Fountains of Papal Rome/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 naumacki% 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 mimachix. 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-buflding in modern Rome really began.
Pius IV, the Pope last but one preceding Gregory XIII, had repaired the old aqueduct of the Acqiia 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, i644-i655) 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 dose of the last century when the Scaldino was removed and replaced by the figure of Neptune. This figure was carved by Bitta Zappald. from a model of Bernini's found in the Villa Montalto. The figures around the edge are Zappala's own, and they as well as the Neptune are of CarraraAll 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. E 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 Or* cus 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 fisb are disporting themselves in characteristic Bernini contortions. Escutcheons bearing the arms of Leo 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 aesthetic 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 VIIL 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 hecame 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.[1]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 facade 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 XIIFs 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 nawnachix held fourteen hundred years earlier in the same place.
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑ Compare the sensations produced by this fountain and those given by the "Bhapsodie Hongroise."