Nicola Salvi and the Trevi Fountain

Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in
more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain
ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to
1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and
Clement XIII, the great scenographic water display is often described
as the glorious capstone of the baroque era.This is indeed where
most architectural histories (and tourist itineraries) of Italian
architecture end. It is one of those places, like the Pantheon, where
the entire sweep of Rome’s culture can be read.

The history of the Trevi Fountain reaches back to antiquity.The
waters that feed the fountain today flow through the Aqua Virgo
aqueduct originally constructed by Agrippa in 19 B.C.The aqueduct
passes mostly underground and was obstructed in the Middle Ages to
prevent barbarian infiltration, so it was easily repaired in the
Renaissance.The water inspired a succession of baroque designers
with ideas for a fountain. As at San Giovanni, a similar architectural
competition was opened by Clement XII.With Clement’s own
favored Florentine architect, Galilei, already loaded up with projects, the pope took this opportunity to calm the waters over the Lateran
competition with a bit of artistic diplomacy. Nicola Salvi, born and
bred a Roman, was awarded the commission in 1732.
Salvi was endowed with a remarkably broad education in literary
and artistic culture that earned him positions in a range of Roman
intellectual societies, including the Virtuosi del Pantheon, a sort of
well-rounded genius club that met in the temple. His participation in
the Lateran competition featured his ability for flexibility and fusion,
both innovative and traditionalist, combining qualities of architectural
grandeur drawn from ancient and baroque examples.The same balance
and profundity is found in his singular masterpiece, the Trevi Fountain.
The Trevi Fountain is an architectural, sculptural, and aquatic
performance that spills off the flank of a pre-existing palace into a
low, irregular piazza.

A colossal Corinthian order on a rusticated base
sews the broad facade together around a central arch motif that
marks the terminus of the Aqua Virgo. Sculptural figures and panels
in relief adorn the central section.The figure of Ocean on an oystershell
chariot rides outward and gestures commandingly to Tritons
and their sea horses in the churning water below.

The water rushes in at eye level on the piazza across a cascade of rough-hewn travertine blocks tumbling down from the palace’s rustication into a deep-set
pool. Sweeping steps bring us down to the water while rich
sculptural flourishes draw our eye upward to the papal arms above.
Salvi has deftly combined formal references to imperial arches of
triumph and the colossal order of the Renaissance, elements featured
in both vignettes of Nolli’s map, with the scenographic unity
characteristic of the baroque.The architectonic structure is packed
with all the sculptural decoration it can hold, not more.The
sculptures were contracted to various artists who despite their legal
protests were forced to subordinate their work to Salvi’s commanding
architectural scansion.
One stumbles upon the site on this edge of the eighteenthcentury
city quite by surprise, as the engraved image by Piranesi of
the fountain and the piazza shows. Attracted perhaps by the splashing
sounds, we are drawn into a delightful episode in the urban fabric.
The jump in scale of Salvi’s construction provides a powerful impact  for this unexpectedly grand public event, like the grandiose
architectures of contemporary festivals or the fantasies of the lyric
opera stage.

Here water has taken center stage in an engaging
spectacle of cascading forms.Water is the source of salubrity and
fertility and nourishes all growing things, represented by all the
accompanying sculptures here and focused by Ocean’s magisterial
presence. Classical allegory is the basis here of a contemporary
philosophical program typical of Enlightenment interests in the
natural sciences.Thirty species of flora minutely described and
artfully disposed upon the rocks emphasize an encyclopedic spirit.
The natural and the artificial, the tectonic and the fluid, are
intermingled in continual transformation one into the other.The
themes of this poem in stone and water suggest an exaltation of
water’s vital energy in the cycle of self-renewal, time and decay, ruin
and regeneration.

