Four Rivers Fountain

The fountain was commissioned by Pope Innocent X to decorate the Piazza Navona, where work on the Palazzo Pamphilj was then going forward. The family palace faced onto the square, as did the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, which the pope sponsored. In 1647 he commissioned Francesco Borromini to design a conduit carrying water from the Aqua Virgo to the piazza and announced a competition for the design of the fountain itself, and he made known his wish to recover the obelisk, afterwards called the Agonale, which lay in ruins in the Circus of Maxentius on the Via Appia. An imitation of the Domitianic period rather than an Egyptian original, it was found in that same year.

The competition was won by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and two accounts of how he won it have come down. By one, he secured the commission by making a silver model to scale, about a metre and a half high, and presenting it to Olimpia Maidalchini, the pope's sister-in-law and a figure of great influence in papal Rome. Filippo Baldinucci's life of Bernini, published in 1682, tells it otherwise: with Bernini's rivals working on the pope's mind, Innocent had designs made by the leading architects of Rome and ordered none from Bernini, until Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, whose wife was the pope's niece, persuaded Bernini to prepare a model and to arrange for it to be secretly installed in a room of the Palazzo Pamphili through which the pope had to pass. Seeing it when his meal was finished, by that telling, Innocent stopped almost in ecstasy and said it would "be necessary to employ Bernini in spite of those who do not wish it". Borromini submitted a design of his own, an obelisk at whose base four large shells with mascarons poured water into a basin.

Work began in 1648 and was finished in 1651 under Bernini's direction, carried out by a body of sculptors. Giovan Maria Franchi cut the central travertine rock in 1648; the Nile was carved by Giacomo Antonio Fancelli and the Danube by Antonio Raggi in 1650, the Ganges by Claude Poussin and the Rio de la Plata by Francesco Baratta in 1651. The fountain took the place of a beveratore, a plain square trough for watering horses. Setting the obelisk over the sculptural group repeated an innovation Bernini had tried in 1643 at the Fountain of the Triton: the monolith bears not on a compact central mass but on a hollow structure, resting only on the corners of its base.

The cost was so high that the pope met it by taxing bread while reducing the standard weight of the loaf, and the anger this roused in Rome fell less on Innocent than on his sister-in-law, held indirectly responsible and already disliked in the city. The fountain was built at public expense during the intense famine of 1646 to 1648, and throughout the construction the city murmured and talk of riot was in the air. In September 1648 pasquinade writers protested by attaching handwritten invectives to the stone blocks being cut for the obelisk, reading "We do not want Obelisks and Fountains, it is bread that we want. Bread, Bread, Bread!" Innocent quickly had the authors arrested and set disguised spies to patrol the Pasquino statue and the Piazza Navona. He also expelled the market's street vendors from the square, in the belief that they detracted from its magnificence; they refused to move and the papal police had to chase them out. Roman Jews in particular lamented the closing of the Navona, where they had been allowed to sell used articles of clothing at the Wednesday market.

The fountain was unveiled to the populace of Rome on 12 June 1651. Wooden scaffolding hung with curtains had hidden it beforehand, though probably not the obelisk, and an event was organised to draw people to the Piazza Navona. The festival was paid for by the Pamphili family, and specifically by Innocent X, who had sponsored the erection of the fountain; the performers brandished the olive branch, the most conspicuous item on the Pamphili arms. A report by Antonio Bernal describes a woman dressed as the allegorical figure of Fame announcing the celebrations from a carriage paraded through the streets, followed by a second carriage carrying a woman dressed as Curiosity; of the unveiling itself he says less than of the spectators, whom he describes as overwhelmed by the size of the fountain and by the lifelike figures. With the work finished, Bernini wanted to give colour to the rocks, the palm, the peonies and the agaves, and dispensed gilt paint at various points.

The tradition that makes Bernini the rival of Borromini has produced two stories about the fountain, both reported as legend rather than fact. One, common among tour guides, is that Bernini draped the head of the Nile because the figure could not bear to look at the facade of Sant'Agnese, by Borromini. The other is that the Rio de la Plata raises his hand towards the same church to fend off its imminent collapse. The order of building tells against both, the church not being begun until 1652, after the fountain was complete. The veil over the Nile is otherwise explained by the obscurity of the river's sources, which were unknown at the time and remained so until the end of the nineteenth century.

The fountain belongs to Roma Capitale and is protected as Italian national heritage, its conservation in the care of the Sovrintendenza capitolina ai beni culturali; the watering, the emptying and the routine maintenance of the tanks and the artistic lighting fall to Acea Ato 2 and Acea. A first restoration was carried out by the Istituto centrale per il restauro with roughly 622,000 euro from the ministry for cultural heritage, consisting chiefly of cleaning the fountain of droppings and invasive vegetation, consolidating the damaged areas and the water jets, and installing an electrostatic bird deterrent. A second was conducted in 2021 by the municipal superintendency, to monitor the state of conservation and repair minor damage: the lion's jaw, which had come away through wear on its metal joint, and the garland around the head of the Ganges.