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 iu 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, 1606-1621), 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 archaeologist, 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 Caiu 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 dose 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.