Drawings for the great fountains of Rome and Paris

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1998 by Marilyn Symmes

With the election in 1730 of Pope Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsini; 1652-1740), a competition was held to suitably embellish the city's most cherished water source. Two years later the design by the architect Nicola Salvi was chosen.(4) It brilliantly orchestrated architecture and sculpture with the sound, sight, and movement of water. It also successfully incorporated the elegant facade of the Palazzo Poli behind the fountain by placing Oceanus, the sovereign of the world's water, in the central niche. As Salvi wrote in 1732, Oceanus is

a Power superior to other Powers...most powerful agent among natural phenomena....Thus, in whatever way we choose to visualize Oceanus, it will always be true that the image must embody an impression of power which has no limit....[Water] is completely free and always at work in even the smallest parts of the created Universe....It quenches the excessive heat which would destroy this life. Thus water can be called the only everlasting source of continuous being.(5)

The drawing by Salvi shown in Plate VI reveals his adeptness at harmonizing a sculptural figure and a naturalistic cascade. He collaborated with the sculptor Giovanni Battista Maini (1690-1752), a follower of Bernini, when he designed and modeled Oceanus and the other main figures on the fountain. In the drawing, Oceanus stands in a dignified pose of benevolent authority because Salvi intended the fountain to be a grandiose monument proclaiming water as the primary animator of nature.

In 1751 Salvi died, followed soon afterward by Maini, so the completion of the fountain in 1762 was supervised by the architect Giuseppe Pannini (1745-1812) with Pietro Bracci (1700-1773) carving the central group in marble after Maini's models. After his arrival in Rome in the 1740s Giovanni Battista Piranesi watched the building of the Trevi, and in 1773 he made the etching shown in Figure 4, which is among the first views to show the entire setting of the fountain. The Corsini coat of arms supporting the papal stemma crowns the attic story of the palace, and a grand inscription announces the important role of Pope Clement XII and his papal successors in creating the fountain. The naturalistic cascade and large basin - a microcosm of the world's fresh water and oceans - take up most of the piazza and transform the modest square into a dramatic aqueous amphitheater animated by the sounds and movement of water. Since Piranesi's day, generations of Romans and tourists have streamed to this piazza to experience the vibrancy of this great architectural fountain (see Pls. IV, V).

In Paris in the early eighteenth century the rue de Grenelle on the Left Bank was a fashionable address for the nobility. Mansions and their gardens were separated from the street by high walls and a porte cochere, providing dignified privacy. This was the setting for the Fontaine des Quatre Saisons, also called the Fontaine de Grenelle, which was commissioned in 1739 to introduce a water supply to that section of the city (Pl. VII).(6) The commission was awarded to the gifted sculptor Edme Bouchardon who had to take into consideration unpredictable water pressure and volume. Thus he adopted the standard and practical solution of providing faucets at street level so that water porters serving the local population could easily fill their containers. However, the contract also called for an elaborate iconographic program to create a grandiose fountain worthy of a monarch proclaiming to his citizens that he was contributing to the embellishment of the city. The street is narrow, and designing a monument that was both a supreme expression of art and a political symbol was a difficult assignment, even though Bouchardon was no stranger to designing fountains. While in Rome between 1723 and 1733 he had studied the city's fountains and had even participated in the 1730 competition to designs the Trevi Fountain.(7)