoroughfares as the Babuino and Condotti date from this time, as does also the modern Corso, this last finally superseding the Via Giulia as the fashionable resort. Paul III preferred the old Palazzo di Venezia at its foot to any other residence, and he connected it with the Campidoglio by the great viaduct, lately destroyed; while for him Michelangelo designed the Campanile of the Senate House. A great Roman of the present day asserts that the fifteen years of Paul III’s pontificate comprise one of the happiest periods in the city’s life.

When Margaret of Austria rode through the Porta del Popolo, “two hours before sunset, dressed in white satin embroidered in pearls and gold,” it was not merely a curious crowd who met and welcomed her. That concourse of citizens represented the self-respect of the Romans, risen from the abasement of a decade, and eager to prove to the daughter of the world’s greatest sovereign their worthiness to be her subjects. They could not know that Margaret felt contempt for her youthful husband, nor that in the long duel between Paul III and the Emperor of Austria she stood not for Rome but for Austria, saying once when her assistance was sought that she had rather cut off her children’s heads than ask her father to do anything that displeased him! These were matters for the Farnese to deal with. So far as Rome was concerned, with the entry of the Emperor’s daughter, its place among the cities of the world became once more important and imposing.

Charles V might despise the upstart Farnese as Francis I had laughed at Cesare Borgia, but the self-made Italians of the Renaissance—churchmen, merchants, and condottieri, were forces which hereditary monarchy could not do without. Spain had the riches of the New World; France and England were breeding the manhood of Europe; but Italy held the keys to the past—to the culture for which men’s souls longed. The time was not yet—in 1540—although it was close at hand, when Italy’s deliberate choice of evil rather than good finally made her, by weakening and corrupting her, a captive to Spain. Time was not yet; and in that last lingering glow of her greatness and freedom the old Pope, Paul III, moves as her incarnate spirit. To a figure slight and stately, though with stooping shoulders, was united a shrewd and kindly countenance, with a massive nose and flowing beard, mobile lips and piercing eyes. His voice was modulated, and his manner gracious and noble. This outer man held guard over a mind so crafty and tenacious, so secretive and resourceful, that to the Venetian ambassador—ever the most astute observer—he remained a fascinating and baffling enigma; while for Cardinal Mendoza and the Emperor he was an antagonist whom, for all their secret Austrian contempt and bitter hatred, they could not afford to ignore.

It was remarked that the Pope never wished to hear or to speak of his predecessor. He felt that the election of Clement VII had robbed him of fourteen years of the papacy. Posterity may well share his prejudice, for it seems safe to assume that, had Paul III been Pope in 1527, Bourbon’s soldiers would never have got within sight of the city walls; there would have been, in fact, no sack of Rome. The Pope felt with all the force of his Italian nature the danger to Italy from the side of Spain. Better patriot than priest, he had made secret treaties with the Protestants as a weapon against the Spaniard; and while no one realized more keenly than he the necessity of reforms in the Church, yet he dreaded them lest they might in any way weaken the strength of the papacy. His singular ability to unite the fortunes of his family with profitable political undertakings runs throughout his long life; but this nepotism, which no pope ever carried further, and for which he has been unsparingly censured by historians, represents the kindliest strain in his nature. It was the human side; and it was the direct cause of his death. In a dispute over retaining the Duchy of Parma in his family, the Pope’s grandson, Octavius, opposed the old pontiff. Paul felt this ingratitude deeply, and spoke openly about it to the Venetian ambassador. The day after All Saints’ Day, 1549, the old man repaired to his villa on Monte Cavallo “to ease his mind,” and from there he sent for Alessandro Farnese II. He came, this magnificent young cardinal, handsome, courtly, the great art patron, the lover of scholars and poets, the finest flower of the Farnese, a grandson and namesake of whom Paul III was justly proud. The cardinal was the Pope’s darling, and from him Paul felt he could expect support and sympathy. The interview, however, soon became stormy. High words passed. The Pope flew into a rage and snatched the biretta from the cardinal’s head. He had discovered that Alessandro also was carrying on a secret counterplot against him, and the discovery broke the old man’s heart. Such a violent attack of anger at the age of eighty-three brought on an illness from which he had neither the strength nor the wish to recover, and in a week’s time Paul III was dead. Even after his death the Romans loved him—a rare tribute to any pope—and all Rome went to kiss his feet. He had been the first Roman to occupy St. Peter’s chair in over one hundred years, and the Romans felt his virtues and his failings to be their own. Fifteen years before, they had carried him on their shoulders into old St. Peter’s for his coronation, and now they buried him there. His tomb cost twenty-four thousand Roman crowns, and is the masterpiece of Guglielmo della Porta. The two recumbent statues upon it are said to be after a sketch by Michelangelo. The connection of Michelangelo’s name with the tomb is interesting, but of greater interest is the romantic legend which surrounds the statue of the younger woman. This figure, once called Truth and now known to be Justice, is said to be the portrait of Paul III’s sister, and this recalls the fact that the fortunes of the princely family of the Farnese rest upon no more honorable basis than the passion of Alexander VI (Borgia) for this sister, the beautiful Giulia Farnese. No one can study the statue on the tomb without understanding how it was that this magnificent creature seemed to the men of her time the flesh-and-blood presentment of those Pagan goddesses whom they all, secretly or openly, worshipped. The superb body is now concealed by Bernini’s hideous leaden draperies, but the carelessly waving hair and tiny ear have witchery even in the marble, while the face possesses that solemnity of perfect beauty found only in the masterpieces of the Greeks. Never before or since was such a price paid for the Red Hat! Alexander VI made the young brother, Alessandro Farnese, aged twenty-five, a cardinal, and Giulia Farnese went to reign in those Borgia apartments, decorated by all the genius of Pinturicchio, and at once the pride and disgrace of the Vatican. The young cardinal was nicknamed the Petticoat Cardinal; but he seems to have felt no compunction at the transaction. With the Romans, as with the Parisians, ridicule is the most powerful engine of destruction; and the fact that Alessandro Farnese lived this sobriquet down, proves, as nothing else can prove, the hold he had upon the Roman people.

Any account of Paul III would be incomplete without some reference to his extraordinary belief in astrology. It was quite a recognized fact that he never even considered any scheme, public or private, before consulting the planets. If the heavenly bodies were not in favorable conjunction, the enterprise was given up, or as nearly given up as was possible to so obstinate and tenacious a mind. In his own time this singular characteristic was felt to be incongruous and rather disgraceful; but it is easy for the modern spirit to understand, and even condone, the weakness. Surely, it was not strange that such a man, with such a life, should feel that “the stars in their courses fought” for him.

The impression made upon the mind by the Farnese fountains is not pleasing. They are certainly “rare and vast,” but as fountains they are not a success. The form overshadows the substance; for the single jet of water thrown upward over the structural part of the fountain is not adequate, and is lost in the effect produced upon the eye by the huge tubs turned black by the deposits of the Acqua Paola; while the water falling back into these receptacles is caught as in a prison, the overflow from the upper to the lower basins being not sufficient to give an idea of a copious stream. The monster granite baths have a sepulchral effect. They seem more like coffins made to hold the bones of departed heroes than like basins for receiving and distributing living water. During more than two centuries these fountains bore witness to the magnificence of the Farnese family; but as that magnificence had been sought and held for reasons as purely personal and selfish as men have ever known, it had no real value or significance for the world. No memories of patriotism or ghost of romance hangs over these fountains, or over the palace which they guard. The family and the splendor once were, and now are not; and all the sunshine which daily floods the spacious piazza fails to reanimate the majestic vacancy of the façade, or to lift the gloom from the dejected and sombre fountains.

VILLA GIULIA

The Villa Giulia is the Italian version of “Kubla Khan,” not built by “lofty rhyme,” but constructed of actual stone and marble for a pleasure-loving pontiff of the Cinque Cento. The desire to realize the poet’s vision is often felt by absolute monarchs. Versailles, San Souci, and the Hermitage show what unlimited power, wealth, and caprice have accomplished in that direction; but none of the northern sovereigns possessed either the climate, soil, historical, poetic, and pictorial setting or the artists, architects, and marvellous art treasures which were at the command of Pope Julius III.

When this pontiff, whose election dates from 1550, decided to build a pleasure-house upon the vineyard in the Via Flaminia, which he had inherited from his uncle, the elder Cardinal Monte, he bought up adjoining property from various landowners, so that his domain finally extended from the Tiber eastward up the Valle Giulia and adjoining slopes of Monte Parioli. The southern boundaries have not yet been fully determined, but those to the north extended as far as the Chapel of St. Andrea, a beautiful little building erected by Vignola to commemorate Pope Julius’s (then Cardinal Monte) deliverance from the soldiery at the time of the sack of Rome in 1527. The Via Flaminia was at that time the fashionable drive. It was lined by fine villas and palaces, and Amannati alludes to it as the “beautiful Via Flaminia.” The approach to it was from the Piazza del Popolo, then a place of gardens, through the fine Porta del Popolo which, begun so long before under Pope Sixtus IV, had just been finished by Michelangelo and Vignola. The fine avenue extended as far as the Ponte Molle, where it crossed the Tiber, and, after skirting the western slopes of Monte Soracte, began its long march to the north. A little road (called the Via del Arco Oscuro) leading up from the Tiber crossed the Via Flaminia at right angles and climbed up the Valle Giulia, turning abruptly toward the northern spur of Monte Parioli. The original Monte property lay along this little road; and it was at the head of this thoroughfare, where it turned sharply to the north and therefore at some distance from the Via Flaminia and on much higher ground, that Pope Julius decided to build his villa. Its creation quickly became the absorbing passion of his life. The greatest architects of the time were employed upon it and no expense was spared. After Pope Julius’s death, the entire place was confiscated by the Camera Apostolica for thirty-seven thousand scudi, the estimated amount of Pope Julius’s debts.

The Monte Pope (Julius III belonged to the Roman family of Monte) would leave the Vatican by the passage leading to the Castle of St. Angelo, take there a magnificent barge and be rowed up the great sweep of the Tiber to the landing-place at the foot of the Arco Oscuro. Here a fine flight of steps was constructed leading up to a vaulted pergola which traversed the fields between the Tiber and the Via Flaminia. The pergola was a bower of verdure and terminated in a fine building and gateway bordering the Tiber side of the Via Flaminia. Here it was necessary to cross the great highway in order to begin the ascent of the Arco Oscuro, which led directly to his new villa. The highway was dusty, and the salita or ascent long and steep, and the Pope decided to create a resting-place at this point. He had begun digging for water very early, while cultivating his vineyard, “without ever having had the slightest indication that water could be found there.” Eventually he accomplished his purpose, for he succeeded in bringing to his vineyard the leakage waters of the Virgo Aqueduct. The “leakage” was very much in the nature of a tap, and the proceeding was high-handed and reprehensible to a degree. In imperial days such tampering with the aqueducts was visited by punishment which Frontinus considered not too severe for so great a crime against the public welfare.

Julius III’s pontificate lasted only five years; but in the year following his death the Virgo Aqueduct had already ceased to supply the city, and his successors, Pius IV, Pius V, and Gregory XIII, were obliged to begin and carry on a systematic and thorough restoration and enlargement of the aqueduct. For Julius III the wonderful water was only a perquisite belonging to the “good gift of the papacy,” and he devoted his short pontificate to its exploitation and adornment, possibly silencing his scruples by the thought that the construction of a public fountain on this highway justified his manner of obtaining the water. At the two opposite angles of the Via Flaminia and the Arco Oscuro, where the ascent toward his villa began, he erected two fountains, blunting the acute end of each angle by a mostra or high façade from the base of which issued the water. The fountain on the right-hand side was a drinking-trough for horses, while that on the left was one of the most beautiful and interesting fountains in all Rome. It was the work of Bartolomeo Amannati, possibly assisted by Vignola; and very often must the youthful Domenico Fontana have studied it, for the famous “Fontana Fountain” is only a modification of this truly beautiful work of the dying Renaissance. It is noticeable that Amannati’s fountain is not a screen nor a gateway; its mostra stands against a solid background with severely plain wings of the same height flanking it at an angle on either side. This mostra is of peperino in the Corinthian order, the columns supporting a fine classic entablature and pediment. The apex of the pediment was surmounted by a colossal statue of Neptune, and the corners of it terminated in two pedestals carrying, the one a Minerva, and the other a Rome. Between these two figures and the Neptune were two minor pedestals marking the architectural termination of the great central division of the fountain, and on these stood two small obelisks, a feature borrowed by Fontana for his fountain of the Moses. The arch of the central division held between its Corinthian pillars the huge square slab with the inscription:

