Introduction: A Monument That Speaks
The Fontana Maggiore addresses whoever approaches it. Running around the upper basin, a long sequence of Latin verses tells the monument’s own story — its makers, its water, its date — and the sequence opens not with a statement but with a command to the passer-by, in the form in which generations of visitors and guidebooks have transmitted it:
Aspice qui transis iocundum vivere fontes.
Si bene respicias mira videre potes.
“Behold, you who pass by, the fountain living joyfully. If you look closely, you can see wondrous things.”
The gesture is ancient. The apostrophe to the viator, the traveller stopped in his tracks by a voice from the stone, belongs to the oldest conventions of Latin epigraphy, where the tomb by the roadside calls on the passer-by to halt and read; at Perugia the convention is turned from death to abundance, and the voice that detains the traveller is the voice of running water. The two lines are built on a single idea. Aspice and videre frame the couplet, and between them stands a condition, si bene respicias: the wonders, mira, are promised not to every glance but to attentive looking. It is, in effect, the monument’s own instruction for use — a warning that the fifty reliefs and twenty-four statues will yield their meaning only to the beholder who takes the time to read them — and this essay takes the fountain at its word.
The familiar form of the couplet must nonetheless be received with a philologist’s caution, for it is not quite what the stone says. The critical edition of the inscription published in 1996 established that the first verse reads iocundo murmure fontes — “the fountains with their joyful murmur” — and that the long-transmitted jocundum vivere, which yields no satisfactory sense or construction, is a corruption; the verb of the second line, moreover, circulates in the tradition as both respicias and prospicias.
The correction changes more than a word. In the restored reading the fountain calls attention first to its sound, and only then to its sights: the passer-by is invited to hear the water before seeing the carving, so that the monument presents itself from its opening line as an experience for ear and eye together. Both readings are given here because both belong to the fountain’s history — the one to the stone, the other to the long life of the verse in the memory of the city — and the text of the inscription, its edition and its authors are examined in detail below.
At the highest point of Perugia, in the piazza that medieval documents call the platea magna and that today bears the name Piazza IV Novembre, stands a fountain that is at once a work of hydraulic engineering, a masterpiece of Duecento sculpture, and a sustained visual and verbal argument about the identity of the city that built it. The Fontana Maggiore, completed in 1278, is not a decorative afterthought placed in a public square but the deliberate terminus of a water system, the crowning gesture of an enterprise that had preoccupied the commune for more than two decades. Water reached the acropolis, and where it arrived the city raised a monument that told passers-by who the Perugians believed themselves to be, where they came from, and by what right they governed themselves.
To read the Fontana Maggiore well is to hold three registers together. The first is functional: the fountain is the visible mouth of the aqueduct that carried water uphill from Monte Pacciano, and its form — a stepped podium supporting two diminishing polygonal marble basins crowned by a bronze cup — is organised around the fall of water from a summit vessel down through the basins. The second is sculptural: the lower basin carries fifty carved panels and the upper basin twenty-four statues, executed by Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni at the very end of Nicola’s career, with a workshop of considerable size. The third register is epigraphic and ideological: a long verse inscription runs around the monument, naming its makers and dating the work, and the imagery constitutes a program that has invited, and resisted, interpretation as a “secular encyclopedia” of late medieval knowledge and civic ideology.
This essay treats the fountain thematically rather than as a chronological narrative, moving from the political and hydraulic circumstances of its making, through the men named on it and the inscriptions that name them, to the fabric, the two figured basins, the bronze crown, the questions of attribution, the long history of damage and restoration, and finally the vexed problem of the program’s meaning and the monument’s critical fortune. Throughout, it observes the evidentiary discipline that the subject demands: the documentary record edited in the mid-twentieth century, the epigraphic edition of the 1990s, the encyclopedia entries and restoration reports are trustworthy in different degrees, and where a fact cannot be secured it is better to say so than to smooth it over. The fountain has attracted more confident assertion than the evidence can bear, and part of its interest lies precisely in the gap between what the monument shows and what we can prove about why.
Communal Perugia in the Thirteenth Century
The Fontana Maggiore is unintelligible apart from the political culture that produced it. Thirteenth-century Perugia was a commune in the full sense: a self-governing city that had, over the course of the century, seen the older consular and podestarile arrangements supplemented and increasingly balanced by the institutions of the popolo. A capitano del popolo is first attested in the city in the mid-1250s, and by 1260 the commune had issued the Ordinamenta populi, the body of regulations that organised the guilds, trades and professional associations into a recognised political constituency. By the last quarter of the century, when the fountain was built, the city was governed by the twin magistracies of a podestà and a capitano del popolo, both typically foreigners appointed for fixed terms, precisely so that neither would become the instrument of a local faction. The two men holding these offices in 1278, Matteo da Correggio as podestà and Ermanno da Sassoferrato as capitano del popolo, are commemorated by statues on the fountain itself, set among prophets and patriarchs — a striking assertion that the contemporary officers of the commune belonged in the same visual company as the sacred and legendary figures of universal history.
Perugia’s external orientation in these years was firmly Guelph1, that is, aligned with the papacy against the imperial and Ghibelline cause, and the alignment was more than diplomatic convenience. The popes of the later Duecento repeatedly resided in central Italian cities, and Perugia was among their favoured seats; the heraldic vocabulary of the fountain, which pairs the Perugian griffin with the Guelph lion, translates this alliance into stone. Yet the relationship with Rome was not one of simple subordination. The commune could and did defy papal policy when its interests required — the conflict with Foligno is the standard example — and the fountain’s imagery negotiates a careful balance between deference to Rome as caput mundi and the head of Christendom, and the assertion of Perugia’s own dignity, antiquity and autonomy.
The ideological key to this self-presentation is the concept of the bonum commune, the common good, the governing idea of Italian communal political thought in the age of the fountain. Public works — walls, bridges, roads, and above all fountains — were understood and described in the language of utilitas and decus, utility and civic honour or beauty; the two terms recur together in communal statutes and deliberations, and they capture exactly the double claim the Fontana Maggiore makes. It is at once a supremely useful thing, the delivery of abundant clean water to a hilltop city that had for centuries drawn it from wells and carried it up by mule, and a supremely honourable thing, a display of the wealth, competence and legitimacy of the government that achieved it.
The monument’s place in the urban fabric reinforces this reading. The fountain stands between the cathedral of San Lorenzo, seat of the bishop, and the space that would soon be occupied by the new communal palace. The Palazzo dei Priori, the great public palace whose construction began in 1293 under the Perugian architects Jacopo di Servadio and Giovannello di Benvenuto, rose across the square from the cathedral, so that the fountain came to stand at the pivot between episcopal and communal power, on the very site that later civic legend identified as the point of the city’s foundation. When one recalls that the government of the Priori of the guilds was formally instituted only in 1303, one sees that the fountain of 1278 anticipates in its imagery a political order that was still consolidating: it is a monument of the ascendant popolo, projecting a confident civic identity onto a stage that the commune was, quite literally, still building around it.
Water and the City: The Aqueduct of Monte Pacciano
The fountain was conceived from the outset as the mouth of an aqueduct, and the history of that aqueduct is the indispensable prehistory of the monument. Perugia sits on a hill, and for the whole of its earlier history it had no running water on the summit; the problem the commune set itself was to bring water from the springs of Monte Pacciano, some four to five kilometres away to the north, up into the heart of the city. Work on the aqueduct began in 1254, but the difficulties were formidable, and by about 1260 the enterprise had stalled and was effectively abandoned.
