Sunday, July 30, 2023

World of Fountains - I

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.)