At Levi, Christ turned water into wine; at the Trevi, Clement XII
turned wine into water: construction of the fountain was financed
with proceeds from the lottery and a tax on wine. Salvi hired a
learned and sensitive building contractor for the work, Nicola
Giobbe, and he also relied on close collaboration with Luigi Vanvitelli.
When Salvi’s health gave way following a stroke in 1744 (due to too
many subterranean visits to the aqueduct, it was thought), the
direction of the work was eventually shifted to Giuseppe Panini, son
of the famous painter, who oversaw its completion in 1762.
The response to the Trevi Fountain was overwhelmingly
positive. Salvi was catapulted to fame, receiving invitations to finish
up the cathedral of Milan with a new facade and build a palace for
the royal family in Naples. Even the stern critic Milizia who
preferred utilitarian works conceded that the Trevi was “superb,
grandiose, rich and altogether of a surprising beauty. . . nothing in
this century in Rome is more magnificent.”The Trevi Fountain
cannot be considered either a precursor of neoclassical rigor nor a
pure product of baroque exuberance. Salvi’s subtle shift toward a
knowledgeable, historicist ensemble is evidence of a significant
transformation in architectural ideas at this moment in the mideighteenth
century.The Trevi is a culmination of a grand cultural tradition in Roman architecture and yet subtly innovative in its
Enlightenment philosophical implications.The Trevi Fountain was
the most widely influential modern construction in its day, emulated
by architects across Europe. It enthuses still today an almost fanatical
fascination among all who encounter it.

Luigi Vanvitelli and the Reggia at Caserta

Clement XII’s consolation prize of the Trevi Fountain commission
to Salvi was coupled with another commission to the second
runner-up in the Lateran competition, Luigi Vanvitelli.Vanvitelli was
the son of a Dutch landscape painter working in Italy, Gaspar Van
Wittel, who Italianized his son’s last name. Luigi trained like many
in his day in scenography yet found employ in civil engineering. His
participation in the competition for the facade of the Lateran
assured his reputation although the bulk of his work continued to
be in rather utilitarian tasks. He built the bastions and quarantine
hospital in the pope’s Adriatic port of Ancona, his consolation prize,
and reorganized Michelangelo’s Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli
in Rome, itself a reintegration of the ancient Baths of Diocletian,
which stirred criticism comparable to the contemporaneous
Pantheon restorations. As head architect of the building commission
at Saint Peter’s, called the Fabbrica, his restoration project of
Michelangelo’s dome was contested yet successful. In Vanvitelli, the
indispensable professional qualifications of engineer and architect,
scenographer and coordinator were recognized by, among many,
King Carlos III of Naples.
Naples and the southern reaches of the Italian peninsula, ancient
Magna Graecia, had been ruled over by a succession of foreign
powers.The early eighteenth century brought the Bourbon
monarchy to Naples under Carlos III. Born the son of King Felipe V
of Spain and Elisabetta Farnese, Carlos inherited not only the
traditions arcing back through the French Bourbons to King Louis
XIV, his great-grandfather, but also through his maternal line to the
Farnese and Medici dynasties of Italy. Carlos III became, in 1734, the absolute monarch of the new and autonomous Kingdom of Two
Sicilies which bordered the papal states to the south. Naples, which
for over two centuries had languished, was now under Carlos’s rule
to be promoted to rank with Madrid, Paris, and Rome. Carlos
instigated ameliorative policies in architecture, urbanism, and regional
infrastructure that became a primary function of his reign. By
ordering landed aristocrats to be physically present at the capital’s
urban court, Carlos stimulated the local economy in construction
while simultaneously directing Naples toward a more cosmopolitan
image.The king set the example by supporting the arts, undertaking
archeological excavations at the buried ancient city of Herculaneum,
and building several royal palaces.
Carlos had lived in many of his parents’ residences, yet the
structures available to the new monarch in Naples were not up to
those standards either in the nature of their planning or in their lessthan-
imposing scale. At Portici, the Herculaneum excavation site on
the bay of Naples, he began a great royal palace more for the good
fishing than the promise of archeological finds the site promised. On a
hill above Naples at Capodimonte he had a hunting lodge built that
outstripped in its ambitious scope that modest program. Both palaces
were in large part the work of a Sicilian architect, Giovanni Antonio
Medrano, but both projects proved insufficient in Carlos’s eye on
aesthetic, representational, and functional grounds.
Finding local architects lacking, Carlos turned to Rome’s
prominent architectural culture for the professionals he required.
Nicola Salvi was first on his wish list, but with the architect in ill
health and concerned for the ongoing fountain project, he deferred,
recommending instead his collaborator Vanvitelli. Benedict XIV may
have been loath to see not only Vanvitelli but also another of his prized
architects, Ferdinando Fuga, summoned by the powerful new monarch
to the south, but the pope sent them along at the close of the Holy
Year of 1750 as a diplomatic payment of cultural tokens.
Carlos set his two new architects to the major buildings of his
two-fold economic and political scheme: two palaces for opposite
ends of the sociopolitical scale, the Reggia or royal court palace at
Caserta from Vanvitelli and the regium pauperum hospitalium, or royal
poor-man’s hospice at Naples from Fuga. Following schemes of his French Bourbon forefathers, Carlos consolidated the charitable
institutions for the poor in a grand architectural project, like Jacques-
Germain Soufflot’s Hotel Dieu in Lyons, and brought together the
governing institutions of the upper realm in an ambitious work
comparable to the palace at Versailles.
Like Versailles, the site of Carlos’s new Reggia lies several dozen
kilometers beyond the capital city limits at Caserta, amidst the king’s
favorite hunting grounds. More crucially, the site was safe from civil
unrest, coastal attack, and volcanic eruption. For the entirely
unimpeded site Vanvitelli drew up his first ideas for a great palace, but
so did the king: as a contemporary noted, “with compass and slate in
hand, Carlos drew out the first sketches of the great palace.” Carlos’s
specific design directives can be deduced by noting all the changes
Vanvitelli subsequently adopted and conscientiously adhered to in his
second project proposal: a square construction with four internal
courtyards and a great central dome.This design had many
inspirations: the project Carlos’s father had commissioned for Buen
Retiro outside Madrid, as well as El Escorial; elements from his
mother’s Palazzo Pitti in Florence; the Palazzo Farnese in Rome; the
Farnese ducal residence at Colorno; and most importantly, the
Louvre,Versailles, and their gardens.Vanvitelli procured all this
pertinent comparative material and dutifully shaped the project
according to the royal vision.