It was revived with decisive energy in January 1277, when the general council of the commune resolved to resume the works and engaged expert consultants. The figure who solved the technical problem was the Venetian master Boninsegna, called to Perugia from Orvieto, where he had been engaged on a comparable hydraulic project. Boninsegna’s achievement, as the sources describe it and as the inscription commemorates, was to conduct the water into the city without pumps, using a pressurised conduit of lead pipes — fistulae of lead — that exploited the principle of communicating vessels to drive the water, in effect, uphill across the intervening valleys and over the ancient Etruscan walls into the district of the Conca, where stretches of the medieval aqueduct, lightened at the base by a series of arches, survive to this day. The scale of the ancillary works was substantial: contemporary campaigns included the excavation of new galleries on the flanks of Monte Pacciano and the construction of large collecting reservoirs on the summit.
The contrast between the two enterprises is telling. The aqueduct required a gestation of more than twenty years and repeated false starts; the fountain, by contrast, was executed with astonishing speed once the water was assured. The verse inscription is dated 1278, while the project was still under discussion in the autumn of 1277, which implies that the entire sculptural monument was carried out in roughly a single year — a compression only conceivable with a large, well-organised workshop practising extensive prefabrication, a point to which the analysis of the fabric will return.
The aqueduct’s later history is inseparable from the fountain’s, because the fountain could only run so long as the water did. By 1308 the conduit was out of commission, and a substantial program of modification and repair followed. Among the eminent figures drawn into this effort was Lorenzo Maitani, the master of the works at Orvieto cathedral, who was engaged at Perugia in this period; his brother Ambrogio was also involved in communal building, directing an expansion of the Palazzo dei Priori in the years 1317–1326. Only in 1322 were the works brought to a successful conclusion, and a Gothic-lettered inscription on the fountain, distinct from the great verse epigraph of 1278, records the restoration of the water supply in that year. The aqueduct continued in service, with repeated interventions, until the nineteenth century, when it was decommissioned and the pensile channel above the Conca district was converted into one of the city’s most characteristic pedestrian streets.
The Men Named on the Monument
The Fontana Maggiore is unusually forthcoming about the people who made it, and the roster of names it preserves — a friar-administrator, a bronze-founder, a father-and-son team of sculptors, and a Venetian engineer — is one of the richest documentary artifacts of its kind in Duecento Italy. It repays reading each name against the archival and epigraphic evidence.
Fra Bevignate2 is named on the fountain as its operis structor, the builder of the work, and as the man who was per omnia ductor, who directed everything. He was a Benedictine monk of the rigorist Silvestrine congregation, and the sources place his origin either at Perugia itself or, more commonly, at Cingoli in the March of Ancona. He was, in effect, the commune’s director of works, the soprastante of nearly all Perugia’s major building operations in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth: after the fountain he was drawn into the fabric of Orvieto cathedral, where he is documented from 1291 and held a leading role among the works’ personnel through the 1290s, and he was subsequently engaged on the cathedral of Perugia and, in 1305, named director of all the commune’s construction.
The nature of his role at the fountain has been debated. The inscription’s language is administrative — he is the organiser, the man who directed all things — and the prevailing scholarly view is that his contribution was that of a project director and impresario rather than a designer of forms or a carver of stone. A minority tradition has sought to elevate him to something closer to the creative author of the monument, but the documentary evidence supports the more modest, and more important, reading of him as the indispensable coordinator who brought a stalled, decades-long enterprise to completion in months.
Rubeus is named in the inscription on the bronze cup: Rubeus me fecit, “Rubeus made me,” dated 1277. He was the founder who cast the bronze basin of the upper stage, and he is generally identified with the Perugian bronze-worker known as Rosso “padellaio” (Rosso the pan-maker). His artistic identity beyond his documented activity as a caster remains genuinely obscure. He is often connected with the Rubeus who signed a bronze architrave at the Porta della Postierla (also called the Porta del Vescovado) of Orvieto cathedral, a work made toward the end of the century, and his presence in the Orvieto workshop has been linked to Fra Bevignate’s role there; some scholars have gone further and proposed a German origin for him, or an identification with the Rosso “padellaio” who cast the metal finial for the dome of Siena cathedral. None of these identifications is secure, and the honest position is that Rubeus is a name attached to documented castings and little more.
Nicola Pisano, named on the fountain in terms of extraordinary praise as the flos sculptorum, the flower of sculptors, was by 1278 at the very end of a career that had transformed Italian sculpture. His origins are obscure — Sienese notarial acts of 1266 describe him as “de Apulia,” and the prevailing view derives his formation from the artistic milieu fostered in the south under the emperor Frederick II, with its cultivated attention to antique models. His major works before Perugia were the hexagonal pulpit for the Baptistery of Pisa, signed and dated 1260; the pulpit of Siena cathedral, executed between 1265 and 1268 with a team that included his son Giovanni and the young Arnolfo di Cambio; and the Arca di San Domenico in Bologna, of the mid-1260s. The Fontana Maggiore is his last documented work: an archival record of March 1284 shows that by that date he was dead. The fountain thus stands as the culmination of the most influential sculptural career of the Italian Duecento, and the fact that it is a secular, civic commission — a fountain, not a pulpit or a tomb — makes it all the more remarkable as the summation of that career.
Giovanni Pisano, Nicola’s son and by 1278 his indispensable collaborator, is named in the verse inscription alongside his father, but his most personal mark on the monument is elsewhere. On one of the two eagle reliefs of the lower basin he inscribed his own signature — the only autograph signature on the entire fountain. The choice of the eagle is not incidental: the eagle is the symbol of the evangelist John, Giovanni’s name-saint, so that the signed relief functions simultaneously as a maker’s mark and a piece of iconographic self-celebration, the assertion of an individual artistic personality distinct from his father’s overwhelming fame. Giovanni would go on to a great independent career — the façade of Siena cathedral, the pulpits of Pistoia and Pisa — and his hand at Perugia is generally sought in the most dynamic and emotionally charged of the figures.
The Inscriptions as Primary Source
The verses that run around the Fontana Maggiore are among the most important primary sources for the monument, and their careful edition is one of the genuine achievements of modern scholarship on it. The great verse inscription, composed of rhymed Latin hexameters — Leonine verses, in which internal rhyme binds the two halves of each line — runs along the cornice of the upper basin. It was given a critical edition by Attilio Bartoli Langeli, with the classicist Loriano Zurli, in a study published in Rome in 1996, and it is on the basis of that edition that the text must now be read.
The opening couplet, discussed at the beginning of this essay, is where the edition’s authority is most visibly exercised: against the vulgate iocundum vivere fontes, Bartoli Langeli and Zurli established the reading iocundo murmure fontes, a phrase that both scans and makes sense, and the verb of the second line, transmitted as prospicias or respicias, should likewise be taken from their text. The correction is a useful reminder of how much even a famous and much-quoted text can be distorted in transmission, and of why a scholarly edition matters.
The inscription then names and praises the makers. Fra Bevignate is celebrated as the operis structor who was per omnia ductor, the builder of the work who directed everything. The sculptors are introduced by a line transmitted as nomina sculptorum fontis sunt ista bonorum — “these are the names of the good sculptors of the fountain” — followed by verses praising Nicola as renowned in his art and as the flos sculptorum, and then naming his son Giovanni.
