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 along 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. ]]> http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/trevi/feed/ 0 http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/piazza-del-popolo/ http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/piazza-del-popolo/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:12:45 +0000 admin http://www.garden-fountains.us/?p=95

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 today, 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.

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 London Bridge, and truly

“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.”

Here in Borne “. . . 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 today 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.

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 sea­horses, 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.

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 Trinita 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 Ill’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.

“Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

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 II 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, lowlying 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. ]]> http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/triton/feed/ 0 http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/navona/ http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/navona/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:56:38 +0000 admin http://www.garden-fountains.us/?p=80

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 naumachiae 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 naumachise. 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. ]]> http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/navona/feed/ 0 http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/pincian/ http://www.garden-fountains.us/fountains/pincian/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:54:59 +0000 admin http://www.garden-fountains.us/?p=78

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 everchanging 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.