Dr. Paolo Alei

This webinar offers an exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, commissioned by Pope Innocent X Pamphilj on the occasion of the Holy Year 1650, a sculptural and hydraulic masterpiece that transforms the square into a theatre of early modern global consciousness. At its center rises the Pamphilj obelisk, crowned by the dove with olive branch—the heraldic emblem of the Pamphilj family—and interpreted by the polymath Athanasius Kircher as a proclamation of Rome’s universal vocation. Around this cosmic axis, the four river gods—Danube, Nile, Ganges, and Río de la Plata—emerge as titanic personifications of the continents, their straining bodies and eloquent gestures binding distant geographies into a single papal realm. In this way, Bernini gives visual form to the Baroque dream of ordering the world, echoing Kircher’s encyclopedic vision of a Rome through which knowledge, faith, natural history, and the riches of the globe ceaselessly flowed—from obelisks once raised in Pharaonic Egypt to plants, animals, and minerals newly arriving from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The fountain thus becomes far more than an aesthetic triumph: it is a cartography in stone and water, a poetic dramatization of the yearning to gather the totality of the newly discovered world into a single, harmonious order. In tracing these symbolic currents, the webinar reveals how seventeenth-century Rome not only celebrated its own grandeur but actively shaped the very consciousness of a newly global age.