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New Light on Bernini's Neptune and Triton Author(s): William Collier Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 31 (1968), pp. 438-440Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750654Accessed: 17-04-2015 18:05 UTC

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438 NOTES in his additions to Bartholomaus Anglicus, Konrad Gesner's De avium natura, Zilrich 1555, P- 254: 'Ciconias audio cum primum adveniunt nidum aliquoties lustrare & cir- cumvolare antequam ingrediantur. Ciconiae nidos suos quotannis repetunt, & unum e foetibus suis, domino loci, sub quo foetificant, deplumatum quasi tributum, ut fertur, dejiciunt: sed forte causa magis est taedium nutriendi. Quinimo, ut vulgo dicitur, pro decimis dejiciunt deo ius suum servantes.' My italics indicate the apparent resemblance to Marvell's line, 'That Tribute to its Lord to send,' while in the word 'pretend' he hints at the same kind of doubt about the bird's real motives as expressed by Gesner (the parents do not want the trouble of looking after their offspring).

Since most Renaissance accounts of the stork's habits make no mention of its offerings to householders, Marvell's use of this odd- ment is not exactly traditional. Might his patron's daughter and his pupil, Mary Fairfax, have come across it with him in some natural-history-cum-Latin lesson during those years when he was her father's poet-in- residence, and wrote 'Upon Appleton House'? Of course it is not really permissible to speculate. Yet there is another notable example of the use of the stork's parental piety in moral pedagogy. Three volumes recorded by Mario Praz in his Studies in Seventeenth-

Century Imagery2 share a common set of exquisite illustrations, copper-plates from designs by Marcus Geerarts; and amongst them is the picture of a parent-stork sacrific- ing one of its young from a roof-top. The earliest is E. de Dene, De Warachtige Fabulen der dieren, I567, the second probably the Esbatement moral des animaux, Antwerp [I 578] (P1. 96c), and the third Arnold Freitag, Mythologia Ethica, Antwerp 1579. While each of these books presents the stork as the emblem of generosity, Freitag's text expands most lengthily and seriously the hint of the sacred in Gesner (p. 250): 'ut videlicet illius exemplo, que annuas foetus alicuius oblatione Deo persoluit primitias, nosmetipsos ad virtutis cultum observantiamq stimulantes, puri cordis ac pectoris thura ei adoleamus . . .' The humour which we may now find in Geerart's bland design (the cottage's occu- pant already leaning out of her window to accept the rather large-sized oblation) is no doubt unconscious. It was Marvell's virtue to have at once an appetite for the varieties of knowledge current in his time, and yet to preserve a certain detachment which allowed him to use it with humorous affection, passing over at times into a deeper sobriety but never remaining there.

KITTY DATTA

2 2nd edition, Rome 1964.

NEW LIGHT ON BERNINI'S NEPTUNE AND TRITON

On 8 May 1795, John Parkinson, Rector of Brocklesby in Lincolnshire, visited Nollekens's studio in Mortimer Street. He was told how Bernini's group had come into the possession of Lord Yarborough a year earlier and entered the news in his diary:

Jenkins sent Mr. Townley an account of the fine things belonging to Villa Negroni with their prices; among which ?500oo was set on Bernini's Neptune. Sir Joshua Reynolds desired Mr. Townley to buy the Neptune with a view to the Duke of Rutland, who dying before it arrived, it lay on Sir J.'s hands who asked ?1,500 for it. When Sir J. died Nollekins persuaded Mr. Pelham [Lord Yarborough's elder son] to offer ?500 for it, which was refused by

the executors partly because they knew on whose behalf the offer was made. They insisted on ?8oo. I should mention that besides the prime cost of ?500oo it has cost Sir J. ?400 more to have it conveyed &c. At last when the time approached for entering upon a new year for the house or apartment where the Statue was kept (the rent of which was ?6o) they sent word to N. that he might have it for ?500 provided he would remove it in a few days. He ventured therefore to purchase it without consulting Lord Yarborough, who ordered [him] to place it in the Octagon at Chelsea. N. considers it as the finest piece of modern sculpture existing.'

Some of this information has already been pieced together from other sources. But there

1 My thanks are due to Mrs. Robinson for her kind permission to quote from the diary of her ancestor, Dr. John Parkinson.

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BERNINI'S NEPTUNE AND TRITON 439 has hitherto been no contemporary account available of how the first of Bernini's surviving fountain statues (P1. 96a, b) came into the possession of Lord Yarborough's family, who only parted with it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1950. It is interesting, inci- dentally, to have confirmation, from another source than Smith's virulent biography of Nollekens, both of his opinion of the statue and of his keen eye for a bargain. One is also given a new sidelight on Sir Joshua Reynolds as virtually a dealer in sculpture employing the collector Charles Townley to act for him.

