Steven Ostrow
University of Minnesota, Art History, Emeritus
From almost the beginning of his pontificate, the Quirinal Palace was a major focus of the patronage of Paul V Borghese (r. 1605-1621), who wished to make it the equal to the Vatican Palace. Key to this effort was the construction of the... more
From almost the beginning of his pontificate, the Quirinal Palace was a major focus of the patronage of Paul V Borghese (r. 1605-1621), who wished to make it the equal to the Vatican Palace. Key to this effort was the construction of the Sala Regia and Cappella Paolina, in which could be staged all the ceremonial and liturgical functions formerly served only by the Vatican. While considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the Sala Regia, especially to the frescoes that adorn its walls, the Pauline Chapel, both as planned and as executed under Paul V, to a large extent has been ignored. This essay addresses this lacuna, interpreting the chapel's program of decoration-both in relation to the contiguous Sala Regia and, more broadly, with regard to the most pressing religious and political concerns of the Borghese pope's papacyas a carefully formulated proclamation of papal authority and the Church's role in defeating heresy.
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Collecting Copies of 'the most charming fountain in Rome': Taddeo Landini's Fontana delle Tartarughe Although the taste for garden fountains goes back to antiquity, a particular enthusiasm for them re-emerged in the mid-to-late nineteenth... more
Collecting Copies of 'the most charming fountain in Rome': Taddeo Landini's Fontana delle Tartarughe Although the taste for garden fountains goes back to antiquity, a particular enthusiasm for them re-emerged in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, especially in England and the United States, and the words quoted above, written in 1900 by the British garden designer and landscape architect Thomas H. Mawson, speak directly to this vogue. 1 Indeed, books and magazines of the period devoted to gardens are replete with calls for fountains to adorn gardens of any kind, from the smallest and most intimate planted lot to the grandest of landscaped estates. As the American horticulturalist and author, Phebe Westcott Humphreys, wrote: 'We are gradually awakening to the charm and the possibilities of the "poetic spray" in our garden pools. It is true that many landscape architects insist that fountain statuary is fitting only in formal gardens and parks. But all agree that the sparkling fountain spray […] is appropriate and desirable for every form of garden'. 2 The combination of water-what J. B. Waring called 'the very life and soul of pleasure-grounds' 3-and sculpted and architectural forms distinguishes fountains from all other types of what was then often referred to as garden furniture and accounts for their unique allure, as Steuart Erskine noted in an article in House and Garden of 1904. 'Fountains have', he wrote, 'from time immemorial, exercised a particular fascination over the mind of man. The combination of the artist's skill with the resources of Nature, the mingling of stone and marble with the ever-changing, sparkling, dripping, tumbling
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Pietro Tacca's wonderfully bizarre Fontane dei Mostri Marini (Fountains of the Sea Monsters) in Florence's Piazza SS. Annunziata – designed and cast in bronze in the third decade of the seventeenth century – were widely praised in... more
Pietro Tacca's wonderfully bizarre Fontane dei Mostri Marini (Fountains of the Sea Monsters) in Florence's Piazza SS. Annunziata – designed and cast in bronze in the third decade of the seventeenth century – were widely praised in English-language guidebooks, travel literature, and scholarly texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also attracted the attention of collectors, and between 1902 and 1920 four exceptionally affluent patrons – in Rome, Washington, dc, Minneapolis, and London – purchased copies of one of the fountains, three of them installing them in the grounds of their respective stately homes. This article examines the history of these copies – their patrons, their installation, and their manufacture – tracing the afterlife of Tacca's original fountain and illuminating a little-studied aspect of the history of collecting in Italy, the United States, and England at the beginning of the twentieth century.