JULIUS III PONT. MAX. PUBLICÆ
COMMODITATI ANNO III

The niches on either side of this slab once contained statues, one of Happiness and the other of Abundance, a design embodied two hundred years later in the background of the Fountain of Trevi. The basin for receiving the water did not extend across the full width of the mostra, but was, and is (for this still remains), a noble white granite conca standing at the foot of the central division under the inscription. It originally received the water from a beautiful antique head of Apollo. All this is described in a letter written by the architect himself, Amannati, from Rome in 1555, and there follows a description of the arcade behind the fountain. This consists of three loggias with Corinthian columns, making a semihexagonal design and carrying a vaulted roof ornamented by pictures and exquisite stucco work. This was where “his Holiness got repose without incommoding the public,” which, on the other side of the wall, refreshed itself and its beasts of burden from the public fountain. The columns were joined together by a balustrade, and the three-sided colonnade held in its embrace a large fish-pond with various jets d’eau. Beyond this architectural loveliness stretched long walks bordered with fruit-trees and espaliers, and up these paths the Pope walked when, refreshed after his long journey from the Vatican, and eager to see what his workmen had concluded over night, he finally decided to go on to the villa on the hill. This beautiful fountain and its loggias have suffered more than customary outrage from time, neglect, and stupidity. There would seem to be no vile use to which the loggias have not been put; and the superimposition of the Casino of Pope Pius IV, which is now recognized to be the work of Piero Ligorio, has entirely altered the proportions and beauty of the public fountain. The fate of Pope Julius’s creation, from the time of his death until 1900, is poorly outlined in the various half-obliterated escutcheons and inscriptions which now ornament the fountain and its superstructural Casino. As the villa and all the land about it had been immediately sequestered by the Apostolic Chamber in spite of the protests of Julius III’s legal heirs before a tardy compensation was awarded them, this portion of the Monte property was divided by Pope Pius IV between a son of the Duke of Tuscany “who was to have the usufruct for his lifetime” and his own two nephews, Carlo and Federigo Borromeo. A sister of these Borromeo brothers married a Colonna, and the property was bestowed upon her as dowry. It remained in that family until 1900, when it was purchased by the present owner, Cavaliere Giuseppe Balestra, who already owned the adjoining villa on the high ground, which might have been a part of the original Villa Giulia, since it corresponds to that land which Julius III had acquired from Cardinal Poggio and Cardinal San Vitelleschi. The Medici escutcheon may have been placed there either by the Duke of Tuscany or by Pius IV. The Pope was of very humble Milanese origin and had no connection whatever with the great family whose name he happened to have; but after he became Pope, the Duke Cosimo I, who found it to his interest to have the Pope on his side, permitted him to use the escutcheon. Contrary to the decent Roman custom,B the original inscription of Julius III was removed in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, by that one of the Colonna who inherited the property after the death of the last descendant of the earlier branch. He placed his own, the present, inscription in place of it, sparing the inscription to Carlo Borromeo, either because of Borroraeo’s connection with the Colonna family or because of the great veneration felt by everyone for the memory of the sainted young cardinal. It was also at this time that the beautiful antique head of Apollo was replaced by the Colonna escutcheon and the sculptured trophies. The inscription on the small tablet under the spring of the arch relates that in 1750 Pope Benedict XIV gave to the Colonna family the right to draw “two ounces” of water daily from the receiving-tank of the Trevi Fountain for use in their Roman palace as a recompense to them for their gift to the public of the Trevi Water in this old fountain.C

Those who visit the Villa Giulia in the morning hours may see the Campagna carts on their way back from Rome drawn up before the public fountain of Pope Julius III, and the sleepy drivers, tired horses, and responsible little dogs refreshing themselves with the water.

So far the picture created more than three hundred and fifty years ago remains the same; fundamental customs do not change in Rome. But on the other side of the wall, where once sat and talked the joyous Pope and his company, what ruin and desolation! Some day the Italian Government will sweep the crumbling loggias free from dust and rubbish and tear away the protecting foliage, not redeeming but unmasking the desecration of the centuries. To-day the dark water in the rough garden tanks, the unpruned trees and wild flowers, the old mule stabled under the ruined loggias where hay is stored, the mysterious gloom of the vaulted roof above the Corinthian capitals and everywhere black shadows of impenetrable depth make up a scene whose like can in all probability be found only among the engravings of Piranesi.

The Villa Giulia proper is designated in the old Italian books as l’Invenzione nella Vigna Giulia, and the literal English translation of invention not inappropriately describes this truly marvellous creation. Amannati, Vasari, Vignola,D and even the aged Michelangelo spent themselves upon the architectural devices by which this pleasure-house became a place of almost fabulous beauty. Consummate knowledge of perspective was employed in making the building, which is not at all large, seem so, and the only defect in the entire design is, as might have been expected, the Pope’s fault, for Julius insisted upon working into the loggias in the rear of the upper court of the fountain a gift of columns, beautiful in themselves but too small for the surrounding proportions, thus making that part of the construction appear insignificant and inferior to the rest. The Pope’s changing caprice wearied even the good-natured Vasari, who has left the record that “there was no getting the villa done”; and it was not long before Vignola, a man of genuine and independent genius, wearied utterly of serving such a master and went off with the great Cardinal Farnese to build the latter’s villa of Caprarola, where he could work at peace and for an appreciative and sympathetic patron.

The last remains of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun were presented by Prince Colonna to the Pope and went into the fabric of the villa, and a great collection of portrait busts of the Emperors, found in the villa of Hadrian, helped to adorn the loggias and niches. The villa was filled with rare marbles, tables, statues, and vases, and the marble columns of the central loggia were so lustrous that Amannati says they mirrored every one who entered there. As the villa is constructed on the hillside, various levels are the natural result, and this feature has been used with diverse and happy effects. The various courts are all on different planes while, with the one exception of the grand double stairway in the central court, all the stairs are cunningly concealed so that there is no suggestion of physical effort as the eye passes from one plane to another. The vaulted roofs of the long semicircular galleries and various rooms were decorated with paintings or with stucco work of the most exquisite perfection. Traces of this last are still to be seen above the niches containing the colossal river-gods, the Tiber and the Arno (Amannati was a Florentine). The place was truly a Palace of Art. Nothing but beauty was permitted to enter it. Stables, offices, and kitchens were placed outside the villa, and the one house which stood within the villa grounds—that of the keeper or custodian—was designed and decorated with great care, so that, according to Amannati, the entire invention was of such beauty that it was in itself “good enough for any great prince.” Nothing remains of this splendor but the bare shell, and this has been so tampered with that it is only from old plans or from outlines of restoration by Letarouilly and Stern that a true conception can be obtained of the villa of Pope Julius III. It is necessary to know, for instance, that the front court, now a commonplace garden, was originally a great paved cortile filled with statuary now in the Vatican or scattered far and wide over Italy. The loggia leading up and out of this court was originally closed and entered by doors. The shallow, broad stairway leading down from the right-hand garden under the terraces was put in for the benefit of the cavalry quartered there during a petty war of the eighteenth century, when the horses were taken down to drink at the Nymphæum! The present gardens in no wise represent the beautiful formal gardens which stretched there on either side of the various courts, and the present walls cannot possibly enclose that space which was once filled with orange groves and every sort of device for fastidious delight. Somewhere in those grounds, probably on the right hand, there was a monticello or little hill from which could be seen the Tiber, the Seven Hills, the “beautiful Strada Flaminia,” the Vatican, and the vast erection of new St. Peter’s overtopping and gradually engulfing the old basilica, the view extending even to the sea. Under the high ground still held in place by a great retaining wall were grottos beautifully decorated by stucco and painting and icy cold even in summer. In the woods, where the Italian pastime of snaring birds was carefully provided for, there were accommodations for every kind of animal, and everywhere there were fountains, marble seats, and antique garden statuary.

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

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!

Looking at the tranquil loveliness of the Colonna fountain—so white and shining in the sunlight—it is difficult to picture it as a part of the turbulent life of the period in which it was erected. Yet many a time its waters must have restored consciousness, stanched wounds, stifled cries for mercy or succor, and washed away the stains of blood. It has always been a Pilgrims’ Fountain. Long before Sixtus V with his passion for converting the “high places” of Paganism into Christian monuments had restored the Antonine column and placed upon it the statue of St. Paul—long before that time the ascent of the column had been a part of the Roman pilgrims’ itinerary. In the Middle Ages the column had become the property of the monks of San Silvestro, who leased it to the highest bidder. As Rome numbered her pilgrims by the thousands in any year, and by the tens of thousands during the years of the Papal Jubilee, a goodly profit was derived from the fees paid by the pilgrims to the custodian of the column, and the monks could therefore always count upon making an advantageous lease. Gregory XIII, in erecting this fountain, must have thought primarily of the comfort and interest of the pilgrims. As the traveller of to-day remembers the fountain of Trevi, so the pilgrim of the sixteenth century remembered the fountain by the side of the Column of St. Paul—the fountain of the Piazza Colonna. Its beauty delighted the eyes of footsore men from far-off and still barbarous countries; while the crystalline waters which quenched their thirst and washed away the stains of travel would have had for these Christians from the North a symbolic significance undreamed of by the Romans. The vision of this shining fountain has been carried back to many distant monasteries and remote firesides throughout the Christian world. Its situation in the Piazza Colonna, which is but a widening of the Corso, has kept it in the main current of Roman life. The people use it and cherish it; Falda has engraved it; and, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XII embellished it with its dainty shells and dolphins, as a father might twine flowers in the hair of some beautiful child.

QUATTRO FONTANE

These quaint old fountains, now fast fading away, were erected during the pontificate of Sixtus V to decorate the famous “Crossing” created by himself and his architect Domenico Fontana when these two began to make over Rome of the Renaissance into modern Rome. The Crossing occurs where the Via Venti Settembre traverses at right angles the Via Sistina. The former leads from the Porta Pia to the Piazza of the Quirinal, and the latter runs all the way from the Trinità de’ Monti to Santa Maria Maggiore, changing its name just above the Crossing to Via Quattro Fontane, and after passing the Via Nazionale becoming Via Agostino Depretis. The Via Venti Settembre becomes, after leaving the Crossing on the Quirinal side, the Via Quirinale. Sixtus V laid out the Via Sistina, and called it for himself the Via Felice. The Via Venti Settembre was called in his time the Via Pia, as it led to the Porta Pia, which was erected by Pope Pius IV.

The four fountains are of travertine and represent two rivers and two virtues. They are all by Fontana except that one which is placed across the grille in the wall of the Barberini Gardens. This is the work of Pietro da Cortona. The choice both of the rivers and of the virtues is significant. Pope Sixtus V’s early life shows what need he had of fortitude, while fidelity marks his attitude toward his two (and only) friends, Pope Pius V and Domenico Fontana.

The Tiber, represented by a river-god behind whom the reeds are growing, was of course to be expected. The Anio, also a river-god but with the emblem of the oak-tree, may have been chosen because of Sixtus V’s intention to bring its waters to Rome, not by an aqueduct but in a canal, for the transportation of the travertine and wood needed in his great enterprises. For the Tiber also he had plans. He wished to enlarge its bed so that he might bring up his galleys from the sea to Rome; and he had a scheme for its separation at the Ponte Molle and for bringing one arm of it behind the Vatican, so as to make an island of that part of Rome containing the papal palace, St. Peter’s and the Castle of St. Angelo. These were among the projects which he had not the time to carry out, for Sixtus V’s pontificate lasted but five years. Seeing what he actually accomplished during that short period and reading what he still intended to do, it seems as if this Pope were not a link in the long chain of St. Peter’s successors but one of those “explosions of energy” which occur from time to time in the history of men.

Sixtus V was not a Roman nor even by descent an Italian. His origin was from the humblest condition in life. The family name of Peretti (a little pear) might have been taken by his father, an Illyrian immigrant of Slavonic origin, to denote his occupation, which was that of a fruit gardener. At twelve years of age this man’s son, Felix Peretti, became a Franciscan novice; and from that time the enthusiasm, ideals, and limitations of the great Order of St. Francis moulded and inspired a character formed by nature for leadership in any position to which it might attain. To an ardent temperament, an imperious will, and a strong intellect was added a constructive, even fantastic, imagination of a high order; but his lack of early culture and his exclusively monastic training had kept him in ignorance of all education not immediately connected with religion and had bred in him a hostility toward classic art almost amounting to fanaticism. Such was the great Franciscan friar, Felix Peretti who, after first becoming Cardinal Montalto, was elected Pope in 1585 and took the title of Sixtus V. It may be said that, although as head of the Roman See his abilities obtained a far wider scope than his order could have given him, yet from the point of view of character and ideals he remained the Franciscan friar all his life. His brief and splendid pontificate closed suddenly amid the last great political and religious struggle between France and Spain. To neither opponent had Sixtus, who could see both sides of the conflict, given his final support; and his suspension of judgment in a cause where the forces of Protestantism were still represented in the person of Henry of Navarre gave rise to suspicions, most unjust, of his orthodoxy. The Roman people forgot the benefits and glories of his reign and remembered only its severity, the destruction of their antiquities, the drain of his taxation, and his temperate policy toward a Protestant king. The marvel of his extraordinary rise to power had produced in the public mind fantastic theories, and when a great storm burst over the Palace of the Quirinal, where the Pope lay dying, it was commonly believed that “Friar Felix” had at last been called upon to fulfil his part of the compact which he had made with the devil for power and place.

When this Pope ascended the chair of St. Peter he found an exhausted treasury, a starving people, a cramped and crowded city suffering from lack of water and from every means of hygienic living; and added to this there was such a condition of lawlessness in the States of the Church as made them a byword throughout Christendom. Within a year after his election the last great chieftain of the banditti had been destroyed, and the foreign ambassadors journeyed in safety to take up their abode in the Holy City. Within three years he had deposited in the Castle of St. Angelo great sums of money, which were to be used, however, only for the defense of the city, the purchase of lost papal territory, and wars against the Turks, with which last contingency his imagination was constantly at play. During these years he had also reconciled the feud of the Colonna and Orsini, had restored the disputed privileges of the nobility in the great cities, and had brought Venice once more into harmony with the papacy. It was by command of this Pope, Sixtus V, that the gardens, hills, wolds, and valleys of the States of the Church were planted with mulberry-trees, so that “where no corn grew the silk industry might flourish.” It was Sixtus V who encouraged woollen manufacture so that—to quote his own words—“the poor might have something.” In connection with this, it is interesting to see that he had fully intended to turn the Coliseum into an immense woollen factory. The streets of Rome resounded with the cheerful din of his architects and masons; and though the nobility and populace had reason enough to fear the entire destruction of their ancient monuments at the hands of this Franciscan, yet they could but admire the great triumphs of architecture and engineering which day by day raised the city to her lost pre-eminence and restored the pride of the Roman people. His first great public enterprise marked him at once as a born administrator. This was the introduction into Rome of a new supply of water. The work which the Pope determined should be worthy of imperial Rome was accomplished in spite of every obstacle and at a cost of two hundred and fifty-five thousand three hundred and forty-one scudi. By it he all but doubled the population of his city and reclaimed that great tract of land comprising the Viminal, Quirinal, and Esquiline Hills. This quarter had been a desert during eleven centuries; and yet, in the days of the Empire, it was the garden of Rome.