In 1751, he was summoned to the
Portici residence where in a private audience,Vanvitelli tells us, the
king and the queen delighted over his solutions, each asking
questions and voicing desires for the apartments, the gardens, the
fountains and, Queen Amalia extemporized, on a whole new, orderly
city to rise up around. Maestà, the courtier-architect obsequiously
responded,“this lesson that you deign to give me will be kept well in
mind and executed without alteration.”
On 20 January 1752, the foundation stone for the Reggia at
Caserta was laid with pompous ceremony.This and the entire palace
project were minutely described by Vanvitelli in a lavish publication
of 1756 distributed by the royals to visiting dignitaries. As the
architect puts it, the fourteen engraved plates and elucidating text
broadcast the sublimity of Carlos’s idea, which feared no comparison
with the great palaces of Europe or antiquity.Vanvitelli’s text is a  guide to the sculptural elements and their monumental architectural
vessel. Like the founding legends of western European civilization
expounded by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, the
rhythms, repetitions, gestures, and metaphors of Caserta are Vanvitelli’s
architectural poems of the ideal of Bourbon absolutism.
Vanvitelli coordinated the ongoing spectacle of construction of
palace and gardens, along with the aqueduct that would serve them.
A 40-kilometer conduit, the Acquedotto Carolino, passes through
mountains, like the Aqua Virgo, and over valleys on arches modeled
on the Roman-era Pont du Gard in France. Aqueduct building, the
stuff of ancient emperors, provided aesthetic and functional benefits
to the palace as well as to the city of Naples—a grand watercourse
was to connect Carlos’s two great works in a single stream.
The Reggia’s ground plan measures over 250 by 200 meters, a
magnificent rectilinear block of stately proportions.Two ranges of
state rooms bisect within to define four rectangular courtyards. Its
1,200 rooms are arranged according to a rational geometric
disposition that conjoins the symmetry, distribution, and dimension
of the great palaces of Renaissance reason and Vico’s notion of
geometry as the visible manifestation of monarchic rule.The facade is
articulated with a colossal Composite order.

