I have been a Bernini lover for years – but seeing this Bernini beauty in Piazza Barberini at midnight with almost no crowds is something else.
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BY TAMARA THIESSEN
Gian Lorenzo Bernini is the master of Rome’s enduring look today. As Rome’s beauty when wandering the streets, and from piazza to piazza, is more than anything else baroque beauty. Ancient wonders too, sure. But they exist in pockets, for visiting mostly with a ticket. Whereas the baroque is there in everyday life, at every turn.
Dolphins and Sea Gods: Fontana del Tritone
One of several piazza centrepieces by Bernini, for the Fontana del Tritone he fantasised Poseidon’s son, Triton, trumpeting water through a conch shell. The half man, half fish is perched high on a crimped scallop shell, carried by four dolphins.
Made around 1642 for Bernini’s major papal patron, Pope Urban VIII Barberini, the fountain sports the Barberini family coat of arms. So, it has many bees in its belly! The Barberini’s buzzing heraldic emblem.
The nearby Fontana delle Api – the ‘Bee Fountain’ – is another Bernini work featuring the family’s bees. It used to lie in the corner of the Piazza Barberini, a little overshadowed by its majestic companion. (Now you will find it at the beginning of Via Veneto – it’s relocated!)
Baroque Bernini Beauty, Piazza Barberini
Bernini beauty flows out from the Fontana del Tritone into the Piazza Barberini. The famous architect and sculptor was born in Naples in 1598, died in Rome in 1680,
At the Fontana del Tritone, his patron Barberini wanted a ‘public ornament for the city’ – and that he got. A big glitzy sculpted jewel. The Palazzo Barberini dominates the square – once the family home, today the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini – the national gallery of ancient art.
As a Baroque masterpiece, says Rome tourism, the Triton Fountain below the palace is ‘an expression of the new Baroque conception of space: its sculptural part includes and completely absorbs its architectural structure’.
The four dolphins with intertwined tails … support a large shell, from which the Triton rises imposingly. The colossal statue is represented with an erect torso, scaly legs, and head bent back to blow into the large buccina (spiral shell) that he supports in his hands and from which the water gushes and irrigates the whole work. The first innovation introduced by Bernini is that, unlike the traditional newts normally depicted with monstrous connotations, this has a more human aspect.
The second innovation is Bernini’s hollow base for the fountain’s sculptures, which amplifies its dimension.
Instead of sitting on a central pillar, the sculptural group rests ‘on a structure with a void in the center, to supply higher momentum and elegance to the composition’. As high as the heavens, you will soar!
All these symbols were there, of course, to massage a papal ego. One that had much money attached.