Piranesi’s engravings give some idea of the savage wildness of the uninhabited parts of Rome; and the ragged and uncouth figures with which he peoples his ruins are, no doubt, a faithful representation of the squalor of the wretched tribe of outlaws who dwelt among them. This state of things had resulted from one cause—lack of water. The aqueducts which supplied these hills had been the first to perish at the hands of the barbarians, and desolation had followed inevitably upon their destruction. Pius IV had dreamed of restoring this great portion of the city; but Pius IV, like his immediate predecessors, had lacked the means of doing this. Sixtus V brought to the task the required money, public tranquillity, and imagination. He found in the erstwhile mason’s apprentice from Como, Domenico Fontana, the engineer and architect for such undertakings. The old Marcian Aqueduct furnished the materials for the Acquedotto Felice, and the water was brought all the way from Zagarolla in the Agra Colonna, near Frascati, twenty miles distant from Rome, to the Pope’s vineyard outside the Porta Maggiore, and thence to the Church of Santa Susanna. The splendid stream carried over these arches was thus distributed throughout the desolation and sterility of the Viminal, Esquiline, and Quirinal Hills. With this water at his command, Sixtus V began laying out what might be called to-day Sixtine Rome—the Rome which lies between the terraces of the Trinità de’ Monti and that portion of the Aurelian wall pierced by the six gates—Porta Pinciana, Porta Salaria, Porta Pia, Porta San Lorenzo, Porta Maggiore, and Porta San Giovanni. It was an enormous space to cover, and the frescoes in the Vatican Library show how desolate and how wild it was. The two great basilicas of the Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore, the Coliseum, and the Septizonium (for very good reasons not included in the picture), the Baths of Diocletian, the Neronian arches, the Villa Montalto with its rows of famous cypresses, and in one panel the Moses fountain and the Porta Pia—these constitute the main features of the wild landscape with its hilly background and its foreground of rough, bare earth and shaggy vegetation. The Pope offered special privileges to all who would build on these hills, and he himself began the work by levelling the ground about the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti and building the fine flights of steps which lead up on both sides to the church. Half-way between this church and the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore he created the Crossing; and for rest and refreshment, as well as for beauty, he placed here these four fountains. This half-way point in the long ascent from the Trinità de’ Monti to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore was well known to Sixtus V. Many a time had he, as Friar Felix Peretti, climbed that lonely hillside and felt for himself the solitude and thirst of the desolate vicinity. Later on, when he had become Cardinal Montalto, he had passed that way in such state as a poor cardinal could command. Here Fontana had first built him a modest dwelling, and here he began to construct the Villa Montalto, which, as Fontana labored over it, became at length so beautiful that it, together with the chapel he was also building in Santa Maria Maggiore, cost Montalto the allowance given by the Camera Apostolica to poor cardinals, since the Pope judged no man to be poor who could build so magnificently. Gregory XIII’s inference and consequent action may have been natural, but was not on that account just. The enduring antipathy between Ugo Boncompagni and Felix Peretti dated from that Spanish mission on which they had been sent together by Pius V; and when Boncompagni had become Pope and had, therefore, Cardinal Montalto in his power, it befitted him to make a thorough investigation of any matter concerning his old antagonist before taking action. As a matter of fact, the villa, though costing in the end thirty thousand scudi, could not have been so extravagant in the beginning. The characters of Cardinal Montalto and Fontana, as well as their accounts, prove how certainly the owner and architect could get the best possible returns for their money. These two men formed at that time one of the notable friendships of history. Fontana supplied out of his savings the funds for continuing the chapel; and Montalto, as Sixtus V, proved his gratitude and appreciation. Their confidence in each other was as complete as was their recognition of each other’s ability. Sixtus gave Fontana the work of taking down and re-erecting the obelisk of the Vatican—and this, in spite of Fontana’s youth (he was forty-two years old and judged by his contemporaries to be too young for such responsibility) as well as the reputation of Amannati and other competitors. Furthermore, when the obelisk was finally lowered to its present position amid the prayers of the vast concourse of people, Sixtus was not even present. The French ambassador was to have his audience at that hour, and the state of Europe was the Pope’s chief concern. As Sixtus passed along the street to the Vatican, revolving the affairs of Philip II and Elizabeth of England, of Mary Stuart and Henry of Navarre, and the “Unspeakable Turk,” the guns of St. Angelo apprised him that the obelisk was in place. That had been Fontana’s business and he had trusted it to him. Nevertheless, the old pontiff shed tears of satisfaction.

The Villa Montalto was eventually finished by the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Montalto II, and later on it was known as the Villa Negroni. Engravings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show that it contained an endless variety of fountains; among them Fontana’s great fish-pond was truly magnificent. All of these had been made possible by the Acqua Felice. Sixtus V preferred the Quirinal to any other residence. Perhaps the Villa Montalto may have become distasteful to him by reason of the crime which was immortalized by Webster’s tragedy of “Vittoria Accoramboni or the White Devil.” Cinque Cento Italy was the Italy of the Elizabethan dramatists, and in this tragedy, the blackest of their Italian productions, many of the chief characters were drawn from actual life. The Cardinal Monticelso of the written tragedy had been the actual Cardinal Montalto, and Vittoria Accoramboni and her husband had been his nephew and his nephew’s wife. Francesco Peretti was the cardinal’s favorite nephew, and the ever-perplexing question of the formation of a cardinal’s household had been solved for Montalto by domiciling Francesco and Vittoria in the Villa Montalto. Vittoria had great beauty, and her ambition and audacity were boundless. She aspired to something higher than the handsome nephew of a parsimonious and conspicuously infirm old cardinal. She captivated the head of the Orsini, the Duke of Bracciano, and gave him to understand that she would marry him after he had made away with his wife and her husband. The Duchess of Bracciano was the sister of the powerful Grand Duke of Tuscany. Nevertheless, Bracciano strangled her with his own hands while pretending to kiss her. Young Peretti was then called away from the Villa Montalto one night on the pretext that his dearest friend had need of him, decoyed into the desolate spaces on Monte Cavallo, and stabbed to death. The cardinal, his uncle, buried him without a cry either for justice or vengeance. He waited. But Gregory XIII forbade forever the union of Vittoria and the duke. More the Pope could hardly dare do against the greatest of his subjects. Vittoria and Bracciano went through a mock ceremony and retired to the duke’s great fortress castle of Bracciano, not far from Rome, where they waited for the Pope’s death. When this occurred, they returned to the city in order to have the marriage performed during that interim which must elapse between the death of one pope and the election of another. Vittoria became the legal Duchess of Bracciano; but her former husband’s uncle, the feeble old Cardinal Montalto, was elected Pope, and the two great criminals fled from a certain and terrible retribution. Venice at that time was the refuge for all the terror-stricken, and the duke’s kinsman, Ludovico Orsini, lived there as a successful general. Bracciano died there seven months later; and six weeks afterward Ludovico Orsini murdered both Vittoria and her young brother Flaminio in Padua, whither they had gone to live on the duke’s great legacy. Vittoria’s possession of Bracciano’s fortune, and the outraged pride of the Orsini occasioned by her marriage, for she was of humble origin, prompted Ludovico’s crime. But all three of these actors in the tragedy were guests of Venice, and Ludovico Orsini had in very truth reckoned without his host. There was one pride greater than that of a Roman noble, and that was the pride of Venice. Padua was Venetian territory, and the republic suffered no such acts of lawless vengeance within her jurisdiction, no matter by whom they were committed nor on what provocation. The Venetian reprisals were summary and fearful. Ludovico Orsini was strangled by the Bargello with the red silk cord which, as a nobleman, he had a right to demand; and his accomplices died by torture in the public square. It was an age of crime, flagrant and atrocious; but the story of Vittoria Accoramboni, involving, as it did, the temporary ruin of the Orsini family, lives on when others equally horrible have been happily buried and forgotten in the archives of the families in which they occurred.

Sixty years after the death of Sixtus V this region about the Quattro Fontane had become both fashionable and beautiful. The fountains were then known as the four fountains of Lepidus, and Evelyn described them as the “abutments of four stately ways.” Sixtus V had made it illegal for any house along his great thoroughfare of the Felice to be torn down against the will of the owner, even after a decree of the Tribunal.

In an age of uncertainty created by the Pope’s own high-handed measures, this security alone must have gone a long way toward encouraging building.

In 1587 Sixtus himself bought the beautiful Piazza of Monte Cavallo from the heirs of the Caraffa family, and the Quirinal Palace, already begun by Gregory XIII, was finished by him with great magnificence. Fontana also built in one corner of the Quattro Fontane the Palazzo Mattei, now the Palazzo Albani. The invaluable stimulant of the “master’s eye” was always to be felt about the neighborhood, for Sixtus V often took his Sunday walk after mass along these streets, examining, criticising, and commanding everything. He was “always in a hurry.” It was as if he felt the time was short. No modern methods surpass the rush of his undertakings; but unlike the modern building, that which he built remained, and remains until this day. The feeble body which so successfully deceived the Conclave at his election and yet survived for those five titanic years of his pontificate lies in Santa Maria Maggiore, in the great chapel built for him by his Fontana. There, as Stendhal truly says: “Amid all the marble magnificence, what one really cares to see is the sculptured physiognomy of the Pope himself.”

One other statue of this Sixtus which formerly adorned Rome would now be of surpassing interest. It was erected at the Capitol in the Pope’s lifetime, and was the work of that gifted young Florentine artist, Taddeo Landini, who modelled the bronze boys in the Tartarughe fountain. The night the Pope died this statue was covered by boards for fear of the violence of the mob, and soon after it was removed; but it is probably still in existence, and the increasing interest in Sixtine Rome may some day bring it to light.

In this mortuary chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore there is also the tomb of Pope Pius V, erected by Sixtus V, and one of the panels in the Vatican Library depicts the solemn removal of the old saint’s body to this splendid resting-place. Sixtus V saw this accomplished in his lifetime, for his devotion to the Pope, who, like himself, had begun life as a friar, and who had made him cardinal and stood his friend in trouble, never wavered nor grew cold. Historians have dwelt much upon Sixtus V’s parsimony. Economy was said to be his favorite virtue. But the best of the Quattro Fontane is that which represents the virtue of fidelity; and this is the only one of them which is decorated with the emblems of Sixtus V.

TARTARUGHE

Giacomo della Porta, Domenico and Giovanni Fontana, Carlo Maderno, and Bernini are the Roman masters in the gentle art of fountain-making. Giacomo della Porta stands first chronologically, and he has also created the loveliest of the lovely. This is the Tartarughe fountain for which the Senate and people of Rome paid over twelve hundred scudi, evidently a large sum at that time for a fountain, as Baglioni mentions it particularly. Giacomo della Porta delighted in rare marbles and for his fountain of the Tartarughe he carved the broad shallow bowl of the classic drinking cup in the centre in bigio morrato fasciato, or veined gray marble, while he made the stem of a mottled yellow marble called Saravezza. The cup stands upon a Carrara base, moulded and carved with decorative shields or escutcheons, from the four corners of which project huge shells of rare beauty and distinction of form carved in different varieties of African marble. It rises from a shallow travertine basin, gracefully shaped and slightly sunk below the level of the present pavement. So far there is nothing to distinguish this fountain from others of its kind except the richness of its marbles and the shape of the shells, but its four bronze figures so harmoniously composed give this design the dignity of a work of art, and make it the most exquisite of Roman fountains. They are by Taddeo Landini, whose early death was a distinct loss to the world of art.

These figures are of boys in the most beautiful period of adolescence, their sinuous bodies lean against the swelling stem of the cup, one slender leg of each figure pushed backward so that the foot rests on the toes, preserving the balance, while the other leg, lifted high and bent at the knee, presses its foot upon the head of a bronze dolphin. The torsos lean toward each other in couples, each supporting itself on its elbow so that the right shoulder of the one and the left shoulder of the other come rather close together. The hands of these supporting arms grasp the tails of the dolphins, while the other arms, raised high above the head, push upward with open palms and outspread fingers four bronze tortoises which clamber over the rim of the cup in haste to plunge into the water. Projecting from the under surface of the rim are carved in marble heads of cherubs, so placed that the water which they spout falls in a steady stream between the figures of the boys and is received into the lowest basin.

The composition of these figures of boys and water-creatures is quite lovely; and the water, rising in a central jet from the drinking-cup, gushing from the mouths of the dolphins and slipping in slender runnels from the cunningly curved lips of the huge shells enhances, as it should, the joyous naturalness of the entire conception.

The popular appreciation of the beauty of the Tartarughe is shown by the wide-spread impression that it was designed by Raphael. It is painful to give up that belief, and in the face of facts which prove the hopelessness of such a contention the enthusiastic admirer can only assert that had Raphael designed a fountain this is the fountain he would have designed.

There is assuredly some excuse for this assertion. Raphael depicted often, and with peculiar tenderness, the gracious figures of youths. There is, also, a whimsicality in this conceit, a certain sympathy seems to unite the boys with the water-creatures; it is as if they were all joining in the sport of their own free will, and might at any moment break away from each other only to reunite in some fresh prank in splashing water under happy skies. All this is highly reminiscent of the art of Raphael. By virtue of it the Tartarughe belongs not to the end of the sixteenth century but to that great period of the High Renaissance when “for Leo X Raphael filled rooms, galleries, and chapels with the ideal forms of human beauty and the pure expression of existence.”