Its thirty-seven bays are
broken up in central and terminal pavilions originally to have been
accented with a cupola, corner towers, and acroterial sculpture,
references to Carlos’s Farnese inheritance and boyhood homes.
Unlike Louis’s Versailles, the walls of Caserta are not dissolved in
windows; instead,Vanvitelli, like Galilei before him, exalts the
rectilinear solidity of construction and achieves a sweeping
monumentality worthy of the Sun King’s descendant.Vanvitelli has
balanced Carlos’s French memories with the requisites of Italian
design tradition.
The facade of the palace announces its monarchic functions.
The deep central niche on the upper floor, which emphasizes the
wall’s solidity, is ideal for royal appearances. As Vanvitelli declared, the
central area of the palace “must show off those characteristics that
might give to those who enter some notion of the Personage who
resides there.”The various statues and inscriptions planned for the
entrance declare his virtues: Justice, the measure of our well-being, and Peace, which increases our prosperity, Clemency that sustains the
miserable, and Magnificence that sustains the arts “as was known,”
Vanvitelli wrote, “of Rome in the times of Augustus,Trajan, Hadrian,
in Paris in the celebrated reign of Louis XIV, and now in Naples.”
The towers, which were not executed due to later financial
constraints, would have lightened the facade’s horizontality with
bright vertical accents. For the central cupola the architect may have
been thinking of Saint Peter’s, but this suggestion would have been
overridden by the patron’s own more pertinent reference to El
Escorial. Here, this cupola does not mark a chapel within the palace.
Whereas Felipe erected a palace for the lord, Carlos, his son, erects a
palace for the realm, inverting ecclesiastical models and confirming a
theme of divinization of the monarch.The crowning construction
was to have been a pierced belvedere, an airy temple seen from the
vast piazza and axial road approaching the palace, rising high and
framing the equestrian statue on the pediment as if the royal
simulacrum were in triumphal procession.

Entering the palace, the visitor’s eye is drawn along a central axis
through the ground floor and clear out the back to the garden.This
is a grand covered street, a triumphant way that threads three
vestibules each of which radiates diagonal glimpses into the
courtyards. Many sources for Vanvitelli’s inspiration for these
surprising and dramatic vestibules have been suggested, but only
Vanvitelli’s first training in scenography can explain the effect of
infinite space achieved by the fleeting diagonal planes across the
rectangular courtyards. Every view to and through the Reggia
suggests the infinite power of its resident, even the interior vistas.
That power is also manifest in the materials used in the construction.
The dozens of monolithic columns that punctuate the great masses
of supporting wall, especially in the vestibules, were a particular
passion of Carlos, both for their representational value as
achievements of the classical past and for their local provenance from
archeological sites across his realm. Even the materials manifest the
monarch’s sovereignty across space and time, territory and its history.
These connections are made explicit in the few but significant
sculptural elements realized at Caserta. At the central ground floor
vestibule is a colossal figure of resting Hercules, loosely adapted from the ancient “Farnese Hercules.”According to Vico, Hercules plays a
major role in the origin of civilization and in many ways: wanderer to
foreign shores, tamer of beasts and land, huntsman and planter, builder
of gardens and cities.This reflects Carlos in all his endeavors.The stair
climbs its first ramp between lions and up to a tall scenic wall with a
statue symbolizing Royal Majesty. Here, approaching petitioners are
exhorted to truthfulness and meritoriousness by flanking allegories.
The stairs bifurcate and continue to climb within this large space
vaulted by two domical shells, the first pierced to reveal the second
painted empyrean of Apollo’s realm.A musicians’ gallery tucked away
above allows for ethereal accompaniment to the ascent. Here,
Vanvitelli maintains an extraordinary equilibrium of baroque
theatricality and classical measure.