It is important to be candid here about the limits of what can be quoted with confidence. While the phrases flos sculptorum, operis structor and per omnia ductor are securely attested, and the vocabulary of the sculptors’ couplets (sculptorum, Iohannes, natus, imus, dampnes) is confirmed by the word-index of the critical edition, several individual words in those couplets vary across the transmission — the epithets applied to Nicola, for example, and the choice between clarissimus and carissimus — and the precise wording of these lines should be taken from the critical edition rather than from the popular tradition, which is not uniform.
Boninsegna is likewise named and praised, and of him it is said that he is the ductor aquarum, the “conductor of the waters,” the phrase neatly distinguishing his hydraulic role from Bevignate’s role as ductor of the whole enterprise. The poem also dates the work to 1278 and situates it under the pontificate of Nicholas III and the reign of the emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg.
To these principal verses must be added the shorter inscriptions. The bronze cup carries the founder’s signature and, with it, the names of the communal officers of 1277: in the translation given in the standard English guide to the monument, “Rubeus made (i.e. cast) me in 1277, at the time of Podestà Geraldino dei Boschetti and Capitano del Popolo Anselmo di Alzate. Those responsible for the work were the Benedictine Fra. Bevignate and Boninsegna.” These 1277 officers are distinct from the officers of 1278, Matteo da Correggio and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, whose names are recorded separately and who appear as statues on the upper basin. And the Gothic-lettered inscription of 1322, on a panel of the upper basin facing the direction of the communal palace, records the restoration of the aqueduct in that year. Taken together, these texts allow the monument to date and explain itself, and they are the anchor to which every argument about the fountain — its chronology, its authorship, its meaning — must ultimately be tied.
Fabric and Structure
The Fontana Maggiore is built as a sequence of two diminishing basins raised on a stepped circular podium, the whole conceived so that water rises to the summit vessel and cascades down through the stages. The geometry is deliberately complex and productive of movement: two faceted rings of slightly unequal design are superimposed, so that the eye is kept in motion around the monument.
The lower basin springs from the top of the stepped podium and is a polygon of twenty-five sides. Each side is articulated by small columns — alternating single shafts and clustered groups of three — and carries two carved panels, so that the perimeter forms a continuous frieze of fifty reliefs. This basin is of marble, generally identified as Carrara marble for the figured panels. Above it rises the upper basin, supported on a ring of twelve columns whose shafts are largely concealed behind the parapet of the basin below, so that the upper stage appears almost to float.
Its parapet describes a still more intricate mixtilinear figure, composed of twelve convex faces each bearing two smooth panels; in the description of the standard English guide, this middle basin “is formed from 24 slabs of pink stone from Bettona with marble figures at the junctions.” At the junctions of these panels stand twenty-four figures, and at the base of each projecting statue a bronze animal-head spout discharges water into the basin beneath.
The plastic climax is the bronze crown: a cup or tazza cast by Rubeus, surmounted by a group of three female figures standing shoulder to shoulder in a columnar composition, supporting the vessel from which the water finally springs. The materials, then, are three: the pink-and-white local stone of the region, Carrara marble for the finest carving, and bronze for the summit. Some descriptions add stone from Assisi to the account of the local material, and there is minor inconsistency in the sources over exactly which basin is faced with which stone; the safe generalisation is that the monument combines local pink-and-white stone (the pink slabs of the middle basin quarried at Bettona) with imported white marble and cast bronze.
Two structural observations bear on the monument’s making. The first is that the fountain was prefabricated: the stone was worked in a workshop and then assembled in the square, a procedure consistent with the extraordinary speed of execution. The second follows from that speed. If the sculptural monument was indeed carried out in roughly a year, as the documentary and epigraphic dating implies, then the workshop must have been large and its labour finely divided — not, as has been observed of medieval workshop practice generally, with individual panels parcelled out to individual assistants, but with a collaborative practice in which many hands contributed to the whole under the direction of the two masters. This is the material fact that underlies, and complicates, every attempt to distinguish the hands of Nicola and Giovanni on the finished work.
The Fifty Reliefs of the Lower Basin
The fifty panels of the lower basin constitute the densest and most discussed part of the fountain’s imagery, a compendium that ranges across time, work, knowledge, sacred history and civic identity. The panels are read in pairs, each of the twenty-five sides carrying two, and the modern order is itself a historical artifact, since the reassembly that followed the earthquake of the mid-fourteenth century disturbed the original sequence; it should be stated plainly that the panels cannot all be securely enumerated and sequenced, and that the identification of the full set falls somewhat short of certainty for a handful of panels. The description that follows therefore reports the securely identifiable groups and flags the uncertainties.
The calendar cycle of the Fontana Maggiore occupies twelve of the twenty-five faces of the lower basin, and thus twenty-four of its fifty panels — nearly half of the entire relief program. Each month is given a pair of panels separated by a slender fluted colonnette: on one side the principal labour of the season, usually accompanied by the zodiacal sign carved small in the upper field, and on the other a companion figure — the socius, the helper, or in some months the peasant’s wife uxor — continuing or completing the work. The identifying Latin legends incised along the upper frame (AGUSTUS, IUNIUS, OCTUBER, NOVENBER, and the recurring SOCIUS of the second panel) remain partially legible on the monument today, and several are visible in the photographs on which this analysis is based.
The panels are carved in white Carrara marble, set between framing colonnettes that alternate in form and material — clusters of three twisted or chevron-cut shafts in white marble and pink-tinged travertine, and single fluted shafts — beneath a dentilled cornice. The whole basin was executed between 1277 and 1278, within the astonishingly compressed campaign attested by the monument’s own dated inscription, and it is the work of Nicola Pisano, his son Giovanni, and their workshop. The verse inscription names both masters; only one relief on the entire fountain — the eagle panel — carries an individual signature, Giovanni’s. The division of hands within the calendar therefore rests on stylistic judgment alone, and this analysis states attributions as the scholarship holds them: probable, argued, and unproven. What is certain is the design’s authorship in the broad sense — a cycle conceived under Nicola’s direction at the very end of his life, and carved with substantial participation by Giovanni, whose nervous, mobile figures many critics recognise throughout the series.
A final preliminary caution. The lower basin was disturbed by the earthquake of the mid-fourteenth century and reassembled in an order the literature describes as arbitrary; the calendar sequence itself, being internally self-ordering, survived the disturbance better than the narrative cycles, but the reader should remember that the monument as it stands is a reconstruction, restored philologically in 1948–49 and again, thoroughly, in 1995–99. The panels analysed here are the originals in situ, weathered but legible, and among the most remarkable images of labour produced anywhere in thirteenth-century Europe.
The labours of the months
January (Ianuarius) — The Couple at the Hearth
January opens the year indoors, and the pair of panels is unique in the cycle for being entirely domestic. In the left panel a mature man sits in profile, wearing a close-fitting cap and a heavy mantle whose folds pool over his knees; before him stands a stemmed cup — a goblet raised on a tall foot, carved with surprising volumetric care — and beneath it the suggestion of a brazier or hearth. He is at rest, warming himself, taking the wine of the season: the classic occupation of the year’s dead month, when the fields give nothing and the peasant lives on what the previous year has stored. Above and to the right of his head a small figure occupies the upper field of the panel: this is the month’s sign, Aquarius, rendered in the miniature scale that the fountain reserves for the zodiac, hovering over the labour like a calendar notation made flesh.
The right panel gives the man his companion — here not a socius but the wife. A veiled woman sits facing left, mirroring her husband’s pose across the dividing colonnette, and holds a large round object — a loaf or flat bread — over a jug or pot set at the fire beneath her. The two panels thus compose a single interior read across the architectural divide: husband and wife on either side of the winter hearth, he with the cup, she with the bread. It is a scene of remarkable intimacy for a public monument, and the compositional device of the shared hearth split between two frames shows the designer thinking of the pair of panels as a diptych rather than as two independent images.
