'Like a Roman sepulchre': John Soane's design for a Castello d'acqua at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, and its Italian origins

Apollo, April, 2003 by David Adshead

... I am flattered by the friendship you have honour'd me with, of not being too intrusive by informing you of my conduct. Mr. Burdon, for whose friendship I can never be sufficiently grateful having brought me with him to Parma, I informed myself of the subject of the Premium in architecture to be given by the Royal Academy of this place in 1780 (May) for which I wish to become a candidate if it meet with your approbation. I have therefore taken the liberty of enclosing you two designs for 'Un Castello d'acqua decorato d'una pubblica fontana ...' [Soane continues with a transcript of the first paragraph of the competition specification quoted above] ... I must beg leave to request your assistance to point out the most exceptionable parts & to inform me if I have conceived it in any degree agreable [sic] to the proposition if you should think my request unfair I wish you to know that I then cease to desire your Ideas on the subject, tho' most sensible to the want of your assistance: I must confess I am very doubtful of the propriety of my Ideas respecting it ...

Soane added as a postscript:

I must trouble you to enclose me this letter as the Sketches contain'd in it are the first ideas, of which time will not allow me to take Copies, I have only to wish to have the honour of hearing from you, at Florence, a la Posta Restante, which will determine my future plan, & to express my hopes of not breaking in too much on your repose. (16)

Pitt's potential future patronage was important to Soane and he would have been well aware how a plea for guidance from the older architect might flatter. Nevertheless, the brief, with its suggestion that the building might be ornamented with all the magnificence of a public fountain--an architectural fantasy with springs flowing from rockwork, figure or animal statuary drawn from mythology or history, no less--may genuinely have given Soane some cause for concern. (17) Du Prey's detailed analysis of these initial sketches shows that Soane's hesitancy was certainly not born of a paucity of ideas (Fig. 2). (18) Rather he had generated an embarrassment of alternative design possibilities, and his quandary was about choice and appropriateness of form and decoration. Should he plough a conservative furrow and present an all'antica scheme or offer a 'modern' design solution that would show him to be in step with international neo-classicism? (19) How might Soane second-guess which approach the Academy's professors would favour? And what, he might further, and very legitimately, have wondered, was meant, and understood, by a castello d'acqua in late-eighteenth-century Italy, or, indeed, by a castellum aquae in ancient Rome?

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Both in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, Soane would have seen the remains of Roman engineering structures specifically designed for the collection, storage, transportation and distribution of water. And greatest of these were certainly the aqueducts that brought water from the spring, lake and river sources in Rome's hinterland, and which, as they approached the city across the Campagna, were lofted on arcaded structures of Cyclopean proportions. Ancient Rome must have brimmed to overflowing with water, that most vital of natural resources: certainly Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79 AD), thought 'the whole terrestrial orb offers nothing more marvellous' than the plashy display he saw there. (20) Wildly disproportionate to the essential needs of her populace, this great volume of water not only fed the eleven imperial thermae, and nine hundred and twenty-six public baths, but also the city's one thousand, two hundred and twelve fountains. (21)