The upper vestibule is similar to the one directly below, but
bathed in intense light. Approached at oblique angles, this vestibule
is invested with a centrifugal force that sends the visitor off to the
four corners of the palace. Carlos ordered Vanvitelli to model the
chapel after Jules-Hardouin Mansart’s at Versailles by emphasizing
the structural integrity of the free-standing polychrome marble
shafts.Vanvitelli also paired the columns as Claude Perrault had done
on the recent facade at the Louvre.Vanvitelli too strikes a balance
between the forces of tradition and the drive for innovation.
The royal apartments emanate from the central vestibule, the
king’s toward the principal facade, the queen’s toward the gardens,
in a strict subdivision of title and gender.The visitor proceeds
through sequences of antechambers to the royal presences, shaping,
as at Versailles, the rituals of absolute monarchy through the
controlled movement of its courtiers. Although the decoration of
these interiors fell to the successors of Carlos and Vanvitelli, the fuga
di stanze, or flight of aligned rooms along its 250-meter axes is
more impressive than any later gilding.The court theater on the
ground floor was completed entirely under Vanvitelli’s direction.
Within its tiny 10-meter breadth, completely subsumed like the
chapel within the overall geometry of the building,Vanvitelli’s
colossal columnar order unifies the space. Placed on the ground
floor, the stage may be opened at the back to a garden vista. The gardens at Caserta are an integral element in the
experience of Bourbon self-imagery.

Parterres and boxwood extend the geometry of the palace’s architecture outward. The central axis, noted upon our first approach, shoots thousands of meters up the hillside; the abundant waters of the aqueduct cascade toward us, bursting rambunctiously from a mountain cataract, stepping down enormous water chains and flowing into long, low pools.Vanvitelli’s
son, Carlo, strove to complete the key features of the sculptural
program of his father’s gardens.The Ovidian themes of fertility and
metamorphosis that Vanvitelli listed in his publication were carefully
determined as a Vichian mythopoeic historiography of the land.
The fountain sculptures reference both the king’s passion for
hunting here and the site’s historical association with the virginal
goddess of the hunt, Diana. At the top of the park, a dramatic
ensemble of statues play out the scene of Actaeon’s fateful
encounter with the goddess in her bath who in her ire flings drops
of water onto the hapless hunter who is transformed into a stag and
devoured by his dogs. In other ensembles along the water chain,
Adonis departs on his fatal hunt and Venus uses his blood to
seminate the earth with anemones.The statues describe the region’s
mythic foundations in the acts of gods.
All elements of this monarchic project are concatenated along
the water’s course, garden, palace, and on to the new city of
Caserta. In front of the palace, a vast elliptical piazza opens,
delineated by the severe forms of barracks and service buildings. Its
geometry begs a comparison to Bernini’s piazza at Saint Peter’s but
here the architectural gesture is stern and military beneath the
monarch at his loggia controlling with his gaze this place and the
model town that expands from it, the center of a wisely governed
realm. From here a radiating trevium and an orderly grid of streets
were planned with decorous, uniform blocks to guarantee light and
air to the residential units. Contemporary interests in urban
planning exhorted the monarch to the organization of cities, a duty
that brings with it not only considerable public utility but also
effective political propaganda.
Caserta was designed not to replace the capital city but, like
Versailles, to rise alongside as an ideal image of the monarch’s rule.  The axis of the palace and garden was to continue over the horizon
to Naples along a single road carrying with it the waters of the
aqueduct in flanking canals.The union of monumental aesthetic and
functional utility characterizes the particular strengths of Vanvitelli’s
vast plan and the absolute power of Carlos’s rule. Contemporaries
hailed Caserta as the greatest project of its kind. Milizia gushed with
praise calling it “a rare complex of grandeur, of regularity, of
rhythm, of variety, of contrasts, of richness, of facility, of elegance.”
Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, the French critic,
lauded its unity of conception and unity of execution, others its
sublime effect of symmetry and expansion, huge dimensions, and
controlled singular vision.While concepts of the sublime were being
developed across Europe,Vanvitelli himself described Caserta as “a
true mirror in which His Royal Highness can see himself . . . and the
sublime Ideas conceived by his magnificence,” and claimed that it
would “show to Italy, and to all Europe, what sublimity the thoughts
of his Majesty reach.”
Vanvitelli was the last architect of such absolutist ambition and
Caserta the swan song of the absolutist rule that sustained such
visionary building. Caserta is as much connected to the traditions of
the Renaissance and the baroque as it is a response to the innovating
classical shift of Vanvitelli’s generation. But Caserta stands, even in its
abbreviated form, as a confirmation of the highest aspirations of
late-eighteenth-century culture and a prototype for a whole line of
“megapalaces,” buildings of power, logic, largeness, magnificence, and
manipulation.
In celebration of his achievements, the festival decorations erected
in the streets and squares of his capital presented Carlos III as a
modern Hercules, the mythic builder of a new civilization. Far from
abandoning the city to its own squalor, the king began to set out
systems of urban improvement for the city of Naples, encouraging
private building. He commissioned a map of the city, like Nolli’s of
Rome, a clear testimony of an urban consciousness. He built the Teatro
San Carlo, repaired churches like Santa Chiara, established public
museums for the Herculaneum finds and the Farnese sculpture
collection, supplied warehouses, barracks, and hospices, and opened an
ancient-style forum, the Foro Carolino.