Iconographically, January’s couple belongs to a long calendar tradition — the two-faced Janus feasting, the winter warming — but the Perugian version is notable for its domestication and its equality. The wife is not an attribute of the husband’s comfort; she occupies her own panel, her own labour (the preparation of food) given the same framed dignity as his rest. This is entirely consistent with the reading of the cycle advanced in Chiara Frugoni’s fundamental study of the Perugian imagery: labour on this fountain is communal and honourable, a shared economy rather than an individual penance, and the year begins with the household — the smallest unit of the commune — gathered at its own fire.
The panels are Carrara marble, carved in 1277–78, framed here by twisted triple colonnettes whose travertine warmth plays against the cool white of the relief ground. Attribution within the workshop cannot be fixed: the composed, rounded volumes of the seated figures and the calm parallelism of the diptych have suggested to some critics the more classical temper associated with Nicola’s designs, but no document or signature decides the matter, and the prudent formulation is design by Nicola, execution by the workshop with Giovanni’s participation.
February (Februarius) — The Fishermen
February is the month of water, and the fountain — itself a monument to water — gives it one of the most vivid pairs of the cycle. In the left panel a fisherman sits on a rocky outcrop above a stream rendered as parallel wavy lines, his legs drawn up, one bare foot braced against the rock, a wide-brimmed hat on his head and a hooded cape over his shoulders against the cold. He leans forward in complete absorption, holding his line down into the water, where a creel or trap sits among the waves. Above him, filling the upper field, swims an enormous fish: the sign of the month, Pisces, integrated into the scene so naturally that it reads simultaneously as zodiac and as the fisherman’s hoped-for catch — one of the wittiest conflations of sign and labour in the entire cycle.
The right panel shows the socius in motion: a younger man striding to the left, a short cloak knotted over one shoulder, carrying in one hand a basket of the woven, ribbed type that recurs throughout the cycle and in the other what appears to be a smaller container or a fish. He is the carrier, bringing the catch home or to market — the second half of the month’s economy. The two panels together narrate a complete productive act: patience at the water, and the transport of its yield.
The February pair is central to the local, Umbrian register of the Perugian calendar. Fishing in February is not a generic European calendar topos; it points directly at Lake Trasimeno, the great fishery of the Perugian contado, whose personified Domina Laci stands on the upper basin holding a fish. The lower basin’s fisherman and the upper basin’s territorial nymph are two registers of the same claim: the city’s abundance flows from its lake as surely as from its new aqueduct. The absorbed, hunched concentration of the angler — observed, not idealised — is among the passages of the cycle most often cited as evidence of the new naturalism that the Pisano workshop brought to the observation of ordinary bodies at work.
Materials and date are those of the cycle: Carrara marble, 1277–78, the panels here framed by paired spiral colonnettes of white marble. The nervous, angular energy of the seated fisherman — the sharp fold of the legs, the projecting profile under the hat brim — has encouraged critics to sense Giovanni’s hand or at least his supervision in this pair, though, as throughout the calendar, the attribution is stylistic inference and not documented fact.
March (Martius) — The Thorn-Puller and the Vine-Pruner
March is the cycle’s most learned month, for its left panel contains a direct quotation from antiquity. A young man sits with one leg crossed high over the other, bending toward his raised foot — the pose of the Spinario, the ancient bronze of the boy extracting a thorn from his sole, famous throughout the Middle Ages among the sculptures of Rome. Here the motif is naturalised into the calendar: March is the month when the peasant first goes out barefoot into the warming fields, and the first thorn of the year is its rueful emblem. Above the seated figure, in the upper field, stands the small ram of Aries. The rustic spinario is a double gesture — an observation of seasonal experience and a knowing citation of the antique — and it encapsulates the culture of the workshop of Nicola Pisano, formed on Roman sarcophagi and trained to fold classical models into contemporary life.
The right panel turns from anecdote to labour proper: a man stands before a gnarled vine or sapling, gripping it with one hand and working on it with the other — the pruning that March demands, the cut that determines the autumn’s vintage. His tunic is short and belted for work, his stance wide and stable, his attention wholly on the plant, whose twisting trunk the carver has rendered with real botanical interest. The pairing of the two panels is thus a pairing of rest and work, mishap and purpose: the thorn in the foot and the knife in the vine, both belonging to the same first month of the agricultural year.
Interpretatively, the March pair demonstrates the cycle’s freedom from mere formula. The designer could have given March the conventional labour alone; instead the month receives a humanist joke — a peasant cast as an antique bronze — set beside the serious business of viticulture. The wine economy that the cycle will follow through September’s vintage, October’s cellaring and the drinking of January begins here, with the pruning; the calendar is not twelve isolated vignettes but a connected agrarian narrative, and March is its opening chapter.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78. The spinario panel in particular has drawn attributional attention: the classical citation is of Nicola’s culture, while the compact, slightly swelling volumes of the seated body are handled with a suppleness that some critics assign to Giovanni or the best of the workshop. As with the whole calendar, no division of hands can be proved; what can be said is that this panel, more than most, shows the two generations’ sensibilities fused in a single small marble.
April (Aprilis) — The Allegories of Spring
April departs from labour altogether. Its two panels contain no work: they are personifications, the cycle’s brief lyric interlude between the pruning of March and the chivalry of May. In the left panel a young figure stands frontally in a long sleeved garment, holding in each hand a flowering or leafy branch, with a small quadruped — plausibly to be read in connection with the month’s sign, the bull of Taurus — in the field beside the head. The figure is crowned with curling hair and stands with the slight sway of early Gothic elegance; it is spring itself, or the month personified as a youth bearing the new green.
The right panel answers with a female figure, crowned, standing in gently cascading drapery, who bears in one raised hand a woven basket heaped with flowers and in the other a tall flowering stalk. She is the fullest personification of the season — a Flora-like image of April’s abundance — and her frontal, hieratic presentation deliberately echoes the language of the Liberal Arts personifications elsewhere on the basin, as though for one month the calendar itself becomes allegory. The two figures, youth and crowned maiden, flank the dividing colonnette like attendants of the year.
The interpretative point of April is precisely its exception. By suspending the depiction of work for one month, the designer articulates the cycle’s rhythm: the year is not only toil but also flowering, and the commune’s calendar has room for beauty as an end in itself. The panel pair also binds the lower basin to the upper: the basket of flowers and fruits carried by April’s maiden anticipates the cornucopia of Augusta Perusia enthroned above — natural abundance below, civic abundance above, the one the foundation of the other.
The material and dating are constant — Carrara marble, 1277–78 — with the panels here framed between chevron-cut and spiral colonnettes. The still, frontal composition and the soft, unbroken fall of the maiden’s drapery belong to the calmer register of the cycle, and have accordingly been associated by some critics with designs of Nicola rather than the more agitated manner of his son; the attribution, as ever on this monument, is an argument from style and is offered here as such.
May (Maius) — The Ride of the Nobles
May is the aristocratic exception within an agrarian cycle, and the fountain gives it two of its most charming panels. On the left a young nobleman rides to the right on a compact, powerfully arched horse; he is bareheaded but crowned with a chaplet of flowers, and in his free hand he holds up a small bunch of blossoms — the flower of May, the courteous offering. In the upper field beside the colonnette a small standing figure marks the sign of the month, Gemini. The horse is a superb piece of carving: the neck curved hard against the rein, the forelegs gathered, the tail long — an animal observed with the same attention the cycle elsewhere gives to oxen and pigs, but here ennobled to match its rider.
