Trevi Architects: Giuseppe Pannini succeeds Bernini
Yet it seems to me that Fraschetti was right, not so much because of the attribution – which was certainly erroneous – as because the design bears a noticeable similarity, which is certainly by Bernini. Therefore, I think there can be no doubt that the second, if not the first, served as inspiration for the arrangement which Salvi held so dear but which, in the spirit of the 18th century, was extremely successful and at the same time extremely formal; an arrangement which is by no means as magnificent as the architecture or even the stupendous crags that caused the architect so much trouble. At this point we would be right to enquire if Bernini’s design for the Trevi fountain on which Salvi drew to such great advantage was known to anyone else, so we must ask if anyone else was aware that Salvi had used it as his model. There is some very good evidence to lead us to believe the answer is “Yes”.
In fact, poor Salvi, completely paralysed by arthritis since 1745, died on 6 February 1751. The young artist called upon to succeed him as architect for the Aqua Vergine and therefore for the Trevi fountain was Giuseppe Pannini who, when the fountain was inaugurated in 1762, was to reveal a whole series of modifications to Salvi’s work: modifications that were as considerable as – until now – they have been inexplicable. I will talk about the two main ones. The two bas-reliefs (on the left, Agrippa giving orders for the construction of the aqueduct and, on the right, the virgin known as “Trivia” showing the thirsty soldiers an underground pool) were already present in Bernini’s design, even if the first was portrayed differently. As you can see from the engraving executed around, I think, 1745, Salvi had two niches beneath these bas-reliefs; in the one on the left he put a wooden statue of Agrippa and, in the one on the right, the virgin “Trivia”, also a wooden statue.
Pannini, evidently with Gian Lorenzo’s design in front of him, hastily removed the statue of Agrippa and substituted a female figure (Abundance, with a cornucopia; in the niche on the right he replaced the “virgin” who had found the water with the much more generic “Health”. But if, in Bernini’s design, the figures of two “modern” women (even though we don’t know what they represented) were acceptable in those niches because the statues above them were all mythological, Pannini failed to notice his error when he repeated, almost identically, one of the statues that Salvi had already had carved higher up, i.e. Abundance, or Harvest, with her cornucopia.
Finally, Pannini made another important modification in the center of the rocks. As you can see in the engraving already mentioned, Salvi had, so to speak, opened up a road between the rocks in front of Neptune’s chariot, sloping gently down to the pool. Pannini had the idea of replacing this “road” by the three basins that now exist, positioned in such a way that, seen from below, they look like three steps, of which the bottom one is larger. The result was that he altered Salvi’s original idea considerably and at the same time reproduced, though quite without justification, the three tiny basins that Gian Lorenzo had designed beneath the hooves of the impatiently stamping Pegasus. Back to Trevi Architects Home...
