Acqua Felice

The work was completed within eighteen months, at the same time that Sixtus was engaged in laying out the street plan that would provide the arteries of modern Rome.

The three-arched Fontana dell'Acqua Felice (designed by Domenico Fontana, 1587) marked the entry of the new water source into Rome, with the conventional mostra or showy terminus: "what makes a fountain a mostra is not essentially its size or splendor, but its specific designation as the fountain that is a public memorial to the whole achievement of the aqueduct.

"[2] "Even in the seventeenth century this fountain was considered as being in very bad style (pessimo stile)," Siegfried Giedion reported[3] "and it is scarcely conceivable that such mediocrity was possible only two decades after the death of Michelangelo".

Its disproportionately large attic, a billboard for the triumphant inscription, has an unbalanced stagey flatness; its proportions may be unfavorably compared to the Arco Scalette, Vicenza, erected in 1576, probably designed by Andrea Palladio (illustration, right).

The allegories are resolutely biblical, avoiding classical pagan allusions in publicising the modern pope who demolished the Septizodium to make way for his avenues linking the major Christian monuments of Rome, the pilgrimage basilicas.