The right panel is rarer still: a lady rides out with a falcon. Veiled, seated gracefully on her mount, she extends her gloved fist on which the bird sits with folded wings, while beneath the horse’s legs a small dog runs — the complete apparatus of the noble hunt. The unusual feature, justly noted in the scholarship, is that it is the woman who carries the falcon: she is not the passive recipient of courtship but the huntress herself, given the active role in the month’s ritual. Across the two panels the pair enact the courtly May — he with the flower, she with the falcon — riding toward one another in perpetual, marble spring.
The presence of this chivalric interlude within a cycle otherwise devoted to peasant labour is not an inconsistency but a statement. The calendar of the Fontana Maggiore represents the whole social body of the commune — the laboratores of the fields and the milites of the hunt, work and leisure, contado and city — bound into a single year. Frugoni’s reading of the cycle as a celebration of the communal economy embraces precisely this completeness: the commune’s ideology of the bonum commune claimed to order all orders of society, and May is the month in which the fountain says so.
The panels are Carrara marble, 1277–78, framed by chevron and rope-twist colonnettes. May carries a particular attributional interest: the detailed analysis published in 1993 assigned this month to Nicola himself, and the grave beauty of the riders — the composed profiles, the weighty, sarcophagus-like horses — is indeed of his classical temper. The attribution remains, like all others in the cycle, unproven by document; but if any pair of the calendar preserves the direct hand of the old master in his final year of activity, May is among the strongest candidates.
June (Iunius) — The Harvest
With June the cycle enters the great cereal sequence that is the economic heart of the Perugian year. The left panel — the legend IUNIUS survives above the frame — shows a reaper bent over his sheaf: a man in a peaked hood and working tunic, grasping a thick bundle of wheat whose individual ears the carver has patiently rendered, binding or cutting it low to the ground. In the upper left field crawls the month’s sign, the crab of Cancer, its legs and claws spread flat against the marble — one of the most legible of the cycle’s zodiac miniatures. The reaper’s pose, folded almost double over his work, is a masterly study of the labouring body: back curved, weight forward, the whole figure organised by the task.
The right panel gives the socius in a complementary action: a young man striding with a long-handled tool — a scythe or mowing implement — swung up over his shoulder, his short tunic flying with the movement, his head turned back as he walks. Where the left panel is all compression, the right is all extension; the pair reads as two moments of a single working day, the cut and the carrying, stasis and motion set against each other across the colonnette with evident compositional intent.
June inaugurates the sequence — June’s reaping, July’s threshing, the bread of the winter panels — through which the cycle follows grain from field to table, exactly as it follows the vine from March’s pruning to January’s cup. This chained, processual conception of the year is the cycle’s deepest originality: the months are not independent emblems but chapters of two continuous stories, of bread and of wine, the two commodities on which the commune’s survival rested and whose abundance the upper basin’s Domina Clusi, holding her sheaf of the Chiugi’s wheat, personifies.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, set between twisted triple colonnettes. The June pair belongs stylistically to the more dynamic register of the cycle — the flung stride of the socius, the deep undercutting of the reaper’s folded back — and criticism has generally sensed here the manner of Giovanni and the workshop working at full energy under his direction; the attribution is stylistic, but in these panels unusually persuasive.
July (Iulius) — Threshing and Winnowing
July continues the grain narrative at its most strenuous. In the left panel a man swings a flail high over his head with both arms — the full arc of the threshing stroke caught at its apex — above the sheaves spread at his feet, their ears rendered as a field of fine chevrons. In the upper field, small and alert, stands the lion of Leo, the July sign, its mane summarily but recognisably carved. The figure is a study in torsion: the body twisted by the swing, the tunic pulled tight across the back, the feet planted wide — the carver has understood, and communicated, exactly how a thresher’s weight moves.
The right panel — the legend of the socius, here spelled SOZIUS in the vernacularising orthography visible on the frame — shows the winnower: an older, bearded man in a brimmed hat who raises a broad wooden shovel, tossing the threshed grain against a heap rendered as a stippled mound behind him. The stippling is a notable technical passage: the carver abandons line for texture, pocking the marble to signify the loose mass of grain — an experimental, almost pictorial device rare in Duecento relief.
Together the two panels complete the transformation of the harvest: June cut and carried, July beats and cleans, and the grain is ready for the sacks and the mills of the commune. The dignity of the treatment deserves emphasis. Threshing and winnowing were among the humblest of agricultural tasks, yet here they receive the same framed, monumental presentation as the personifications of the Liberal Arts a few faces away — the visual argument, again in Frugoni’s terms, that on this fountain the work of the contado is constitutive of the city’s honour, not beneath it.
Material and date are constant: Carrara marble, 1277–78, between spiral triple colonnettes. The violent diagonal of the flail-swinger, the projecting profile of the winnower, the taste for textured grounds — these are the marks of the cycle’s most advanced manner, and most critics place the July pair with the June panels in the orbit of Giovanni Pisano, executed by him or under his immediate supervision within the shared campaign of the workshop.
August (Augustus) — The Fig Harvest
August — the legend AGUSTUS is clearly incised above the left panel — is the month of the fig, and the pair devoted to it is among the most lyrical of the cycle. On the left a bearded man in a working tunic, a heavy basket at his feet, reaches up with both hands into a fig tree whose broad, lobed leaves the carver has rendered with genuine botanical delight — the fig leaf being, of all leaves, the most sculptural. He picks with a gesture at once practical and almost ceremonious, his profile lifted to the fruit; in the upper left corner of the field a small standing figure marks the month’s celestial company.
The right panel belongs to a woman. Seated beneath her own fig tree, whose canopy of leaves answers the tree of the left panel, she holds in her lap a woven basket already filled with fruit, one hand resting upon it, her long hair falling loose to her shoulders. She is at once the labourer’s companion and, in her calm frontality and ripe, generous modelling, something more — a figure into which the month’s zodiacal maiden, Virgo, seems absorbed, sign and season and harvester fused in a single seated form. Whether the designer intended the identification or the modern eye supplies it, the effect is the same: August is a woman with a basket of figs, and abundance has a body.
The fig is the cycle’s most local fruit. Like February’s lake fishing, the August panels are keyed to the actual produce of the Umbrian contado rather than to any imported calendar formula, and the pairing of male picker and female gatherer once again distributes the month’s economy across the household. The two trees, mirroring one another across the colonnette, make of the pair a single orchard — one of several places in the cycle where the designer composes across the architectural divide.
The panels are Carrara marble, 1277–78, framed on one side by spiral marble colonnettes and on the other by the rope-twist travertine clusters whose porous, honey-coloured stone warms the composition. The seated woman of August, with her full, quiet volumes and the soft transitions of her drapery, has often been felt to belong to the cycle’s more classical, Nicolesque register, while the reaching picker has the observational sharpness of the workshop’s younger hands; the pair, like the fountain itself, holds the two manners in balance.
September (September) — The Vintage
September opens the wine sequence, and its left panel contains one of the cycle’s most ingenious inventions. A man kneels or crouches in a great octagonal treading-vat, working the grapes beneath him — and in his raised hand he holds a balance, the two pans of Libra swinging from its beam. The month’s sign is not carved in the field above the scene, as elsewhere in the cycle; it is placed in the labourer’s own grip, so that the treader of grapes becomes the bearer of the scales, sign and worker united in one figure. The conflation is more than wit. The balance over the vat quietly moralises the vintage — measure, equity, the just weighing of the year’s most valuable crop — in a commune whose statutes regulated wine as carefully as grain.