This fountain was erected in the last year of the pontificate of Gregory XIII and the first year of the pontificate of Sixtus V, which would explain why its erection is attributed sometimes to the reign of one pope and sometimes to that of the other. It is difficult to understand how Sixtus V could have permitted the erection of any fountain so entirely devoid of scriptural suggestion, so purely pagan in its expression of joyous and irresponsible life, as is the Tartarughe. Possibly the play of the boys in the splashing water reminded the old man, who was in spite of his fierce enthusiasms so kindly and so human, of the far-off days of his childhood. As Cardinal Montalto he had done much for his native village, and many acts of his pontificate prove he had the poor always with him. He never forgot their sufferings or their simple pleasures, and in that old heart there lingered memories of his father’s fruit garden at Formi, of the pear-trees which he placed in his coat of arms, and of the great cistern in which he dabbled with such happy recklessness that one day he fell in and had to be fished out like any other urchin destined or not for the papal chair.

Rome would, undoubtedly, be the richer for a fountain by Raphael, but it is probably fortunate for the Tartarughe that it was not of Raphael’s creation. It is not likely that this bit of fancy in bronze and rare marbles could have escaped destruction at the time of the sack of Rome in 1527, only six years after Raphael’s death. Perhaps, also, this last blossom from the golden Summer of Italian Art owes its perfect preservation to its position in an obscure corner close to what was once the Ghetto. But as a setting for this gem no situation could be more inadequate. A mean square of dingy, uniformly ugly houses surrounds it, and there is not one redeeming feature in all this dreariness except the patch of blue sky overhead. A fountain fit to be the crowning beauty of some prince’s garden or to be celebrated in a canto of “The Faerie Queene” plays on in this commonplace part of Rome unheeded, and seemingly uncared for. However, when in 1898, one of the tortoises was stolen the indignation felt at the theft was so wide-spread and so fierce that the thief was only too glad to abandon the precious tortoise in a place where it could be easily discovered.

Trevi water supplies this fountain at present. Until quite recently it was the Acqua Paola, but its deposits had so discolored the bronze and marbles that the water in the shells was changed back to the Trevi, for which water it was originally constructed. However, the highest jet in the fountain was not changed, as Paola water can rise to a much higher level than Trevi.

FONTANA DEL MOSÈ

This is the first of the great Fontana fountains, and if Domenico Fontana got his inspiration for it from the beautiful public fountain made by Amannati for Julius III on the Via Flaminia, with which he was familiar before the Casino was placed above it, his fountain in its turn became the prototype for the great fountains erected in the next century by his brother for Pope Paul V.

This Fountain of the Moses is a great portal consisting of three arches equal in size, from the base of which the water issues in double cascades. The water falls into three large basins guarded by couchant lions, and each lion spouts an additional stream of water. In the centre archway stands a colossal figure of Moses in the act of striking the rock, and the niches on either side of him are filled by high reliefs of scenes from the Old Testament relative to the importance and significance of water. The relief to the right represents Gideon testing his soldiers and is the work of Flaminio Vacca, and in the left Giovanni Battista della Porta has carved the scene in the desert after Moses has brought the water from the rock. Four beautiful marble columns with Ionic capitals stand one on either side of these arches, and in the small triangular spaces between the capitals and the keystones are the emblems of Sixtus V—the star, the three mounts, the pear branch and the lion. These arches and columns support a massive entablature of which the inscription, in the noble Sixtine caligraphy, forms the most important feature, and is, in fact, the most impressive part of the entire structure. Above the inscription rises the florid pediment, flanked by two obelisks (an idea distinctly borrowed from Amannati’s fountain) and bearing on its apex the three mounts of Sixtus V which carry the huge iron cross. Underneath this and occupying the greater part of the pediment are the armorial bearings of Sixtus V. The huge shield is supported by two angels, a conceit borrowed, perhaps, from Pius IV’s escutcheon over the Porta Pia, and repeated again for Paul V in his fountain on the Janiculum. The armorial sculpture is by Flaminio Vacca. Such is the great Fontana fountain, grandiose rather than magnificent, but still distinctly imposing and adequately filling by its size and importance the honorable position which it occupies among the fountains of Rome. It is the main delivery tank of the Acqua Felice; and the Acqua Felice was the first new supply of water which Rome had received since the aqueducts had been cut off from the city by Vitiges in 537.

The statue of Moses is a colossal blunder. Prospero Bresciano had modelled the curious Sixtine lions which served to support the Vatican obelisk, and the Pope gave him the commission for the principal figure in his great fountain. Contrary to the advice of his friends, Bresciano carved this statue, which was to be his masterpiece, directly from the travertine without any previous modelling—the block lying horizontally on the ground. When the figure was raised it was found to be not only out of proportion but also out of conformity with the laws of perspective. Its unveiling was greeted by the critical Roman populace with a shout of derisive laughter, so Homeric in its volume and duration that it utterly condemned the artist, who, as a result, fell into a melancholia and died.

The present lions, which are of bigio marble, are modern, dating from the days of Gregory XVI (1846). This Pope created the Egyptian Museum in the Vatican and removed thither the original lions, which were of Egyptian origin and had been appropriated for his fountain by Sixtus V—two from the Piazza of the Pantheon and two from the gate of St. John Lateran.

The two great points of difference between the Fontana fountains and the Amannati fountain on the Flaminian Way are interesting and significant. They are, first, the place of the inscription, and secondly the volume of water. The first point of difference is due to the fact that the Fontana fountains, here and on the Janiculum, proclaim the appearance in the city of a new supply of water. Sixtus V and Paul V had each built a new aqueduct and could announce the fact conspicuously by magnificent inscriptions; whereas Julius III, using a stream of water from an aqueduct already in existence, could only claim the honor of having erected the fountain for the convenience of the public. His inscription, therefore, is not borne aloft on triumphal arches but occupies a place in the central niche, filled in Sixtus V’s fountain by the figure of Moses, and in Paul V’s fountain left absolutely vacant. The stream which Julius III dared appropriate from the Virgo Aqueduct was only large enough to fill a single basin placed before the central niche of Amannati’s fountain; whereas in the Fontana fountains the water fills the entire space below the mostra, as it was naturally the intention to show the magnitude and force of the new supply.

Pope Sixtus V’s great fountain demands for its effect, like Paul V’s, wide and spacious surroundings. The high modern buildings crowding upon it and dwarfing it have done much toward diminishing its artistic values. One of the panels in the Vatican Library shows what the fountain was like in the years immediately following its erection. Gardens and vineyards lay all about it, and it easily dominated the walls and gateways which were its only architectural neighbors. The Porta Pia to the left merely enhanced its dignity, and in the far distance the hills, aqueducts, and the open sky lent themselves for a magnificent background.

The Acqua Felice, which was the first water of papal Rome, had been the last water brought to the ancient city. In 226 the Emperor Alexander Severus built the eleventh and last aqueduct of the classic city. Its remains are still to be seen on the Via Prænestina. Over this aqueduct he brought the Acqua Alexandrina, which was from practically the same sources as those which now supply the Acqua Felice. The Acqua Alexandrina was brought by the Emperor down the Via Labicana as far as the Esquiline, where he erected for it a magnificent fountain. A coin of his period shows the design to have somewhat resembled the present “Fontanone” on the Janiculum.

Sixtus V selected as the site for his fountain an open space on the Viminal Hill near the Church of Santa Susanna. He faced it southwest, at right angles to the Via Pia, which terminated at some distance to the northeast in the Porta Pia. The Acqua Felice enters Rome at the Porta Maggiore at the altitude of 59 metres and supplies 21,632.8 cubic metres of water daily. In order to bring the water to Fontana’s fountain it was necessary to cut a wide street, the Via Ceruaia, and to tunnel through the Baths of Diocletian. Although the Acqua Felice served the Pope’s purposes and literally made the desert blossom like the rose, Sixtus V had no sentiment about it. When the water actually reached the city, his sister and nephew, thinking to please him, hastened to bring him a cupful. The Pope, who hated a scene of any kind, refused to drink it, declaring that it had no taste, which is quite true. It is to this day the least valued of the Roman waters, and the overflow or “lapsed water” of Fontana’s great fountain is used for laundry purposes.

The Pope bought the land containing the feeding-springs of the Acqua Felice from Cardinal Colonna, and brought it to the city underground for thirteen miles and for the remaining seven over arches. Its channel is known as the “ugly aqueduct.”

The worst of the crimes committed by Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana against the antiquities of the city was the destruction of the Septizonium. Artists of the period have left invaluable sketches of this last fine example of classic architecture. It had been built by Septimius Severus against the Palatine, probably as an architectural screen to the mass of confused buildings in its rear. It faced south down the road by which travellers from Africa entered the city. It had survived the sieges, the earthquakes, and the fires of more than thirteen centuries; yet Sixtus V, without a qualm, demolished it for the sake of the blocks of travertine and peperino and its beautiful marble columns, which he wished to use in his own architectural enterprises. It is impossible not to wonder what were Fontana’s feelings as he superintended the destruction of this masterpiece of his own profession. He does little more than mention the fact in his memoirs, and this may be in itself significant. Some of the material went into the fabric of the Moses fountain; but the Romans never forgave either Sixtus V or Fontana.

Considering the dearth of water in Rome in the sixteenth century and the character of Sixtus V, the conception of the central idea of this fountain—that of Moses striking the rock—was not only happy but almost inevitable. Although the Pope was an ardent churchman, it was easier for him to believe in the conversion to Catholicism of the conqueror of Ivry than to understand that the Roman ruins had any other than a commercial value. Leo X had believed in art “for art’s sake.” He had believed in nothing else. To Sixtus V, on the other hand, all the efforts of painting, sculpture, and architecture were to be for the glory of God, more particularly as that glory was understood and expounded by himself. The Neptunes and Tritons of later pontificates would have seemed to him creations of the devil. The Old Testament was to him, as it was to the English Puritan of the next century, the source of artistic inspiration; and for his great fountain the Hebrew lawgiver, bringing the water out of the rock at the Divine command, was alone adequate. It was not unnatural for him to think of himself as standing in the place of Moses.

SIXTVS · V · PONT · MAX · PICENVS
AQVAM · EX · AGRO · COLVMNAE
VIA · PRAENEST · SINISTRORSVM
MVLTAR · COLLECTIONE · VENARVM
DVCTV · SINVOSO · A · RECEPTACVLO
MIL · XX · A · CAPITE · XXII · ADDVXIT
FELICEMQ · DE · NOMINE · ANTE · PONT · DIXIT
COEPIT · AN · I · ABSOLVIT · III · MDLXXXVII

Pope Sixtus V, of the Marches, conducted this water from a junction of several streams in the neighborhood of Colonna, at the left of the Prænestine road, by a winding route, twenty miles from its reservoir and twenty-two from its source, and called it Felix, after the name he himself bore before his pontificate. He commenced the work in the first year of his pontificate, and finished it in the third, 1587.

THE LATERAN

Modern photographs can still be found of the original fountain of the Lateran. It was the work of Fontana and was placed in this spot after he had erected the obelisk for Sixtus V. The present fountain is quite new and most inadequately replaces the old one which had stood there for over three hundred years. By the close of the nineteenth century the upper basin of Fontana’s fountain was badly broken, while the lower one had been held together for some time by iron clamps. The carving was so worn and defaced that the dolphins and eagle were quite shapeless, and the figure of St. John writing in a scroll upon his knee and looking to Heaven for inspiration had long since disappeared. Maggi’s engraving of this fountain made in 1618 shows it to have been one of the richest ever designed by Fontana. A curious feature in this old fountain was the blending of the insignia of three popes. The pears of Sixtus V were carved in heavy festoons under the huge supporting scrolls of the mostra (which was a screen made low so as to bring the figure of St. John in simple and high relief against one of the square sides of the pedestal), the Borghese eagle poured the water into the shell-shaped upper basin; and finally the Aldobrandini bar of continuous Maltese crosses was used as frieze.

The obelisk of the Lateran was set in its present place by Fontana only two years before the death of Sixtus V, and it is quite probable the fountain was not erected until some years later. Sixtus V rushed the work on the Lateran at top speed; and this obelisk was no sooner in place than Fontana was commissioned to transport its companion to the Piazza del Popolo. The Lateran obelisk was erected in 1588. In August, 1590, Sixtus V died. Four popes followed him in rapid succession—Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX, all dying so soon that by January 20, 1592, Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) had become Pope; and Fontana may have finished this fountain during the first years of Clement’s pontificate, before he fell under that pontiff’s displeasure. The frieze on the fountain must have been originally the Montalto or Peretti frieze, which forms so beautiful a finish to the Lateran Palace; but Fontana, while keeping the star of Montalto (one of Sixtus V’s emblems) in the corners under the cornice of the screen, changed the design of the intervening space into the Aldobrandini bar. It was a small detail, and the change was a mere matter of custom and policy and involved no disloyalty to the great past in Fontana’s life. This would account for the Aldobrandini frieze. The eagle seems at first more difficult to explain. From the accession of Paul V the eagle denotes the Borghese family; but Paul V did not become Pope until 1605, and Fontana left Rome for Naples in 1596. Therefore, the eagle of this fountain cannot have any connection with the Borghese family. Why did Fontana use it instead of the lion’s head, which was another of Sixtus V’s emblems and would have made a better architectural outlet for the water? It must have been because the eagle is the emblem of St. John. In Michelangelo’s fresco of the Fourth Evangelist in the Sixtine Chapel the eagle stands with bent head and folded wings close against the figure of the saint who, seated upon the ground, is writing in the scroll supported by his knee. Fontana, or the sculptor who carved for him the figure on the top of the mostra of this fountain, was undoubtedly inspired by Michelangelo’s creation. The St. John of the fountain was, according to the old engravings, a beautiful and youthful figure looking to Heaven for inspiration and writing in the scroll held upon his knee. The eagle was wanting, but Fontana placed him just below the cornice between the curving tails of the dolphins, and adapted him to the purposes of a fountain. The design was original and extremely interesting, as it shows both Sixtus V and Fontana in a new and unusual light. They were dominated by the place. The great new Lateran Palace which they had built, the ancient obelisk which they had set up, the fountain which supplied the invaluable Acqua Felice, were all subservient to the venerable basilica of St. John. The piazza and all that it contained were dedicated to St. John, and had been so for seven hundred years. Pope and architect may have felt that in this fountain the insignia of any pontiff were more fittingly kept in a purely subordinate position.

