Fountains of Papal Rome/Triton
"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.
This fountain was done by Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Urban VIII. It stands near the Barberini Church of the Capuchins, and was intended to adorn the approach to the Palazzo Barberini. This third of the trio of the great palaces of the nepotizing Popes Farnese, Borghese, and Barberini was built by Urban VIII in order to invest his house with an importance equal to that enjoyed by the families of Paul III and Paul V. As the fountain was an adjunct of the palace, it had to bear upon it in some way the emblem of the Barberini the colossal bee and this explains why Bernini united the curving bodies of his dolphins by escutcheons carrying three bees and the papal arms.
Another fountain, contemporaneous with the Triton, once stood in this same piazza, at the corner of the Via Sistina; and this fountain, also made for Urban VIII by Bernini, was in itself the emblem of the Barberini, for it represented merely a great shell into which the bees spouted water. In some way this second fountain has disappeared, but the piazza still remains the Barberini quarter of the city ; and the Triton, as well as the magnificent palace, recalls the days when the power and rapacity of that family brought upon it the unf orgetable pasquinade:
"What the Barbarians spared,
The Barberini took."