The right panel gives the vintage its porter: a man in a hooded working cape strides forward under a tall basket of grapes borne on his shoulder, steadied by one raised arm, his body bent by the load, his legs — bare below the knee — taking the weight with wide, sturdy steps. The basket, woven in the same ribbed convention as those of February and August, towers over him; the carver has made the burden itself the panel’s protagonist. To the left of the pair, on the adjacent face, sits the figs-gathering woman of the neighbouring panel — a reminder that in the round of the basin the months flow into one another without interruption.
The September pair inaugurates the narrative that October will complete: the pressing here, the cellaring there, and the cup of January at the year’s turn. Read together with June and July’s grain, the two sequences make the lower basin a systematic representation of the commune’s food economy — precisely the abundance that the upper basin’s enthroned Augusta Perusia, flanked by the ladies of the grain-lands and the lake, personifies. The fountain’s program is vertically coherent: the labour below produces the plenty above.
Carrara marble, 1277–78. The vigorous torsion of the striding porter and the compact, load-bearing anatomy of both figures belong to the cycle’s energetic manner; the invention of the Libra-in-hand, meanwhile, testifies to the intellectual liveliness of whoever devised the program — a mind unknown to us by name, as the essay literature on the fountain concedes, but visibly delighted by the play between sign and season. Execution is generally placed with Giovanni and the workshop within the collective campaign.
October (October) — The Cellar
October — OCTUBER survives in the legend above the left panel — is the month of the cellar, and its two panels form a small treatise on the cooper’s and vintner’s arts. On the left a man bends in concentration over his casks: he decants from a smaller ribbed vessel into a funnel or bowl set upon a barrel, transferring the new wine, his cloak slipping from his shoulder with the forward lean of the pour. Above him, in the upper right field, crawls the month’s sign, the scorpion of Scorpio, its segmented tail and claws precisely observed. The still-life quality of the panel is remarkable: vessels of three different forms, each with its coopered staves and hoops patiently described, arranged around the working figure like the instruments of a craft portrait.
The right panel — the socius legend again above the frame — shows the companion sealing the work: a figure in a long working gown raises a mallet or hatchet high overhead, driving home the lid or hoop of a standing barrel, the swing caught at its apex exactly as July’s flail was. The echo is surely deliberate: the gesture that beat the grain in summer now closes the wine in autumn, and the cycle rhymes its two economies across the basin.
Interpretatively, October completes the vine’s story begun with March’s pruning and September’s treading, and does so in the register of craft rather than field labour — a reminder that the commune’s popolo, the guildsmen whose political ascendancy the fountain celebrates, included precisely such trades. The care lavished on the cooperage is not incidental description; it is the dignifying of skilled manual work, the visual counterpart of the guild-based constitution that Perugia was consolidating in these very decades.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, framed between chevron-cut and braided colonnettes of notable decorative invention. October carries a specific attributional note: the 1993 analysis of the fountain’s hands assigned this month, with December, to Giovanni Pisano, and the panel’s combination of bowed, absorbed naturalism and vigorous overhead action sits comfortably with his manner as it would unfold at Pistoia. The attribution remains an argument from style; it is recorded here as the considered position of part of the modern literature, not as fact.
November (November) — Ploughing and Sowing
November returns the cycle to the open field for the year’s foundational act. The left panel — NOVENBER legible above — shows the ploughman at work behind his team: two oxen yoked together, carved with the heavy dewlaps, short horns and patient mass of the true working animal, drawing the plough whose share the driver presses into the broken ground rendered as a rough, upturned texture beneath the beasts’ feet. Above the team, in the upper field, leaps the month’s sign — the centaur-archer of Sagittarius, bow drawn, one of the most animated of the cycle’s zodiac miniatures. The panel is the cycle’s fullest animal study, and the affectionate precision of the oxen — observed, individualised, entirely unheraldic — is among the clearest evidence of the workshop’s commitment to the seen world.
The right panel, under its SOCIUS legend, gives the sower: a man striding across the ploughed ground, seed-bag slung at his hip, his free arm swung back in the broadcast gesture that has signified sowing since antiquity, his head bowed to watch the fall of the grain. Plough and sower, the two panels compose the complete act of autumn planting — the opening of the earth and the entrusting of the seed — from which the whole cycle’s grain narrative, June’s harvest and July’s threshing, will grow in the following year. November is thus the calendar’s true beginning disguised as its eleventh month: the round of the basin, like the agricultural year, has no seam.
The pairing carries the cycle’s ideology at its most concentrated. Ploughing and sowing were the paradigmatic labours of medieval calendar art, but their placement here — on the public fountain of a commune whose upper basin shows the city fed by her grain-lands — converts convention into argument: the furrow below sustains the throne above. Frugoni’s insistence that the Perugian cycle celebrates labour as communal foundation rather than Adamic punishment finds in November its plainest illustration; there is no sweat-of-thy-brow gloom in these panels, only competence, rhythm and purpose.
Carrara marble, 1277–78, between rope-twist and chevron colonnettes. The November pair unites the cycle’s two registers — the grave, volumetric animals and the striding, wind-caught sower — and criticism has divided its sympathies accordingly, some sensing Nicola’s design most strongly in the oxen, others Giovanni’s temper in the sower’s movement. The honest conclusion, here as throughout, is collaborative execution within a unified design; the panels themselves, seamless in quality, are the best argument for the workshop’s coherence.
December (December) — The Slaughter of the Pig
December closes the year with its harshest and most vivid labour. In the left panel a man in hood and working tunic bends over the carcass of a pig hung head-down from a wooden trestle whose crossed beam fills the upper right of the field; beneath the animal’s snout a basin waits to catch the blood, and the butcher works at the body with both hands — the maialatura, the winter slaughter on which the peasant household’s fat, salt meat and sausage for the whole year depended. In the upper left of the field a small animal form completes the month’s company. Nothing in the panel is softened: the trestle, the basin, the professional intentness of the butcher are given with the same unblinking observation as June’s reaping.
The right panel is the cycle’s most humane invention. The socius — a bearded man, legs braced under the load — carries the slaughtered pig slung across his shoulders, gripping its legs at his chest; and beside him, forelegs raised, a dog leaps up at his master in greeting. The detail of the dog, singled out in the modern literature on the cycle, transforms the panel: the grim errand becomes a homecoming, the beast at the man’s side answering the beast on his back, and the year ends not with death but with the warmth of the farmyard — the same domestic warmth to which January’s couple, one face further round the basin, will return us at the hearth.
December’s pair completes each of the cycle’s structures at once: the food economy (the meat that joins the bread and wine of the year’s stores), the household (man, beast and dog), and the emotional arc of the calendar, which closes on affection. That a public civic monument of 1278 should end its year with a dog greeting a tired man is a measure of the cycle’s originality — and of the distance the Pisano workshop had travelled from the emblematic calendars of earlier medieval art toward the observed, inhabited world that Italian art would claim in the following generation.
The panels are Carrara marble, carved 1277–78 within the single-year campaign attested by the fountain’s inscriptions, and framed by spiral and chevron colonnettes. December shares October’s attributional note: the 1993 analysis gave the month to Giovanni Pisano, and the deep undercutting of the hanging carcass, the torsion of the burdened carrier and the anecdotal liveliness of the dog are indeed of his sensibility. As with every panel of the calendar, the attribution rests on style alone; the only certainties are the two names in the dedicatory verse — Nicola, flos sculptorum, and Giovanni his son — and the collective achievement of a workshop that, in roughly twelve months, gave the European calendar tradition its most humane monument.