The mostra of the old fountain rested, as the present one does, on the base of the obelisk; and the fine Piranesi engraving of the Piazza of the Lateran shows its position and proportions as well as the admirable balance which it gives to the entire scene.

This obelisk is still the highest in the world, although the lower end was so badly broken and damaged (by fire) that Fontana had to shorten it by three feet. It was also broken in three pieces and Fontana’s device for mending it, which so pleased the Pope, can be traced in various places among the hieroglyphics. When the obelisk was at last erected, Fontana carved his name with his title of knight in Latin on the base, and the three mounts and the star of Sixtus V were fastened to the apex. Above everything was placed the huge bronze cross, for Sixtus V considered the obelisk to be the supreme symbol of divinity in a great Pagan theology; and by placing the cross on all those which he re-erected, the Pope felt that he was exhibiting in the most picturesque and conspicuous manner the triumph of Christianity.

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

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

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

Such a garden was the Villa Borghese; and such a garden it still is, in spite of constant desecration. This is the home of the most poetic of Bernini’s fountains. It stands on the summit of a rising avenue, yet it does not terminate a vista, it makes itself a part of one, for the avenue continues after the fountain has been reached. It stands in full but tempered sunlight, girt about by a circle of box hedges and ilex trees, with here and there a tall stone pine. The lower basin lies in the turf, like a natural pool, and the water fills it to the brim. It reflects the trees and clouds in its quiet depths, or as the little breeze ruffles the surface, it gives back the sunshine like a broken mirror. Single shafts of water, spouting upward from between the forefeet of the sea-horses, fall back into the same basin from which they rose, curving like the arches of a pergola; yet so steady is their flow that the tranquillity of the pool is hardly troubled. Four foam-flecked circles, only, show where the falling water mingles with the water at rest. Greater peacefulness could not well be given to any artificial bit of water. Then from the centre of this dreaming pool there rises a fountain so rich in carving, so beautiful in design that it seems rather a great and splendid efflorescence than the work of men’s hands. From its leaf-fringed lower basin there rises a second and much smaller one, not like another basin but like a corolla within a corolla, and the flower-like composition terminates in a beautifully wrought cup resembling the blossom of the campanula. The water gushes upward from this cup, but not to any height. It falls back at once over the scalloped edges of the marble, and slipping in and over the carved foliage of the lower basins finally reaches, in a gentle, pensive manner, the quiet pool beneath. Sea-horses with tossed manes and backward curving wings plunge outward from the shelter of the lower basin. Their tails twine about its stem, and the basin is close above their heads, but it does not rest upon them; they are free. It is evident that in one more spring they will be out and away. Yet they do not take it, and they never will. For once Bernini’s genius masters his fancy. His fountain is not a fanciful conceit but a rich and peaceful artistic creation. An enchanter’s wand has checked the horses in mid-career, and here they remain, motionless, for all their movement, under the shadow of the leafy basin, part of a beautiful whole that must never be broken. This is one of those rare compositions in which the artist has most happily achieved the second essential in a fountain, that it should be a thing of beauty, a source of delight to the eye and ear. It is admirably suited to its surroundings, for rich carving and imaginative sculpture held in subservience to the natural charm of quiet water, conform exquisitely with a garden where stately formality enhances the loveliness of wild and simple beauty. The fountain is of travertine, the natural mellow tone of which has been rendered even more lovely by centuries of soft Italian weather. It does not stand out conspicuously in the vista; it detaches itself from the surrounding trees gently, as if it had grown there among them.

On either side of this fountain the ground falls away sharply into groves of ilex, traversed by natural footpaths. In the gloom of these wooded spaces there are two other fountains. Great basins catching the water from tiers of smaller ones in the centre and each surrounded by a broken circle of curved stone benches. They are the work of Antonio Vansantio; and, according to drawings by Letarouilly, the back of each semicircular bench was originally decorated at regular intervals with statues. Behind these stood a formally clipped box hedge rising some three feet above the benches, while the larger trees growing behind the hedge made by their branches a green canopy to this truly charming bit of garden architecture. Vansantio’s basins and benches are now in a half-ruined condition, but they are still extremely lovely and suggest pictures of eighteenth-century garden-parties, where groups of Watteau’s figures idle away the hours. The fountains are hardly visible, even at close range. They betray themselves by the sound of their falling water, which gives to the scene, like the song of the hermit-thrush, a poignant sense of remoteness and solitude. The deep shadows and half-hidden waters of Vansantio’s fountains form a well-conceived contrast to Bernini’s sunlit basins on the slope above.

There are many other fountains in this villa. A large round pool decorated with a central figure of a nymph, and set about with huge cactus-filled vases of a shape peculiar to the Villa Borghese, stands behind the Casino, while at the other end of the gardens the so-called Fountain of Esculapius fills a shady place with the sound and beauty of abundant water. This is a beautiful fountain, not because of any special charm or originality of design in the fountain itself, but because of its splendid jet of water and the composition of it and its surroundings. The arch containing the statue of Esculapius stands on a slight eminence surrounded with tall trees and shadowy foliage. Beneath and before it, the ground slopes in masses of broken rock and bowlders, and the fountain, a single round and shallow vase of finished travertine, stands in the midst of them. The jet of water almost tops the Arch above the statue, and it falls in great abundance upon the rocks at its base.

There is also the Fountain of the Amorini—so daintily lovely that the fact that it is incomplete is hardly noticed. The little Loves still firmly grasp their frogs and dolphins, but the vase they once carried on their heads is gone. The moss-grown stone-work of the basin, and the light and shade of the great ilex trees about it give this little fountain a peculiar charm. It seems to belong quite consciously to other days than ours.

There are fountains everywhere in the gardens. They are as common as the trees and the marbles and the violets. The water seems to play at will among the lights and shadows, for during three centuries this has been a Roman pleasure-ground; and to the Roman no pleasure-ground is worthy the name without the sound and sight of water.

The Villa Borghese was created by Cardinal Scipione Borghese during the sixteen years that his uncle held the keys of St. Peter, under the title of Paul V. The Pope assisted him in every way, for Paul V’s chief pleasure consisted in advancing and aggrandizing his family. Marc Antonio Borghese, a second nephew of his, became the founder of the family in Rome, and Cardinal Scipione had as commanding an influence over the Pope as had ever been known. Paul V found his model in Paul III, and so well did he emulate the founder of the Farnese fortunes that by the close of his pontificate the Borghese had become the wealthiest and most powerful family that had ever arisen in Rome. Cardinal Scipione’s annual income alone was one hundred and fifty thousand scudi—about one hundred and sixty thousand dollars—and Paul V destroyed the ruins of the Baths of Constantine so as to build for him what is now called the Rospigliosi Palace. Their habits, charities, possessions were all but regal. The cardinal endeavored to lessen the envy which such opulence naturally aroused by a complaisant and courtly behavior, as well as by benevolence; and he earned for himself the sobriquet of “the delight of Rome.” This villa he laid out for the benefit of the people, and it has really existed for them for over three hundred years. Paul V’s pontificate came to an end in 1621, and in 1645 Mr. John Evelyn writes in his “Diary” a long account of the Villa Borghese. The groves and avenues had by that time a generation’s growth, but the Casino and little temples and the multifarious delights which enriched them were still in pristine freshness. The taste of the present day may prefer the gardens as they now are to those of 1645; they have more of natural beauty and fewer artificial devices, and the simple fountains are more effective than the spouts of water made to resemble the shapes of vessels and fruits and the conceit of artificial rain. Much of the architecture and statuary Evelyn describes has vanished, but enough remains for the present traveller to recognize the picture and to feel that he is walking in groves and meadows trodden by many feet through many years. Since Evelyn’s time eight generations have also found these pleasure-grounds delightful. As full of memories as of fragrance, these gardens convey a sense of human life once lived among them and now forever gone, which is as poignant as the smell of the boxwood hedges in the hot sunshine.

The Villa Borghese has pre-eminently this subtle quality, and therefore it has become the loveliest as well as the best beloved of all Roman villas; and it is precisely because it is a Roman garden that its memories are so compelling. The men and women who have walked in these long avenues and lingered about these fountains have been the aristocracy of mankind. England, France, and Germany come here to gather memories of their great men. Statues to Goethe and Victor Hugo are not needed. Hugo and Goethe and many more of these noble ghosts come back, together with a long line of splendid popes and brilliant cardinals, to haunt the sun-warmed yet shadowy places, never jostling or disturbing the living but felt by the living in some strange and undefinable way.

These groves and fountains have been the setting for many scenes in Life’s dramas. There has been a Napoleonic interlude with dancing, masquerading, and somewhat boisterous merrymaking; and here, amid the loveliness of an alien civilization, began the last act in the tragedy of the Stuart Kings. The son of the exiled James II of England lived and died in Rome, and his children—Prince Charlie and the little Duke of York—played beneath these trees, as scores of other brothers of less fateful history have played before and since.K Here they came every morning with their fowling-pieces. High-spirited English lads, they made of the Italian groves a Sherwood Forest of their own. It was a far cry at that time to Culloden, and a long way to the cathedral of Frascati, where the younger brother was to read the funeral service over the elder. Time means so little in Rome that here in the villa where the Stuart Princes played, the “adventure of the ’45” seems to have happened only yesterday.

The villa is at its loveliest in May and October. On every Thursday and Sunday of this latter month it used to be the custom for the Prince Borghese to receive all Rome within his gates. Forty to fifty thousand people would sometimes come to these garden-parties, all classes mingling yet preserving their identity with the admirable dignity and self-respect of the Romans. The young Princess Gwendolin Borghese was seen for the last time at one of these great fêtes. Her saintly young spirit adds a breath as of incense to the Borghese gardens, and it is more easy to think of her presence here than among the ponderous marbles of the Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore where she lies buried.

Yet another Princess Borghese has left her memory within these gates. Canova has portrayed her as Venus Victrix, and she takes her place among the antique marbles by the right of flawless beauty. The flesh-and-blood original of Canova’s masterpiece, Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, cared but little for her beautiful villa. The ilex groves were gloomy and the fountains were insignificant compared with those of Versailles. She wearied of palace, prince, and villa, and spent as much time as possible with her own kin. It is recorded that the prince, her husband, was far more jealous of Canova’s statue of his wife than of his wife’s person. The Princess Pauline Borghese passed away like a summer cloud, but the Venus Borghese remains.

The personality of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is preserved in the two magnificent busts still standing in the picture-gallery of the Casino. It is difficult to believe that such vitality as Bernini has here portrayed could ever have quite faded from the earth, and surely his ghost must at times return to these gardens of his creation.

LA BARCACCIA

At the foot of the great stone stairway, known in Italian as La Scalinata and in English as the Spanish Steps, which leads down from the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti to the Piazza di Spagna lies the singular fountain called La Barcaccia. The design of this fountain is that of a quaintly conventionalized boat, fast sinking under the water which is pouring into it. To this effect it owes its name; for “barca,” being the Italian for boat, and “accia” a termination of opprobrium, Barcaccia means a worthless boat. The boat is supposed to commemorate an event which occurred during the great flood of 1598. On Christmas Day of that year the Tiber rose to its highest recorded level. All this part of the city was submerged to a depth of from seventeen to twenty-five feet; and here in the Piazza di Spagna a boat drifted ashore, grounding on that slope of the Pincian Hill, which is now covered by the Spanish Steps. For a long time the design of this fountain was supposed to commemorate this event, and it is quite possible that this may have been the case. Still there are other fountains of this design, the work of Carlo Maderno, and as one is in the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the other in the Villa Aldobrandini, it is also quite possible that Carlo Maderno and the creator of the Barcaccia may have had yet another idea when they constructed their stone boats with a fountain amidships and lying in basins not much larger than the boats themselves. For the Romans of this time knew much and surmised still more about the mysterious boats lying at the bottom of Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills, not more than seventeen miles distant from Rome. These boats had been discovered first during the pontificate of Pope Eugenius IV, and had been rediscovered in Paul III’s time, in 1535, or about a hundred years before Carlo Maderno employed this design for a fountain. At each date an attempt had been made to raise the boats, but these efforts as well as all subsequent attempts proved unsuccessful. However, in 1535 measurements had been computed and many objects belonging to the vessels had been brought to the surface to excite the wonder and admiration of the Roman world. It was discovered that the boats when once raised and floated would all but fill the tiny lake. The decks had been made of concrete and marble, and amidships there had been fountains whose falling waters mingled with those of the lake. The mystery surrounding the purpose and construction of those huge vessels is yet unsolved, but in the seventeenth century it still stirred men’s imaginations with all the force of fresh discovery. Both Maderno and Pietro Bernini could not have been ignorant of it, and they must have seen the exquisite bronzes and lead pipes bearing the stamp of the Emperor Tiberius which had been detached and brought up from the sunken vessels.

