EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona and the Universal Mission of Baroque Rome”
Presented by Dr. Paolo Alei
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

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.

The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation is confirmed once you have purchased your ticket. You will receive the Zoom Link to join the presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDING of the webinar will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience for 7 days after the event.

Paolo Alei is an art historian from Rome. He is Professor of art history at the University of California (the UCEAP academic program in Italy) and Curator of the Museum of the Castle of Bracciano near Rome. He has a Master from Columbia University where he specialized on Venetian Renaissance Painting and a PhD from Oxford University where he completed a dissertation on the influence of the Natural History by Pliny the Elder on Italian Renaissance art. He has published several essays on Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and a book on the history of the Venice Carnival. Recently, he coedited a monumental book about the patronage of the Orsini family in Central Italy. He is co-organizer of EMR (Early Modern Rome), one of the greatest conferences about Renaissance and Baroque culture.