Read in sequence, the twelve pairs disclose an architecture of meaning that no single panel contains. Two commodity narratives — grain (November’s sowing, June’s harvest, July’s threshing) and wine (March’s pruning, September’s vintage, October’s cellaring, January’s cup) — thread the year together; the household frames it at both ends, hearth in January and homecoming in December; the aristocratic ride of May and the flowering allegories of April open windows of leisure and lyric within the round of work; and the local economy of lake and orchard (February’s fishing, August’s figs) roots the whole in the actual territory of the Perugian contado, whose personifications preside on the basin above. The materials are constant — Carrara marble panels between polychrome colonnettes of white marble and travertine — the date is fixed by the monument’s own inscription at 1278, and the authorship is that rarest of things in medieval art, a documented collaboration: Nicola Pisano’s design, Giovanni Pisano’s energy, and the anonymous competence of a great workshop, dividing among themselves, in proportions we can argue but never prove, the most beautiful year in Italian sculpture.
The Liberal Arts on the Fontana Maggiore of Perugia: A Panel-by-Panel Analysis
Among the fifty reliefs of the lower basin of the Fontana Maggiore, no group is more startling in its context than the cycle of the Liberal Arts. The seven disciplines of the medieval curriculum — the trivium of Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric and the quadrivium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy — appear here crowned by an eighth figure, Philosophy, their traditional queen, in a sequence of eight consecutive panels. Cycles of the Arts belong, in the thirteenth century, to cathedral portals, to the decoration of the studia, to the frontispieces of learned manuscripts; their presence on a public fountain, at the level of the water where every citizen filled a jug, is one of the boldest statements of the whole Perugian program. Knowledge, the basin declares, is a public good like water itself — part of the commune’s patrimony, displayed beside the labours of the months and the emblems of the city.
The cycle does not stand alone. It is framed, on the basin, by two pairs of animal panels that give it a civic and an authorial seal: on one side the heraldic pair of the Guelph lion and the Perugian griffin, the party emblem and the civic emblem seated in solemn profile; on the other, the two eagles, one of which carries along its upper frame the only signature on the entire monument — the fragmentary verses naming Giovanni Pisano as the maker. The Arts are thus bracketed between the city’s arms and the artist’s name, learning enclosed by polity and by craft. The identifying Latin legends incised above each panel remain legible in the medieval orthography of the workshop: RECTORICA for Rhetoric, ASTROLOGIA — the period’s name for the science of the stars — for Astronomy, FILOSOFIA for the crowning figure.
The panels are white Carrara marble, carved within the campaign of 1277–78 attested by the fountain’s dated inscription, and framed by the basin’s alternating colonnettes of white marble and travertine beneath the dentilled cornice. The reliefs of the Arts are notably shallow — carved, in the phrase of the descriptive literature, in a low, ivory-like relief that sets them apart from the deeper cutting of the calendar — and their authorship is bound up with the fountain’s central attributional question.
The verse inscription names Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni as the sculptors; the detailed attributional analysis published in 1993 assigned the Liberal Arts specifically to Giovanni, together with the eagles and the personification of the Roman Church; and the delicate animation of the figures — teachers inclining to pupils, hands caught mid-gesture — is indeed of his sensibility.
As throughout the fountain, the attribution rests on style, not document, and is reported here as the considered position of part of the modern literature. A final honesty: four of the eight panels (Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Philosophy) are analysed below from direct photographic documentation; the remaining four (Grammar, Dialectic, Geometry, Music) are described from the transmitted accounts in the scholarly literature, and the descriptions are calibrated accordingly.
The Guelph Lion and the Perugian Griffin
The heraldic pair occupies a single face of the basin, and the two beasts are composed as a confronted diptych: the lion in the left panel faces right, the griffin in the right panel faces left, so that the two heads converge on the slender fluted colonnette between them — the emblems meeting at the axis, party and city turned toward one another in perpetual, formal acknowledgment. Fragments of the identifying legends survive along the upper frame, the griffin’s still yielding the opening letters of its name. The lion sits in strict profile on his haunches, one foreleg raised from the ground in the pose that heraldry calls sejant with paw lifted; his glory is the mane, carved as a deep cascade of flame-like locks that break over the shoulder and pour down the chest and foreleg, framing the small, alert head with its rounded ear and heavy muzzle. The tail curls forward beneath the flank; the hindquarters gather in a compact, muscular mass.
The griffin answers him in mirror image, and the carver has relished the hybrid. The head is an eagle’s — the great hooked beak open, the ear pricked, the eye ringed — set on a neck clothed in long, streaming feather-locks that deliberately echo the lion’s mane across the colonnette; behind the shoulder a single vast wing sweeps up and back, filling the upper field of the panel with its layered pinions; and below, the body resolves into the lion’s own anatomy — the seated haunches, the tucked tail, the heavy forelegs — so that the two panels share a body, as it were, and differ in the head and wing. The correspondence is the meaning: the griffin is the lion transfigured, the city’s emblem raised on eagle’s wings above the party’s beast, kinship and hierarchy stated in pure zoology.
The political statement is the plainest on the lower basin. The lion is the emblem of the Guelph cause — the pro-papal alignment that Perugia maintained throughout the century of the fountain — and of the popolo whose ascendancy the monument celebrates; the griffin is Perugia herself, the civic beast of the seals and standards, the same creature that presides in bronze, paired again with the lion, over the portal of the Palazzo dei Priori across the square. Party beside commune, alliance beside identity: the pair declares under whose colours the fountain’s whole encyclopedia — the months, the Arts, the histories — is displayed. That the sequence of learning opens with the city’s arms is no accident of arrangement; the basin teaches, but it teaches as Perugia, and the beasts are the flag planted at the classroom door.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, and the stone of this face is among the most dramatically veined on the monument — the grey marbling coursing through the fields and across the beasts’ bodies like storm-light, an effect the polished white of the carving turns to advantage. Attribution within the workshop cannot be individually fixed: the heraldic pair belongs to the collaborative campaign that the dedicatory verse places under Nicola, flos sculptorum, and Giovanni together, and the confident, decorative naturalism of mane and wing — antique gravity in the lion, Gothic sweep in the griffin — shows once more the two temperaments of the workshop fused in a single face of the basin.
Grammar and Dialectic
Grammar opens the cycle, as she opens the medieval curriculum: the ianua artium, the doorway of the arts, the discipline through which every literate person entered the world of letters. The panel shows her seated in profile, a full-bodied woman in a close gown and a squared, boxy headdress — the coif of a respectable matron rather than the crown of an allegory — and against her knee, pressed into the shelter of her lap, leans a small child bent over an open book. The teacher’s head inclines deeply toward the pupil; one arm curves around the child’s shoulders, guiding the lesson on the page; the two heads nearly touch above the book. The ground of the panel is plain, the whole attention of the composition gathered into the point where the child’s face meets the text.
The invention is remarkable for what it refuses. The dominant iconography of Grammar in the European cycles is disciplinary — the mistress with the rod or scourge, the ferula of correction, over cowering pupils; the Perugian carver has suppressed the instrument entirely and composed instead what is, in everything but name, a Madonna group: mother and child bent together over a book. Grammar as nurture rather than punishment, the first lesson given at close and affectionate quarters — the choice is itself an interpretation of the art, and it announces the register of humanity that governs the whole cycle. The commune’s children, the panel proposes, are led into letters, not beaten into them.