The Barcaccia fountain is the last work of Pietro Bernini, the father of Lorenzo. He had been employed to bring a branch of the Trevi Water from its reservoir at the head of the Vicolo del Bottino as far as the foot of the Pincian Hill in front of the Trinità de’ Monti, and the fountain done by order of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644) was the adequate consummation of that work. From whatever cause he derived his inspiration, his design of the Barcaccia fountain is so admirably suited to its position that it explains and almost excuses the popular idea that the fountain was made low in order not to obscure the view of the Spanish Steps. A reference to dates at once shows the absurdity of this last suggestion. In the Keats Memorial House hard by there can be seen an engraving by Falda (born in 1640) showing Pietro Bernini’s completed fountain against the background of the tree-planted slope of the Pincian Hill. The fountain was finished before the death of Pope Urban VIII, which occurred in 1644, and the steps were not begun until 1721, nine pontificates after that of Urban VIII.

On the prow and stern of the boat is carved the coat of arras of the Barberini family, for Urban VIII was the Barberini Pope and the founder of that family in Rome. This pontiff, whose character was a formidable compound of priest, statesman, warrior, and man of letters, delighted in the design of the fountain. Pietro Bernini had placed cannon at either end, thus making his boat into a war-vessel, whereupon Urban VIII composed a Latin distich in its praise:

At both ends of the large basin in which the boat stands are long, flat pieces of travertine. These are the stepping-stones on which any one using the fountain stands while dipping up the water. The Marcia Pia now supplies the houses in this part of the city, but the Romans still prefer to drink Trevi, and the stepping-stones are as much in use as they were in the days when Falda and other artists of that period engraved this fountain, placing in the lower basin figures of men or women in the act of dipping up the water. This quarter of Rome, once a part of the Campus Martius of classical days, has been for a long time given over to the interests of the American and English colonies; but for more than three centuries its foreign associations were chiefly French. Urban VIII was in many ways a French Pope, although he came of a Florentine family. As papal nuncio he had spent many years and made many powerful friends at the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII. In the conclave which elected him Pope, France openly and ardently supported his claims. During his residence in France he had known Armand du Plessis, who was to become Cardinal Richelieu. The two great churchmen went up the ladder of preferment side by side. They became, as pope and cardinal minister, respectively, lifelong allies in their tireless and successful efforts to humble the dual power of Austria and Spain, while promoting on the one hand the prestige of France and on the other the stability of the Papal See.

At the accession of Urban VIII, Spain and Austria held the passes of the Alps, thus dominating Europe and threatening the existence of the Papal States. At the close of his pontificate, France was rapidly becoming the first Continental power, and the Papal States had reached their utmost limit of territorial expansion. With his death the French influence in papal politics rapidly declined, but its artistic ascendency still lingered on. Thirteen years later a certain French gentleman, attached to the French embassy at Rome, and named Etienne de Guéffier, left in his will a sum of money for the construction of a great stone stairway which should connect the Piazza of the Trinità de’ Monti, in the centre of which lay the Barcaccia fountain, with the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti, standing far above, on the slope of the Pincian Hill. This gentleman, of whom little is known, must have been the friend of more than one of the great French artists who were living in Rome contemporaneously with himself. Possibly the splendid project of the Scalinata was the result of long hours of comradeship, when he, with his fellow countrymen, watched the sunset from the terrace which Sixtus V had placed before the Church on the Hill, or scrambled down the tree-planted slope before it in order to reach the fountain at its base. Certain it is that Rome owes this most distinctive architectural feature of papal times to the imagination and generosity of a Frenchman. The two Latin inscriptions upon the steps are worthy of attention.L

The building of the steps, begun by Alessandro Specchi and completed by Francesco de Sanctis, was not undertaken, as appears from the inscription, till sixty years after the death of De Guéffier and six pontificates later than that of Alexander VII (Chigi), in which De Guéffier died. By that time the Spanish influence had reasserted itself to a marked degree, and as the Spanish embassy had been established in a palace on the western side of the square, the old name of the Piazza della Trinità de’ Monti gradually gave way to the present name, Piazza di Spagna. And so finally the great stone stairway, the gift of a Frenchman in the heyday of French influence at Rome, came to be known as the Spanish Steps.

Yet, after all, the paramount association with the fountain of the Barcaccia is neither French nor Spanish, but belongs pre-eminently to the English-speaking race. This fantastic fountain, with its commonplace background and its limited view of the Scalinata, forms the only outlook from the windows of the house in which the poet Keats spent the last three months of his life; so that from the position of this house the fountain of the Barcaccia is connected for all time with the fate of the “young English poet” who lies buried now these many years in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls. From the windows of his narrow death-chamber he watched the plashing waters in the fountain below him, while above his head the bells in the church, which he could not see, remorselessly rang out the quarter-hours or tolled for some fellow creature the “agonia,” or “passing bell.” During his hours of listlessness or fits of sombre rage, this passing of time and of life was always in his ears, as the futile play of the water was always before his eyes.

It is not difficult to connect the bells and the fountain with the bitter epitaph written, by his own wish, above his grave:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

TRITON

The exquisite lines rise involuntarily to the lips as one comes suddenly upon Bernini’s old fountain in the Piazza Tritone, which, standing in the centre of one of the busiest and most prosaic thoroughfares of modern Rome, still keeps its own quality of beauty and seems to weave about itself the enchantment of the world of fable. Roman art has created many Tritons, notably the joyous group surrounding Galatea in the Farnesina Palace, but there is about this water-worn old figure such distinction and such emphasis of life that he becomes the prototype of all his race. He is Il Tritone.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

The fountain consists of a vast semicircular basin, sunk so far below the level of the pavement that it is necessary to descend a flight of steps in order to stand beside it. This device, which was rendered necessary by the low head of the water, is excellent from an æsthetic view-point, as the spectator, being on a different grade from the piazza and its surroundings, feels that he is in another world and is able to forget the city and give his entire attention to the scene before him. Looking up, he sees a great ledge of broken rock, over which the water pours in many streams and waterfalls, disappearing and reappearing among the rocks like a veritable mountain torrent. The main stream descends in a series of three quite lovely cascades, their semicircular-shaped basins being prototypes of the great lower basin, into which all eventually flow. Their edges are smooth, as if they had been water-worn, and the force of the water feeding them is so great that it boils and roars among masses of broken rock as it does in a natural waterfall. Above all this finely simulated wildness rises the ornate group of Neptune riding in a chariot made of an enormous sea-shell and drawn by two sea-horses. The horses are placed well to each side of the central cascades, and the group is terminated by Tritons who are restraining the onward dash of the horses and are blowing conches. The background or frame-work to this scene of commotion and tumult is the highly finished conventional façade of a Roman palace; Neptune issues forth not from a rocky cavern but from a Renaissance tribune constructed with four Ionic pillars and a richly carved roof, on the frieze of which runs the following inscription:

CLEMENS · XII · PONT · MAX
AQVAM · VERGINEM · COPIA · ET · SALVBRITATE
COMMENDATAM · CVLTV · MAGNIFICO · ORNAVIT
ANNO · DOMINO · MDCCXXXV · PONTIF: VI

Pope Clement XII decked out with magnificent ornament the aqueduct of the Maiden, which is recommended for its plenteous flow and for the healthful qualities of its water. In the year of the Lord 1735, and of Clement’s pontificate the sixth.

On either side of this tribune the palace wall breaks into niches containing statues, one of Abundance, the other of Health; and separated from each other by tall columns are panels depicting in high relief the discovery of the water and the construction of the aqueduct. Beyond these sculptures the windows and balconies of the palace frankly make their appearance.

Nothing could be more incongruous and artificial. The design is one which demands a background as an integral part of the composition, but this background has absolutely no connection with the fountain, except the purely physical connection of juxtaposition. Neptune should be appearing from some sea cave, worn in straight, steep cliffs like the cliffs at Sorrento. The architect who could so skilfully mass these rocky ledges and dispose these streams and cascades could have designed quite as well stone palisades and grottos; but the fountain belongs to an age which played “Macbeth” in periwig and ruffles, and it remains a magnificent example of the taste of that period.

PIAZZA DEL POPOLO

The fountains in the Piazza del Popolo should not be considered as individual creations; they must be regarded as parts of an architectural composition which includes the piazza as a whole—its shape, dimensions, and location, and the buildings which surround it. This composition is the work of the distinguished Roman architect Giuseppe Valadier, whose life lay within the last thirty-eight years of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth. His bust stands in the place of honor on the Pincian; that is, it stands at the end of and facing the long, broad drive called the Passeggiata, which begins on the terrace before the Villa Medici and runs northward along the western crest of the Pincian Hill. Valadier had been papal architect under Pius VI and Pius VII, and he had laid out for Napoleon the public gardens of the Pincian. Up to that time most of that land had belonged to the Augustinian monks whose convent stands below the hill, close to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. It has been their vineyard, and the story goes that it was while he was walking in this vineyard that Valadier got his first conception of what he might make out of the Piazza del Popolo.

Standing on the brow of the hill, from which is obtained the incomparable view of St. Peter’s at sunset, Valadier looked down upon the Piazza del Popolo as Piranesi had engraved it in his time (1720–1778). A somewhat shapeless area of flat ground stretching in an indeterminate way westward from the base of the Pincian Hill, it seemed to be only the debouchment of the three great thoroughfares running into it from the heart of the city. The twin churches standing one on either side of the Corso, the centre thoroughfare, were the chief architectural features on the south side, while on the north side ran the city wall and the Church of St. Mary of the People. In the centre of this area stood the obelisk as it stands to-day, placed there by Sixtus V in 1589, and with a single fountain at its foot—a huge basin carved by Domenico Fontana out of one solid block of marble taken from the ruins of Aurelian’s Temple of the Sun. The water supplying this fountain was the Acqua Trevi, the same which fills the fountains of the present day. Such was the Piazza del Popolo as Valadier’s eyes beheld it, but at that point where the Aurelian wall is pierced by the Porta del Popolo (the old Flaminian Gate) he saw something else: He saw the end of the Flaminian Way—the great highroad leading directly from the north. And at that point the actual faded away, and to Valadier there came a vision. He saw the Piazza del Popolo as the magnificent and adequate antechamber to Rome. He saw it approached by this great highroad which, first skirting the shore of the Adriatic, then traversing the breadth of Italy and the watershed of the Appenines, descends thence to the western slopes of Mount Soracte and, crossing the Ponte Molle, comes all the way to Rome from far-off Ariminum, or Rimini, the Roman fortress and frontier town on the Adriatic—two hundred and twenty miles distant—and the key to Cisalpine Gaul. Down this road, which is but a continuation of the still greater Via Emilia, have come all the northern friends and all the northern foes of Rome. Other eyes than Valadier’s can see that procession. Barbarian invaders and imperial armies have covered all the countryside like swarms of locusts—the progress of most of them marked by burning farms and plundered villages. In quieter times there have come pilgrim hosts and companies of merchants; and travelling scholars, and artists “with hearts on fire” for Rome; also ambassadors and foreign prelates, exiles and penitents, great bridal processions like Margaret of Austria’s in 1537, funeral pageants, bandit troops, fugitives of every type, bare-legged friars (among them a Luther), soldiers of fortune, and English noblemen in travelling carriages with postilions; every sort and condition of man whom the north has sent forth to the Eternal City. Down this Flaminian Road they came, passed through the Flaminian Gate, and received their first impression of Rome here in the Campus Martius—the modern Piazza del Popolo. Valadier lived in the period of the First Empire, when the shock of change and of contrast quickened even the most formal imagination. He came down from his “mount of vision” and designed the noble and finely proportioned piazza of the present day. He formed the vast and slovenly-shaped piece of ground into a stately ellipse, whose broadly curving ends, made of Roman brick and travertine, ornamented by sphinxes and allegorical figures, become the retaining walls of the terraced gardens at their rear, so that these long retaining walls seem coped by a line of glistening green foliage. On the side of the Pincian Hill the grass and trees of the Pincian Gardens rise in four tiers of terraces, high against the sky. Behind the retaining wall, opposite the Pincian, the tall cypresses screen the new city which stretches off toward the Tiber. A beautiful small semicircular basin, with a shell-like upper basin, stands in the centre of each of these curving ends. They might be called decorative keystones to recumbent arches. The water gushes through the retaining walls which form their background and falls between the convolutions of the shell in a fringe of steady, slender streams.

It has been truly said that the eighteenth century did not die with the close of the year 1799. It lingered on through the first, and more than the first, decade of the century which followed. Valadier remained an eighteenth-century architect to the end of his life. This is most apparent in the Piazza del Popolo, his work of widest scope and freest fancy and the product of his most mature talent. Elegance, proportion, and formality are the qualities on which Valadier relies. His composition is simple, polished, and formal, and the note of affectation ingrained in the art of that period is given in the Egyptian character of some of the ornaments and accessories. This character was undoubtedly suggested by the obelisk, but it is a curious coincidence that many archæological remains of Egyptian origin have been discovered in this part of Rome.

The allegorical groups placed behind the fountains represent on the side of the Pincian the god Mars in full armor, supported by the river-gods Anio and Tiber, each with his respective emblem, one of the emblems belonging to the Tiber being the figure of Mercury, the god of trade. On the side toward the river the group represents Neptune between two Tritons. These groups are by Valadier, and their mass of elaborate detail proves an admirable foil to the fountains beneath, which in their great simplicity are among the very loveliest in Rome. Small white marble sphinxes, said to be made out of blocks of Greek marble, found under the sea at the time that the bronze vase of Mithradates in the Palazzo dei Conservatori was discovered, mark the descending grades along the curving wall, and, as might be expected, statues of the four seasons adorn its four terminal piers.