Reynolds may or may not have considered that the theme of the statue was taken from the first book of Virgil's Aeneid. His note on the back of his Fifteenth Discourse, 'The Quos Ego of Bernini', was afterwards crossed out, suggesting uncertainty or a change of mind. Professor Wittkower has accepted the note as correctly linking the passage in the Aeneid with the sculpture, but Mr. John Pope-Hennessy has pointed out some discrepancies: Virgil mentions Cymo- thoe as well as the two other figures and Neptune's chariot is described as riding across the surface of the sea.2 Bernini omitted both Cymothoe and the chariot and placed his statue on a high, rocky base above a pool in the Villa Montalto. There are some even more serious difficulties. The point of Neptune's appearance in the narrative is to rescue Aeneas's fleet. Neptune's two atten- dants are described as dislodging the ships and he himself raises them with his trident.3 Not only does Bernini fail to show the ships round which this incident revolves, but he makes Neptune lunge down with his trident as though to strike. Professor Wittkower has interpreted this action as an angry gesture intended to calm the waters. But not even this assumption manages to tally with the Aeneid. Virgil describes the anger of Neptune as being not with the waves but with the winds that have roused them. It is the winds which he addresses in the passage of ten lines that includes the 'quos ego' phrase.4 Having dismissed them to the cave of Aeolus, he quells the waves with a calm authority which

is compared to that of a statesman silencing a turbulent mob.5 There is nothing particularly statesmanlike about Bernini's Neptune and to accept the Virgilian concetto would be to admit either an unusually free rendering or else a failure of characterization which is very far from being generally true of Bernini's work.

The alternative passage suggested by Mr. Pope-Hennessy presents almost equal difficulties. Although Cymothoe and the ships do not have to be accounted for in the lines he chooses from Ovid's Metamorphoses, they hardly seem to describe Bernini's group:

Nec maris ira manet, positoque tricuspide telo Mulcet aquas rector pelagi . .

.

The sense of this passage, from Ovid's first book of the Metamorphoses, is clearly that Neptune has laid aside his trident and is soothing the waters. Yet Bernini's Neptune is not laying his trident aside but thrusting it down, nor would one think from his vigorous action and angry look that he is engaged in a soothing gesture. At this juncture in the narrative, however, there would have been no point in anger, since the waters which Neptune is calming had been let loose by him alone in the first place. Their purpose in drowning all but two human beings has been achieved and there is no one left in the world, apart from Deucalion and Pyrrha, with whom to be angry. Triton, seconding his father Neptune, sounds his conch shell as a signal for the waters to recede.7 This, surely, would have been a strange theme for a fountain and pool. Are we to expect them to dry up at any moment? Luckily the chances of this happening were reduced by the action of Bernini's Triton, who blew a jet of water from his shell. But one can hardly accept this theme without allowing almost as many variants between text and sculpture as in that hazarded by Reynolds.

The alternative proposed here is an earlier passage in Ovid's first Metamorphosis. The waters which Neptune was to calm had been let loose when he smote the earth with his trident:

Ipse tridente suo terrain percussit. at illa Intremuit motuque vias patefecit aquarum.8

This corresponds with the action which Bernini's Neptune appears to be making: he is about to strike the ground with his trident.

2 R. Wittkower, 'Bernini Studies-i: The Group of Neptune and Triton', The Burlington Magazine, xciv, 1952, pp. 75-6. J. Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1964, ii, p. 6oo. 3 Aeneid, Book i, lines 144, 145:

Cymothoe simul et Triton adnixus acuto detrudunt navis scopulo; levat ipse tridenti.

4 Aeneid, Book i, lines 132-41.

5 Ibid., Book i, lines 148-53. 6 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book i, lines 330, 331. 7 Ovid, op. cit., Book i, lines 333-5- 8 Ibid., Book i, lines 283, 284.

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440 NOTES It also fits the part played by the fountain in sending up a great spray of water from the artificial rock on which the statue stood. Triton's jet helps rather than hinders by increasing the flood. It may be objected that Triton is not specifically included by Ovid at this point. But he was known as Neptune's son and constant companion, he is mentioned at the end of the flood and it would not have been unreasonable, knowing the rest of the poem, to assume his presence on this first occasion. From purely sculptural con- siderations, he helps to provide a supporting mass below Neptune in the same way that the cuirass supports Bernini's David and the Cerberus his Pluto and Proserpine.

The flood was started, according to Ovid, because Jove had descended from high Olympus and disguised in human form travelled up and down the land. It would, he wrote, take too long to recount how great impiety was found on every hand.9 Just as in the Biblical flood, a parallel which the Italians of the period would have appreciated, the waters released at Jove's command were to drown all these impious people. Neptune acts as the instrument of Jove's wrath.

