The Fountains of Campidoglio

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 1o84, 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.