These conventional figures are the work of various and now little known artists of Valadier’s time or later. The effect of Valadier’s creation has been somewhat marred by the huge monument to King Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. This ponderous and tasteless masonry rises in a series of three tiers, placed one above the other, against the Pincian Hill, and makes a hard and artificial background to the fountains in the square. Besides being far less attractive than the green turf and living foliage, this monument is quite out of proportion to all its surroundings. It occupies the place where Valadier had intended in the first instance to construct a vast fountain, which was to rise in various jets on the summit of the hill now bordered by the esplanade and balustrade, and descend in cascades from terrace to terrace until it gained the level of the piazza. The scheme was abandoned for lack of water. Only the aqueducts of imperial Rome could have furnished the amount required for such a fountain. The design was most imposing, but it is possible that Valadier himself may have relinquished it willingly. He was keenly alive to the beauty of proportion, and the monument to “Il Re Galantuomo” shows how incongruous a Niagara would have been amid such circumscribed and highly finished surroundings.

When the time came to carry out Valadier’s design for the fountains about the obelisk, Domenico Fontana’s massive old basin was removed from its position on the south side of that monument and placed in the gardens of San Pietro in Montorio, now the public gardens on the Janiculum. Then the low stone terrace with its five steps was built around the base of the obelisk, and the four corners of this terrace were marked by miniature pyramids of seven steps, the top of each pyramid supporting an Egyptian lioness couchant carved of Carrara. The water gushes in a copious fan-shaped stream from the mouths of these beasts and falls into four massive travertine basins, each basin set so close against the base of its pyramid that the lower steps of the pyramid project well over a portion of the basin’s rim. The task of providing a modern architectural setting to an Egyptian obelisk is probably an impossible one. It must be conceded, however, that Valadier, while not achieving the impossible, did succeed in producing a design which enhances the dignity and importance of the obelisk, considered as the central architectural feature in a Roman square. More than this could not be expected, and as much as this has not been achieved by any other architect. The obelisk on Monte Cavallo is in no way affected by the objects grouped about it. It is as utterly detached from the Roman fountain and the Greek statues at its base as though it stood by itself at Alexandria. Bernini’s extravaganzas, in which the Egyptian symbol of the mystery of life becomes the meaningless centrepiece for a banal fountain, have long ceased to give pleasure. It is doubtful whether the obelisk was altogether pleasing to the ancient Romans. They could not fail to admire its austere dignity and strength, and they regarded it as the insignia of supreme power, human or divine. Roman Emperors from Augustus onward constantly imported them to Rome to celebrate a victory, to adorn a circus, or to place in pairs, one on either side of the entrance to a tomb. But when the Romans re-erected an obelisk, whether in Rome, in Egypt, or in Constantinople, they frequently, if not always, raised the monolith a perceptible distance above the plinth of the base. On the four corners of this plinth they placed a bronze crab—one of the emblems of Apollo—or, as in Constantinople, a square of metal, and the obelisk itself rested upon these, daylight being distinctly visible between the obelisk and its base. The crabs were fixed into the plinth of the base by huge bronze dowels, and other dowels ran up into the four corners of the obelisk, holding it in place. The obelisk in New York, its mate in London, the larger Constantinople obelisk, and the Vatican obelisk were all re-erected by the Romans in that way. Opinions differ as to the reason for this departure from the original Egyptian method, but the decorative effect of this bold but simple device is at once apparent. It is obvious that an obelisk mounted in this way lends itself more easily to alien architectural surroundings.

This obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo was brought to Rome by young Octavius, afterward the Emperor Augustus, to honor his victory over Mark Antony at the battle of Actium, B. C. 31. Octavius believed that he owed his triumph to Apollo; and this obelisk erected by an Egyptian monarch of the XIXth dynasty before the great temple in Heliopolis, the city of the sun, seemed an altogether appropriate trophy. Octavius erected it in the Circus Maximus, where it stood throughout the greatest days of the Roman Empire. But the fate of the Roman obelisks had overtaken it at some time, for when Domenico Fontana suggested to Sixtus V to remove it to its present position it was lying broken in three pieces under masses of rubbish on the site of the old Circus.

There is no inscription upon the four fountains of the lionesses. They are to be regarded solely as adjuncts architecturally suitable to the obelisk, the interest of which must transcend all minor annals.

In developing his design for the Piazza del Popolo. Valadier had to consider and amalgamate the architectural features of many previous generations; for here in the Piazza del Popolo are grouped the works of a great number of Roman architects—men of the very first distinction in their own time and who have left the imprint of their industry or genius upon a large part of modern Rome. Baccio Pintelli, Michelangelo, Vignola, Carlo Fontana, Rainaldi, and Bernini were at work here in the centuries preceding Valadier, but to this last was given an opportunity of combining the past with the works of his own creation, such as had not fallen to the lot of any other Roman architect since the days when Michelangelo remodelled the Capitol.

Throughout the Middle Ages, all that part of Rome which lies between the Flaminian Gate and the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina on the Corso was almost devoid of human habitation and given over entirely to orchards and gardens. This condition still prevailed when Sixtus IV (1471–1484) demolished the old Flaminian Gate, through which, some five hundred years before, the Saracens had captured Rome. He did this in order to build the modern Porta del Popolo. It was by way of this Porta del Popolo that Charles VIII of France entered the city on New Year’s Day, 1495, with the most imposing and brilliant force of arms which modern Rome had ever beheld. At three o’clock on the winter’s afternoon, the great gates opened to receive them, and it was nine at night before they could close. For six hours the great procession marched down the Corso, and when darkness fell torches and flambeaus were lighted and held aloft by the marching troops. The advance-guard of Swiss and Germans was followed by five thousand Gascons, small of stature and very agile, like the bersaglieri of the present day. Then came the cavalry, twenty-five hundred cuirassiers from the French nobility, all arrayed in silk mantles and golden collars, and each knight followed by his squire and grooms leading three additional horses. Then more cavalry, and finally four hundred archers, of whom one hundred were Scotch. These last formed the body-guard of the King, who rode surrounded by two hundred of the greatest of his nobles; and among these came Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, afterward Pope Julius II, at that time papal legate to France and the most implacable enemy of the Pope whose territory they were invading. “The King,” wrote Brantôme, “was in full armor; lance on thigh as though pricking toward a foe. Riding thus in full and furious order of battle, trumpet sounding, drums a-beating,” the rattle and rumble of the artillery bringing up the rear, Charles made his way to the Palazzo di Venezia, whence he issued his edicts and gave his orders, while his army, with all its network of sentries and pickets, occupied the city as though it were Paris.

Pope Alexander VI fled to the Vatican and, later, to the Castle of St. Angelo. Very little came—or, for the time, very little seemed to come—of all this glitter and commotion. “Charles VIII and his lusty company of young men, among them the youthful Bayard, all of good family,” says the old chronicler, “but little under control,” were making a holiday war. They could not have comprehended the great forces that were at work beneath the noisy agitation of their enterprise. Yet King and nobles fell at once under the spell of Italy. Charles VIII, bred in the fortress castles of Louis XI, wrote home to his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, describing the loveliness of his Neapolitan gardens and the genius of the Italian painters who were to do wonderful ceilings for him when he had carried them back to France. Before he quitted Rome, the army got one day of pillage and the King founded the Church of the Trinità de’ Monti. Then after six months more of picturesque soldiering Charles went back to France, planning his return already in his heart, and taking with him over the Alpine passes an army which spread the legend of Italy far and wide through the northern countries. In the fifteenth century there were but two ways for a man to see the world. Either he went on pilgrimage to some far-distant shrine or he had to join an army of invasion! Charles VIII did not return, but he had shown his subjects the way to Rome, having been the first French King to cross the Alps since Charlemagne. Even before the Porta del Popolo was finished and long after the orchards and gardens of this district had been converted into the spacious Piazza del Popolo, Rome and France felt the influence for evil and for good set in motion by this unjustifiable and light-hearted incursion of (as the old Huguenot historian calls him) a “madly adventurous young King.”

Modern methods of travel have deprived men of one of life’s greatest sensations. Lovers of Rome know this. One of them, a schoolboy, spoke for all when he came out of the railway station, exclaiming in bitter disappointment: “So this is ancient Rome! It might as well be modern Chicago!” The Piazza del Popolo is no longer the entrance hall to the Eternal City. It must be sought for, with guide-book or map; but when it is found there is no better way to revive the ghost of that thrill which came spontaneously to those who entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo than to seat oneself upon the edge of one of Valadier’s fountains, preferably the western one, and then—to try to think!

PINCIAN

Until quite recently the Acqua Felice fed all the fountains on the Pincian Hill, and the altitude of its source is so nearly the same as the top of the hill, where the public gardens are situated, that the only kind of fountain possible there was a sheet of water; so the sculptor of the chief fountain in the Pincian Gardens, Count Brazza, the elder, made a virtue out of necessity and created a fountain in which any kind of jet d’eau would be distinctly out of place. Brazza’s white marble group of the infant Moses and his mother stands, set about with tall aquatic plants, in the centre of a large white marble basin, which is filled with placid yet ever-changing water, and it is so happily suited, both in subject and treatment, to its purpose that the absence of action in the water is never felt. On the contrary, plashing water would be a false note in the quiet and legendary harmony of this composition, and the higher jet produced by the recent change of water is no improvement. The biblical story is portrayed with great naturalness and dignity. The mother of Moses has placed the basket containing her sleeping infant among the rushes, which are represented by the living plants. As she rises to move away, she pauses, on one knee, to implore divine protection for the child whom she must abandon to his fate. The heroic size of the figure enhances the strength and dignity of the artist’s conception. The design is little in sympathy with the gay and crowded life of the Pincian Gardens, during the afternoon, but all through the morning hours this fountain becomes the centre of one of the world’s most tender settings for the comedy of childhood and early youth. The civilization which man has made and kept can show nothing fairer than the Pincian Gardens at that time. The soft Roman sunshine then filters through the ilex branches only upon groups of little children and their nurses, solitary old men who have become as little children, and bands of seminarists or theological students wearing black or scarlet gowns and speaking divers tongues. The little company occupy the benches, or walk demurely in small groups beneath the trees, or play the endless plays of babyhood, in and out of the warm shadows; all of them living in a dreamland as old as life itself, and finding in this quiet garden of the Eternal City a background full of sympathy and significance. Up and down the shaded alleys, linking the present to the great past, stretch the long rows of portrait busts placed there by order of Mazzini during the short-lived Mazzinian Republic of 1849. This is what has been called “The Silent Company of the Pincio.” No happier fate can befall an imaginative child from northern lands than to wander at will through this Roman playground. All unconsciously the classic beauty is woven into his spiritual fibre, and with that strange sensation of coming into his own—peculiar to such children—he finds, in these seemingly endless rows of white marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of heroes already known to him.

In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile, more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. This is the obelisk which the Emperor Hadrian and his Empress Sabina raised to the memory of their beloved Antinous—the most beautiful youth the world has record of—who drowned himself in the Egyptian river, under the impression that his voluntary death would avert calamity from his benefactor the Emperor. After all these eighteen hundred years it is still possible to feel the passion of Hadrian’s grief. His biographer calls it “feminine”! But the gifted Emperor, lover of all things beautiful in art and nature, and a student of men and character, understood the value of his treasure and knew full well the irreparableness of his loss. He brought back to Rome all that was left of that beauty—an urnful of ashes—and placed it in the Emperor’s own tomb, now called the Castle of St. Angelo; and on the spina of the circus by the tomb, Hadrian and Sabina erected this obelisk whose hieroglyphics, only quite recently deciphered, relate the deification of their favorite and give the information concerning his place of burial. The obelisk must have been removed by a later Emperor, probably Heliogabalus, for it was found in 1570, near Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in the gardens of the Varian family, to which family that Emperor belonged. Bernini, in the century following its discovery, moved it to the Barberini Palace, which he was erecting and beautifying for the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII. Later on, a Princess Barberini presented it to Pope Pius VI, who set it up in the Giardino della Pigna in the Vatican, that temporary resting-place for so many treasures, and finally, in 1822, Pius VII and Valadier erected it where it now stands in full view of Hadrian’s Tomb, they being quite unconscious, however, that there was any connection between it and that great mausoleum.

Not far from the fountain of Moses stand two umbrella-pines, their great boles shooting high up through all the foliage about. A hundred years ago they marked the exit into a side lane from the vineyard where they had been planted, for until that time these Gardens of the Pincio had been for centuries the vineyard belonging to the Augustinian monks of Santa Maria del Popolo, the same order from which, about 1494, young Cardinal Farnese bought the property by the Tiber, on which he built the Farnese Palace.

The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo had been built by the Roman people in the twelfth century, and from that time on it and the Augustinian convent beside it became the first hospice and sanctuary to the pilgrims from beyond the Alps. This was because the church and convent stand close to the Porta del Popolo, the gateway to the Flaminian Road, which is the great highway leading to the north.

With these Augustinian monks stayed young Martin Luther when business connected with that order had brought him to Rome. The German seminarist who threads his way to-day among the Pincian alleys must often cross those vanished paths in the vineyard once trodden by the sandalled feet of his great fellow countryman, since Luther’s northern feeling for nature would surely have carried him at dawn or sunset to the convent’s vineyard. There the voices of the birds and the well-trained vines could soothe a spirit dazed and disquieted by the splendors and vices of Rome. The history of the German Reformation may well have had its earliest beginnings in the thoughts which thronged the mind of that young monk, as he leaned upon the vineyard wall and gazed with eyes that saw and saw not at the papal city, where old St. Peter’s—the church in which Charlemagne had been crowned—was being made over by Bramante into its present form; and beside it the huge pile of the Vatican housed the fighting Pope, Julius II, and a hierarchy of utter worldliness.

