Photograph: EAHN

The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City
Katherine Wentworth Rinne

New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2011, 262 pp., 135 b/w and 32 colour ill., £ 35
ISBN 978-0-300-15530-3

As the future availability, use, and control of water for farming and human consumption becomes an increasingly urgent global topic under the spectre of climate change, studies are pouring off the presses about water management and ownership in the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern worlds. Katherine Rinne, an urban designer who has in recent years held distinguished fellowships in Rome and in the USA, and who is director of the website Aquae Urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome, has now written a book of singular importance in this field. Some architectural historians and historians of fountain sculpture will doubtless find The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City strange and even disappointing in that its focus is not exclusively on the works of art and their iconography, as is usually the case. Indeed, Rinne’s text bristles with hostility towards the art historical interpretations of fountains that assume the sculptural decoration to be the chief scholarly interest. She is likely to say that certain fountains are ‘larded’ (p. 89) or ‘filled’ (p. 96) with sculpture if those sculptures are not demonstrably functional elements of the water display. This is a contentious issue that merits further debate, given that art historians are likely to regard any sculpture on a fountain that is even marginally touched by running or splashing water as being essentially related to the design concept of the fountain. Rinne’s rather extreme view is that ‘fountains are meant to contain water, not sculpture.’ (p. 89)

Rinne draws her voluminous information about the planning, design, and delivery of water to fountains and other water distribution sources in Rome from the mid-Cinquecento onwards, mainly from fresh archival sources in Rome’s Archivio di Stato and the Vatican. Her approach is to raise all the difficult, basic questions about Rome’s water supply and distribution: where the water came from; how it was moved from distant springs along newly created aqueducts; how it was sent from reservoirs into underground pipe systems according to the law of gravity; how each of those newly constructed systems had intrinsic strengths or limitations for water delivery and display within Rome’s topography; how decisions were made by committees responsible for water engineering and distribution; and how the Papacy succeeded in wresting control of the system from other interested parties from the late sixteenth century onwards, in the interest of signifying papal power and control of the city’s quality of life. In nine fascinating, richly descriptive chapters Rinne moves through the disastrous Tiber flood of 1557; the construction history of the Acqua Vergine aqueduct and its urban consequences; the distribution systems then employed; the successes and failures of practical hydrology; the fountains of the architect Giacomo della Porta, studied from the angle of their water volumes, pressures, and displays; the ‘water lust’ of Roman religious and secular grandees, as represented by their acquisition of water rights through their access to and control of water regulating committees; the irrigating of Rome’s seven hills, dependent on new aqueduct construction and distribution systems; the creation of an unrivalled new network of civic fountains, together with the legislation governing their non-polluting use by persons and animals; water as Rome’s ‘liquid currency,’ dominated and traded by powerful cardinals; and the development of the city’s streets and drain systems, seen in relation to the buried ancient systems and the Tiber’s capacity to flood.

Rinne makes constant reference to the inhabitants and their manufacturing trades and professions, such as pipe-laying, water-carting, and clothes washing, activities linked to the water supply and determining its potability. We are therefore provided with a vivid social history of early modern Rome illuminated by the problems of the water supply. There are a couple of factual glitches in note 26 on p. 236; ‘Ranuncio’ Farnese at p. 53 is Ranuccio, but otherwise the scholarship looks sound, despite the author’s modest protestations (preface, p. viii) about generating skepticism ‘among more traditional scholars.’ What counts, however, is that Rinne has provided a strong foundation for a new history of early modern Rome’s water supply and its manifold uses. She has a valid point in arguing that her Roman fountains cannot be researched convincingly without serious consideration of how and why they were served by water. Rinne shows that the historical ‘meaning’ of such fountains can be just as deeply embedded in the political processes that she illuminates from her archival evidence as in the (mostly) straightforward iconography of the sculpture. The book is amply illustrated with apposite images from the period and with a number of informative new maps.

Architectural and sculptural invention is here subordinated to the desperate struggle of individuals to obtain and control water supply, something that certainly signified in itself, as Rinne argues, the possession of power and influence in the city of Rome.

Robert W. Gaston
The University of Melbourne
Australia