IN the Piazza Barberini is the Fountain of the Triton by Bernini, one of the least objectionable of his minor works. A chubby, sonsie fellow is the young Triton, embrowned by wind, water and sun, seated in a shell, supported by four dolphins and blowing into a conch with a single eye to business that should, but does not act as a salutary example to the tribe of beggars, models and gossips who congregate around him.
From the right of the spacious square leads the street on which stands the Palace of the Barberini,—I had nearly written the Bee-hive, so intimate grows the association between the powerful family and these busy stingers to one who has studied the Barberini monuments, erected by them while living, and to them when defunct. I have consistently and resolutely refrained, thus far, from plying my readers with art-criticisms—fore-ordained to be skipped—of pictures and statues which do not interest those who have never seen them, and fail to satisfy those who have. I mention the picture of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni because it is the most wonderful portrait extant. Before seeing it, I fairly detested the baby-face, with a towel wound about the head, that looked slyly backward at me from the window of every print-shop. Of the principal feature so raved about by Byronic youths and bilious school-girls, it might be said,—
“Thou hast no speculation in the eyes
That thou dost glare with.”
The other lineaments would have been passable in a Paris doll. Believing these caricatures—or some of them—to be tolerable copies of the original, we lived in Rome four months; made ourselves pretty well acquainted with the half-dozen good pictures among the host of poor ones in the Palazzo Doria, and the choice gems in the small Academia di San Luca; we had seen the Aurora of the Rospiglioso, the Antinöus upon the mantel in Villa Albani; Venus Victrix and Daphne in the Borghese, and the unrivaled frescoes upon the walls and ceilings of the Palazzo Farnese, besides going, on an average, once a week to the Capitoline and Vatican museums;—yet never been persuaded by friends wiser or less prejudiced than we, to enter the meagrely supplied art-gallery of the Barberini Palace. When we did go it was with a languor of curiosity clogging our steps and dulling our perceptions, which found no stimulus in the two outer apartments of the suite. There were the usual proportion of Holy Families, Magdalenes, and Portraits, to an unusual number of which conscientious Baedeker had affixed interrogation-points casting worse than doubt upon their origin;—Christ among the Doctors—which it is difficult to imagine was painted by Dürer, but easy to believe was “done” in five days; Raphael’s Fornarina, a shade more brazen and a thought less handsome than the bar-maid of the same title, in the Uffizzi at Florence, and so plainly what she was, one is sorry to trace Raphael’s name upon her bracelet. Then the guide suddenly turned toward the light a small, shabby frame hung upon a hinge—and a soul looked at us!
“The very saddest picture ever painted or conceived. It involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.... It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet her glance and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of the case better than we do.”
Hawthorne comprehended and expressed the spirit of the composition (if it be a fancy sketch, as latter-day iconoclasts insinuate), and the language of the doomed girl’s eyes. Even he has told but a part of the story; given but a hint of the nature of the charm that holds cool critic and careless stroller spell-bound before this little square of canvas. There is sorcery in it pen nor tongue can define. It haunted and tormented us until the possession was provoking. After coming many times to experience the same thrill—intense to suffering if we gazed long;—after dreaming of her by day and by night, and shunning, more disgustfully than ever, the burlesques in the shops—“the poor girl with the blubbered eyes,”—we tried to forget her. It was weak to be thus swayed by a twenty-inch painting; unworthy of people who fearlessly pronounced Perugino stiff, and had not been overwhelmed to rapturous incoherence by the sprawling anatomical specimens left by Michael Angelo to the guild of art-lovers under the name of the “Last Judgment.” Saying and feeling thus,—we took every opportunity of slipping without premeditation, or subsequent confession into the Barberini Palace;—finally leaving the picture and Rome, no better able to account for our fascination than after our first grudging visit.
Returning to the square of the Triton after one of these bootless excursions, we ascended a short avenue to the plain old church of the Capuchins. A Barberini founded this also, and the convent next door,—a cardinal, and brother to Urban VIII. He made less use of the bees and Bernini in his edifices than did his kinsman. That he had a juster appreciation of true genius, was evinced by his hospitable attentions to Milton when he was in Rome. Church annals record, moreover, the circumstance that Cardinal Barberini availed himself no further of the family wealth and aggrandizement than to give liberally to the poor and endow this church and monastery. He is buried beneath the high altar, and a modest stone bears the oft-borrowed epitaph—“Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil!”
There are famous paintings in this church,—the chapel nearest the entrance containing Guido Reni’s “St. Michael,” while upon the walls of the next but one is a fine fresco of the “Death of St. Francis,” by Domenichino. The crypts are, however, the popular attraction of the place.