The monks retained possession of their Pincian vineyard during the three following centuries, or until 1809, at which time Napoleon annexed the Papal States to his Empire, banished the recalcitrant Pope, Pius VII, and set about making Rome over to suit himself. He found the architect who had worked for Pius VI and Pius VII equally ready to serve him, and it was to this architect, Giuseppe Valadier, that Napoleon intrusted the conversion of the old convent vineyard into the Pincian Gardens of the present day. The work was not begun until 1812, and before it was finished Pius VII was back in Rome, and Napoleon was eating out his heart in St. Helena. In that long dying, when this last of the world’s great conquerors had time to remember even all that he himself had done, Napoleon must have often thought of Rome. The old mother who had always believed in him, yet never looked up to him, still lived there in her sombre palace under the shadow of the Austrian Legation and the Austrian hate. His favorite sister, Pauline, was a princess of one of the greatest of the Roman families; and the little son, who was to grow up as the Austrian Duke of Reichstadt, was still, to his father, the King of Rome. Did he ever think of the instructions he had given to Valadier about a public garden for the Romans? There was time to think of everything as the seasons came and went and the remote seas washed the crags beneath his feet, while his English jailers watched him from a distance with hard, uncomprehending eyes.

It is something of a shock to find Napoleon’s bust in that company of great Italians which Mazzini placed here. In these Pincian Gardens, as elsewhere in the world, he surely belongs in a niche by himself! However, the Roman episode was of small importance in his life, and he would not have grudged the honorable position to Valadier, whose bust stands alone facing the principal promenade of the Pincian. That architect lived to welcome back the exiled Pius VII and to finish for him the gardens begun by order of Napoleon.

One explanation of Rome’s charm may be found in her power of suggestion. Although the things to be seen in the Eternal City are of transcendent interest, the things which are only apprehended have a still stronger hold upon the imagination. The actual loveliness of the Pincian Gardens is forgotten as the archæologists build up from buried marbles and scattered inscriptions the life lived here in centuries gone by. Where now is Valadier’s casino there stood in the second century of our era a great Roman dwelling, the home of a patrician family, Christian in faith, its members holding from generation to generation high offices of state and called by historians “the noblest of the noble.” The grounds about this house of the Acilii included not only the present public gardens but also the precincts of the Villa Medici, the garden and convent of the Sacred Heart, and a part of the Villa Borghese. It would be impossible to find nowadays in any land the exact counterpart of this Roman dwelling. Its comfort, splendor and universal perfection of detail could not be surpassed, perhaps not equalled. Its artificially heated bathrooms, the cool, dark recesses of the wine-cellars, the courts and offices and state apartments, the devices for garden and foundation building, everything which made up this perfect specimen of the highest domestic civilization the world has known, has been discovered on the Pincian Hill. The great buttresses which this private family built to sustain the northwestern boundaries of their terraced garden still support the public gardens of to-day, and were incorporated by the Emperor Aurelian into the great wall with which he surrounded the city. Surely no stories of the Pincian can ever give so good an idea of the power, solidity, and grandeur of Rome as do these archæological discoveries, which show in fullest detail the domestic life of the Roman patrician under the Antonines. Of all this the northwestern buttresses of the Pincian Hill and the immortality of Nature alone remain.

Napoleon was only following in the footsteps of another Emperor, when he created these gardens; for the Emperor Aurelian made the grounds—which had been the estate of the Acilii—into a public park. So whether owned by private individuals or by Emperor, church, or municipality, the Pincian has always been known as the Hill of Gardens; and the water which now feeds its public fountains is once more the Acqua Marcia—the same water which supplied the fountains, baths, and fish-ponds of the great Antonine villa.

FONTANA PAOLA

Throughout Roman history the Janiculum has suffered many alternations of peace idyllic and of sanguinary strife, for it is a natural garden, and it is also the key to Rome. Whoever can hold the terraces of San Pietro in Montorio and the heights to the north and south has the city at his mercy. At the present day the Villa Pamphili-Doria and the Villa Garibaldi crown its summit, and stretch downward toward the west, and its southeastern slope, leading toward the Tiber, once contained the gardens of Julius Cæsar—those gardens where he received Cleopatra and which he left by his will to the Roman people. One of the earliest chapters in Roman history tells how Lars Porsena came over the Janiculum to reinstate the Tarquins, and one of the latest recounts the struggle carried on across its heights and terraces in Garibaldi’s defense of the Mazzinian Roman Republic. Like the gardens of Ischia and the vineyards on Vesuvius, which are forever threatened by earthquake or eruption, the Janiculum villas will have, so long as war lasts, a precarious existence; but with villas, gardens, and vineyards, so great is the fertility of the soil and so enchanting the prospect, while the world endures men will take the risk.

The water for this part of the city was brought to Rome by the Emperors Augustus and Trajan. Trajan built the aqueduct bearing his name; and this aqueduct, like that of the Virgo, has, in spite of many vicissitudes continued to supply Rome with a varying quantity of water from that time until the present day. The Emperor brought the water thirty-five miles from Lake Bracciano to the Janiculum. It was almost the last water brought to Rome and entered the city at the level of two hundred and three feet above the sea. The first water (the Appian) had entered Rome fifty feet under ground. Trajan used the water from the springs about Lake Bracciano, not from the lake itself, because the spring-water was much purer and the ancient Romans were fastidious in the water they used. Alsietina water, for instance, brought to Rome by Augustus, was considered fit only for baths and the naumachiæ; and Frontinus says that, as a matter of fact, the water was intended for that purpose only and for the irrigation of the gardens across the Tiber. Christian Rome was far from being so particular, and its inhabitants drank Tiber water as late as Michelangelo’s time. During the “Golden days of the Renaissance in Rome” Virgo water, which was to be had intermittently from the Trevi fountain, and a remnant of this Acqua Traiana still flowing in the fountain of Innocent VIII were the only pure waters. Meantime many Romans of that period preferred the Tiber water; and Petrarch coming to Rome gave special instructions to a friend to have a quantity of Tiber water which had stood for a day or two, to settle, ready for his use. Paul III took with him, on his journey to Nice to meet the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France, a supply of Tiber water, so that he might not miss his customary beverage! When, therefore, Pope Paul V bethought him of reconstructing the Trajan Aqueduct he had nothing to hinder him from collecting the water from every available source. He used Trajan water from the springs, water from Lake Bracciano, and water from Lake Alsietina as well. By this means the united water now called the Acqua Paola, although not so pure as the former Acqua Traiana, is yet good enough, and it forms a supply of magnificent quantity and force. Paul V’s intention was to surpass the Acqua Felice, brought to Rome some twenty years previously by Sixtus V. No one could forget Sixtus V and the Acqua Felice. Was not the water always before men’s eyes as it gushed out of the great fountain of Moses on the side of the Viminal Hill; and did not every Roman know that Cavaliere Domenico Fontana had brought it there by order of Sixtus V? The Borghese pontiff determined to erect another fountain, across the Tiber, on the Janiculum, which was a still more commanding position, and to build another aqueduct for Rome, so that there should be an Acqua Paola as well as an Acqua Felice, and men should remember Paul V even as they remembered Sixtus V.

Domenico Fontana had just died in Naples, rich and honored by the Neapolitans, but there were others at hand of that renowned family of architects. Fontana’s elder brother Giovanni was still alive, and had great skill in hydraulics; and Carlo Maderno, his nephew, was also to be had. So in 1611 Paul V employed these two to build his great fountain on the Janiculum. This fountain is made of travertine, adorned with six Ionic columns of red granite taken from the Temple of Minerva in the Forum Transitorium. Other portions of the same beautiful ruin were sawed into slabs and used in the decoration of the fountain. The design is that of a church façade in the style of the florid and debased Renaissance. It consists of five arches, three colossal ones in the middle, directly under the great inscription which they support, and on each side smaller arches. The three centre cascades fall into a huge semicircular basin, which is sunk into the ground, while the arches on the side have small individual basins in which to receive the water. The inscription, which is a magnificent example of Renaissance caligraphy, gives the history of the Paola Aqueduct and the pontifical dates. A smaller inscription describes the final completion of the fountain under Alexander VIII.

PAVLVS · QVINTVS · PONTIFEX · MAXIMVS
AQVAM · IN · AGRO · BRACCIANENSI
SALVBERRIMIS · E · FONTIBVS · COLLECTAM
VETERIBVS · AQVAE · ALSIETINAE · DVCTIBVS · RESTITVTIS
NOVISQVE · ADDITIS
XXXV · AB · MILLIARIO · DVXIT
ANNO · DOMINI · MDCXII · PONTIFICATVS · SVI · SEPTIMO
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This water, drawn from the purest of springs, in the neighborhood of Bracciano, was conducted by Pope Paul the fifth, thirty-five miles from its source, over ancient channels of the Alsietine aqueduct, which he restored, and new ones, which he added.

In the year of the Lord 1612, and of Paul’s Pontificate the seventh.

Pope Alexander the eighth, Ottoboni, of Venice, in protection of the beneficent work of that most far-sighted pontiff, Paul the fifth, recleaned the channel, admitted water from new sources, and constructed a single capacious reservoir for the common reception of the several streams which had formerly been strictly confined each to its own channel. To prevent the wearing away of the hill, he paved the surrounding area, surrounding and beautifying it with a marble coping. In the year of Salvation 1690, and of Alexander’s pontificate the second.

The Borghese griffins and eagles compose the decoration of the mostra, and the whole structure is surmounted by the papal insignia and the arms of Paul V, the escutcheon being guarded by two angels.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

Sixtus V died in the Quirinal Palace. His pontificate had lasted but five years, and it remains to this day one of the most memorable periods in the development and power of Rome. Never had Pope done more for his people; yet, when he came to die, the Romans had already forgotten the benefits of his pontificate and remembered only the severities. They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener’s son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman mind—superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus! It was well that he could not know how the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him!

Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal, came in 1840 that extraordinary funeral cortège which carried the body of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 30, by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S. Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession reached Monte Cavallo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince Borghese wished to know the names of those who had drawn the funeral car, he was only told that they were Romans!

Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army. They entered the Quirinal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the temporal power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.

Rome was metamorphosed into a republic, but this obscuration of the papal power was only temporary. When Pius VI died, at Valence, in August, 1799, the cardinals held their Conclave at Venice, and on March 14, 1804, elected Pius VII (Chiaramonti, 1804–1823), who returned to Rome the following July. This was the Pope who, after many misgivings, consented to crown Napoleon. Five years later, when the Emperor proceeded to annex the Papal States to his empire, this was the Pope who excommunicated him.

Few of St. Peter’s successors have been called upon to suffer and to dare more than the good and gentle Pius VII. His Italian nature comprehended to an unusual degree the strange character of Napoleon, enduring with perfect composure the Emperor’s outbursts of histrionic rage, and daring to bring him back to business by the single word, “comedian.” He braved no less calmly Napoleon’s genuine anger at the bull of excommunication, and refused to cancel it. Consequently, on the night of July 5, 1809, the Emperor’s soldiers broke into the Quirinal and took the Pope prisoner. For a moment, standing under the stars which looked down upon Monte Cavallo, Pius VII blessed his sleeping city, and then was hurried away from Rome to that wandering exile, depicted in the frescoes of the Vatican Library, which was only brought to an end by Napoleon’s fall. Then the States of the Church were restored to the papacy, and the Quirinal Palace once more received the aged pontiff.

In the quiet sunset of his days, which outlasted by two years the life of the great conqueror, the Pope had time to erect the fountain of Monte Cavallo, and to begin or continue the architectural and archæological projects connected with his name.

In that brief halcyon period immediately following Pius IX’s election to the Holy See, in 1846, the Quirinal Palace and the Monte Cavallo were in a state of unwonted and constant activity. Pius played with all his heart the rôle of the liberal Pope, both he and the Romans mistaking his amiable disposition for liberal political convictions. Day after day the Romans thronged the space before the palace, waiting for their idol, who was sure to appear some time on the balcony over the entrance. Standing there in his white robe, his dark eyes glowing with sympathetic emotion, he would bless the people with uplifted hand and in the most moving and beautiful of voices. If the hour was late, he might add the injunction to go home to bed! The attitude of the Pope and people at this time is epitomized in the story of the ragged little boy who one day found himself in the Quirinal Gardens face to face with the Holy Father. Dazed and enraptured, he poured forth the pitiful tale of his hardships to the handsome and compassionate countenance bending over him, and the wonderful voice comforted him with promises of redress—promises which both pontiff and child believed in passionately.

There is about this period of Pius IX’s life, with its visits to the prisons, its charities and public appearances, a strange atmosphere of unreality. A factitious glamour blinded the popular mind, and the Pope lived upon pious and ideal illusions—as Marie Antoinette had played at simplicity and a return to Nature on the eve of the Revolution.

When the golden charm was broken by the outbreak of the Revolution in Palermo and the murder of Pellegrino Rossi in Rome, the frightened pontiff, turning from an angry people, whom in the nature of things he could not possibly satisfy, appealed to the most reactionary of all the Italian powers, the King of Naples, or “Bomba.” Then the Quirinal witnessed the last act which the papacy was to play within its precincts. The Pope and one attendant escaped from the palace by a small side door in the garden wall and fled across the frontier to Gaeta, on Neapolitan territory. He carried with him the pyx which Pius VII had carried when he also had quitted the Quirinal in haste thirty-nine years before; but, unlike Pius VII, Pius IX never returned thither. When he came back to Rome the Vatican received him.

The Quirinal, the third one of the papal palaces, has become a symbol of the actual sovereignty of Rome, and, in 1871, it passed with the temporal power from Pope Pius IX to Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy.

The cardinals’ coaches no longer drive about the fountain of Pius VII. The consistories are held in the Vatican; and on the Monte Cavallo the Bersaglieri have superseded the papal Zouaves. Over the Quirinal the pontifical yellow and white has given way to the green and white and red of United Italy. “Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new”—once again in the city of eternal change.