Vanvitelli brought to Naples what Carlos most needed, a grand
architectural imagery—clear, solid, geometric, with its severe grandeur
and rich magnificence “fusing,” as the visiting Frenchman Jérôme
Richard summarized in 1764,“the majestic beauty of ancient
architecture with the pleasantness of modern architecture.”Vanvitelli’s
impact in the hitherto provincial world of Neapolitan architects was, as
he immodestly said himself,“a lesson in proper modern architecture.”
As Michelangelo had done for Rome itself in the sixteenth century,
Vanvitelli defined an imperial idiom for his day that dismantled
regional inflections through the Herculean force of classicism.
Vanvitelli’s command of objective functional requirements may
certainly have predisposed him to classical solutions, reducing the
perceived excesses of baroque space with the rigor of columns, but his
classicism is neither self-consciously historicist nor artificially
aesthetisized but the result of a continuously evolving and solid Italian
tradition in architecture almost two millennia in the making.
Carlos’s ameliorative policies and architectural visions were
stopped short by his ascension to the Spanish throne and departure for
Madrid in 1759, leaving behind the regency of his eight-year-old son,
Ferdinando IV.Vanvitelli’s career, which depended upon Carlos, was in
jeopardy under Ferdinando’s lax interest and his regent’s stringent
spending. During his reign, only Caserta’s theater was inaugurated,
along with some small apartments on the main floor. Efforts to build
up parts of the new town, then to be called Ferdinandopoli, were
undertaken, although not to Vanvitelli’s original plans. Ferdinando,
however, established a worker’s colony specializing in silk production
nearby at San Leucio in 1769, and examples of its work line the walls
of the Caserta apartments.The collective community at San Leucio
figures as the Bourbon monarchy’s most effective socioeconomic
effort—it sustained local crafts, educated its inhabitants, and eliminated
the need to import silk.The notions of social ameliorative policies had
been at the core of Bourbon works, and Carlos had all along a second
grand project under way in town.

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