Luigi Vanvitelli Proposal for the Trevi Fountain, Rome ca. 1730-32 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
Hubert Robert Trevi Fountain under Construction ca. 1755 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
Anonymous French Printmaker Trevi Fountain ca. 1765 hand-colored etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Giovanni Battista Piranesi Trevi Fountain ca. 1765 engraving Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
Giovanni Battista Piranesi Trevi Fountain ca. 1765 etching Art Institute of Chicago |
Domenico Montagù Trevi Fountain ca. 1765-70 etching British Museum |
Gian Paolo Panini Trevi Fountain ca. 1765 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
Sir James Dunlop Trevi Fountain ca. 1847-48 salt print Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
Anonymous Photographer Trevi Fountain ca. 1850 daguerreotype Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Jane Martha St John Trevi Fountain ca. 1856-59 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Robert Macpherson Trevi Fountain ca. 1857 albumen print Art Institute of Chicago |
Anonymous Photographer Trevi Fountain ca. 1860 albumen silver prints (stereograph) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Tommaso Cuccioni Trevi Fountain ca. 1860-65 albumen print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
James Anderson Trevi Fountain before 1877 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Anonymous Photographer Fountain of Trevi, Rome 19th century albumen prints (stereograph) Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
Alvin Langdon Coburn Trevi Fountain 1908 photogravure Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
Carl Van Vechten Trevi Fountain 1934 gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art |
William Bradshaw Fountain of Trevi 1958 tempera on paper Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Remembering the Fountain
Dry Apollo: His bright butterflies silently
Flutter among the gray greens; motionless
Lizards ablaze with black and olive, striped with darts
Of ochre, or spotted with everything,
Lounge on pocked steps. Carved not of the god's regular
Marble – aflash even in ruin with
Something of his sunlight – their columns were flung up
From the unruly rocks dashed all about
Among the pale daisies and hard, unfruitful weeds.
They support only the unbearable
Blue of sky not, at this height, a true measure of
The faraway: distant thoughts of water,
Of silent coasts, unimaginable islands –
These mark where wideness is under the sun.
And there the fond, pictorial eye's greater reach
Off southwestward frames a shadowless peak,
Where even the high travellers, poking about
Among those wolf-grey forms would shed no shade.
And now our eye is cast back at our stony feet.
What had been done here was done in green wood:
What do we do here now in the dry? –Remember:
Back up toward the north-northeast, at the green
Foot of a holy mountain, old water, deep, clear
And cold, had something to say to sunlight;
His touches of gold unwedded to her whispers
Of frosty stream, but wet, with caressing
Amusing surfaces, and with reading clear depths.
Not so with those three who bend over the
Fountain now: unquickened, the god who lies entombed
In the noon sunshine; and no legacy
Of his, the almost-enduring nymphs whose voices
Drown the rock talk and water murmuring
Deep below their discourse. Significances splash
Up to him, standing nearby, whose they are –
The Rememberer, unknowing yet of the dry
Heights that wait southward, and above no sea.
– John Hollander (1973)
(In line 2 Hollander writes "gray greens" – then in line 18 "wolf-grey" – which causes this reader to wonder whether the poet intentionally spelled the word in two different ways within the same piece, or if he did so inadvertently, or else whether possibly the inconsistency – oddly jarring – was contributed by the manual transcriber of half a century ago when setting up the copy for publication.)