Why should this concetto have been chosen? The fountain was commissioned by Cardinal Peretti, nephew of the former Inquisitor Pope Sixtus V and his principal assistant in the government of the Roman church and the Papal States from 1587 until the Pope's death. In 1587 Domenico Fontana had erected in the Piazza San Bernardo in Rome

the Acqua Felice with its minatory central figure of Moses. Intentionally or not, the spirit of the Papacy at the time is strikingly conveyed. A rather similar atmosphere existed when Bernini's Neptune and Triton was begun, probably, it is now thought, about 1620.10 On December Ist that year Rome received with rejoicing the news of the Emperor Ferdinand II's victory over the Protestants at the Battle of the White Mountain. Pope Gregory XV, who succeeded Paul V in January 1621, was an eager supporter of Ferdinand. His enthusiasm may well have been shared by Cardinal Peretti, who could have chosen no more fitting way of alluding to papal policy than by a work of art celebrating the destruction of the impious. This may have been the allusion behind the more obvious meaning of Ovid's narrative. It must seem to us a tortuous form of expression but there is, at least, no doubt that it was typical of the age and place. Of Bernini's other fountains, the Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna seems fairly certainly to represent the Ship of the Church and the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona can be taken as an allegory of the world-wide power claimed for the Roman church under Innocent X.

WILLIAM COLLIER

* Ovid, op. cit., Book i, lines 214, 215.

1 R. Wittkower, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, London 1955, pp. 179-84; Martinelli, Bernini, Milan 1953, p. 29; Hibbard, 'Nuove note sul Bernini', Bollettino d'arte, xliii, 1958, pp. 181-3. Pope-Hennessy, op. cit., p. 6oo, prefers the date 1622.

Quaestiones disputatae: POUSSIN'S VENUS AT PHILADELPHIA*

te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli adventumque tuum . . .

(De rerum natura, Book i) n this Journal, XXV, 1961 (pp. 323-7), I argued that Poussin's so-called 'Triumph

of Neptune and Amphitrite' belonging to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (P1. 97a) was not correctly identified by that title. In the twenty-sixth volume (pp. 359-60), Mr.

Michael Levey rejected my proposed re- identification in favour of a 'Triumph' or 'Wedding of Neptune and Amphitrite'. In the twenty-eighth volume (pp. 338-43), Mr. Charles Dempsey accepts my re-identi- fication with qualifications.

I did not reply to Mr. Levey, since I felt that little was to be gained by disputing an interpretation which seemed to me to be clever, but wholly without substantiation. Since Mr. Levey fails to explain the unequal emphasis given to the two protagonists of Poussin's painting, offers no explanation of the dolphin's outrider, or of the storm-cloud and wind which permeate the picture's landscape, I cannot accept his interpretation of the picture as a 'Wedding' or 'Triumph of

* I should like to thank Sir Anthony Blunt and Dr. E. P. Richardson for reading this paper and for valuable suggestions.

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a Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum

bl Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum

a, b-Gianlorenzo Bernini, Neptune and Triton. London, Victoria and Albert Museum (p. 439)

96

c-Parent stork sacri- ficing young from roof- top, from Esbatement moral des animaux Antwerp, 1578 (p. 438)

C Permission: Trustees, British Museum

d-Engraving by Gilliam van der Gouwen of a print by Jan Goere (P. 443)

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Article Contentsp. 438p. 439p. 440[unnumbered]

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 31 (1968), pp. 1-462Volume Information [pp. 450-461]Front MatterSymbolism in the Plato Scholia [pp. 1-11]Thbit Ibn Qurra on Euclid's Parallels Postulate [pp. 12-32]Some Early Medieval Figure Sculpture from North-East Turkey [pp. 33-72]The Capital Frieze and Pilasters of the Portail Royal, Chartres [pp. 73-102]Studies in English Manuscript IlluminationPart III: The English Apocalypse; II [pp. 103-147]

Virtues and Vices in the Chapter House Vestibule in Salisbury [pp. 148-158]Piers Plowman and Local Iconography [pp. 159-169]A Mid-Fifteenth-Century English Illuminating Shop and Its Customers [pp. 170-196]The Signatures and Original Foliation of Leonardo da Vinci's Libro F [pp. 197-217]Leonardo's Architectural Designs and the Sforza Mausoleum [pp. 218-233]The Term Emblema in Alciati [pp. 234-250]Mercurius Ver: The Sources of Botticelli's Primavera [pp. 251-273]Le Thme de la Madeleine pnitente au XVIIeme sicle en France [pp. 274-306]The Painted Enigma and French Seventeenth-Century Art [pp. 307-335]William Hogarth and Antoine Parent [pp. 336-382]Delacroix's Imagery in the Palais Bourbon Library [pp. 383-403]The Architectural Setting of Jane Austen's Novels [pp. 404-422]NotesThe Yale [pp. 423-428]An Allegorical Portrait of Emperor Sigismund by Mariano Taccola of Siena [pp. 428-434]On the Iconography of the Nymph of the Fountain by Lucas Cranach the Elder [pp. 434-437]Marvell's Stork: The Natural History of an Emblem [pp. 437-438]New Light on Bernini's Neptune and Triton [pp. 438-440]Quaestiones disputatae: Poussin's Venus at Philadelphia [pp. 440-444]Harrison, Jonson and Dekker: The Magnificent Entertainment for King James (1604) [pp. 445-448]Two Eighteenth-Century Frontispieces [pp. 448-449]

Back Matter