The placement of Grammar within the basin’s larger argument deserves note. She stands at the head of a sequence that runs unbroken to Philosophy, and the sequence itself sits between the heraldic beasts of the commune and the signed eagles of the sculptor — literacy framed by citizenship and by craft; in the photographic documentation the wing of the neighbouring eagle is visible at the very edge of the frame, the sculptor’s sign brushing the schoolroom. For the merchant and guildsman public of the Piazza Grande, whose sons learned their letters for the account-book and the notarial act as much as for the psalter, Grammar was not an abstraction but the foundation of civic and commercial life; her presence on the fountain dignifies the commune’s schooling as the months dignify its fields.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, carved in the cycle’s characteristic shallow relief; the surface is weathered but the essential forms — the inclined coifed head, the child’s bent back, the open book between them — remain fully legible. Its execution belongs to the collaborative campaign of the Pisano workshop; the 1993 analysis places the Arts as a group with Giovanni, and the tender, enfolding intimacy of teacher and child — a psychological rather than emblematic conception — accords closely with the gentler register of his early manner. The attribution is stylistic inference, made under the authority of the verse inscription that names father and son together.
Dialectic follows Grammar as the second art of the trivium: the discipline of argument, of distinction, of the syllogism — the art that taught the medieval mind to divide truth from sophistry. The panel shows her seated in profile on a bench whose back and legs are summarily indicated, a mantled woman whose drapery falls in long unbroken folds from shoulder to feet; and in her raised hands, held out before her face, writhes her ancient attribute — a serpent, its sinuous body coiling around and between her fingers as she contemplates it. Nothing else occupies the field: the Art, the bench, and the snake turning in her grasp.
The serpent is Dialectic’s canonical companion, inherited from the foundational allegory of the Arts, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, where the bride Dialectic carries a snake concealed beneath her cloak — the emblem of argument’s subtlety, its coiling advance, its capacity to strike; behind the pagan image stands also the Gospel’s injunction to be wise as serpents. What distinguishes the Perugian formulation is the frankness and calm of the handling. The serpent is not hidden in the mantle but held up and examined; the dialectician studies her own instrument, turning the coils in her hands as a craftsman turns his tool. Argument, the panel proposes, is dangerous and must therefore be known — mastered by inspection, not concealed. It is the most intellectually witty conception in the cycle.
What can be said of the panel’s structural role reinforces the reading. Dialectic is the hinge of the trivium: Grammar gives words, Dialectic gives reasoning, Rhetoric gives persuasion, and the three together constituted the verbal equipment of the communal citizen — precisely the equipment exercised daily in the council chambers and courts a few steps from the fountain. In a city governed by deliberation, statute and notarial record, the art of handling slippery argument was no scholastic luxury; the Ordinamenta populi of 1260 and the whole apparatus of Perugian communal law were its products. The woman calmly mastering the serpent is the commune’s own self-image as a polity of disputation kept under control.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the cycle’s low, ivory-like relief; the surface has weathered — the face is largely effaced — but the essential invention, the raised hands and the coiling snake, survives clearly. Authorship follows the group: the design of the cycle under Nicola’s general direction, the execution associated by the 1993 analysis with Giovanni and the workshop. The quiet torsion of the seated body, turned wholly toward the living attribute in its hands, belongs to the same psychological register as Grammar’s embrace beside it — the two panels of one face, the caress and the coil, nurture and subtlety, the trivium’s first lessons paired.
Rhetoric and Arithmetic
Rhetoric is the third art of the trivium, and the panel rewards close reading. The legend RECTORICA — the medieval orthography, with its characteristic initial doubling of the R-sound — is incised along the upper frame. The Art herself sits at the left in profile: a woman in a heavy hooded mantle that falls over her shoulders and pools across her knees, holding upright before her a large open book or writing-tablet braced against her lap, into which she writes or points with a stylus held in her right hand. Behind and above her stands a second, slighter figure — a young attendant or pupil with curling hair, arms folded across the breast, head inclined toward the mistress and her page — completing the two-figure formula that governs much of the cycle.
The composition is a study in attention. Everything converges on the open book: the seated woman’s bent head and working hand, the standing figure’s inclined gaze, even the fall of the hood that frames the writer’s concentrated profile. Rhetoric — the art of persuasion, so often personified across the medieval cycles with the sword of Cicero’s arma eloquentiae or the expansive gesture of the orator — is here conceived instead as composition: the framing of the persuasive text, the discipline at its desk. It is a scribal, notarial, distinctly communal Rhetoric, the art as it was actually practised in Perugia — in the drafted statute, the diplomatic letter, the ars dictaminis of the chanceries — rather than the declamatory art of the antique forum.
The carving exemplifies the low, ivory-like relief of the cycle. The figures rise barely from the ground; the drapery is drawn in long, calm, closely-set folds, deeply channelled only at the lap and sleeve; the faces, though abraded by seven centuries of weather, keep their fine oval structure and the delicate join of hood to brow. The upright rectangle of the book, set on the diagonal, is the panel’s one strong geometric accent, and the carver has used it to organise the whole field — an economy of means characteristic of the best of the cycle.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, framed between the fluted central colonnette and the chevron-cut travertine cluster at the basin’s angle. The 1993 attributional analysis assigns the Liberal Arts to Giovanni Pisano, and the tender inclination of the two figures, the mobile fall of the mantle and the psychological quiet of the scene sit well with his early manner as the Perugian campaign reveals it; the attribution, as throughout the monument, is an argument from style, made under the authority of the verse inscription that names father and son together.
The Arithmetic panel, set beside Rhetoric on the same face of the basin, is the cycle’s liveliest lesson. Its legend, partially abraded, survives above the frame in the medieval form of the word. At the left sits the Art: an amply draped figure on a bench whose openwork side — a lattice of turned members — the carver has rendered with unexpected care, the mantle drawn over the head and falling in broad diagonal folds to the feet. The seated figure’s right hand is raised before the breast, fingers deliberately disposed; opposite stands a young pupil in a long close-fitting garment, and the pupil’s hands too are lifted, fingers flexed in answering configuration. Between the two figures, nothing passes but the gestures themselves — and the gestures are the subject.
For this is finger-reckoning: the computus digitorum, the ancient and universal system, codified for the Middle Ages in Bede’s treatise on calculation, by which numbers were represented, held and manipulated on the joints and postures of the fingers. Master and pupil are computing together, the raised hands exchanging quantities as words are exchanged in the Dialectic of the schools. No abacus, no tablet, no written figures: the Perugian designer has chosen the most bodily, most universally legible image of number available to his culture — arithmetic as every merchant of the Piazza Grande actually performed it, at the bench and the market stall, on the living hand.
The choice is eloquent of the cycle’s audience. Perugia’s popolo was a polity of merchants and artisans, men for whom calculation was the daily instrument of livelihood; the fountain’s Arithmetic honours their skill in its vernacular form, exactly as the calendar honours the labours of their contado. The bench with its turned lattice — a piece of real, contemporary furniture — anchors the allegory in the workshop and the counting-house, and the standing pupil, hands raised in eager reply, makes of the panel what the whole cycle everywhere seeks: not an emblem but a transaction, knowledge alive between two people.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the cycle’s shallow relief, its ground now weathered but its gesture-language intact. Attribution follows the group — the Arts assigned to Giovanni Pisano by the 1993 analysis, within the collaborative campaign that the verse inscription places under both Pisani — and the panel’s psychological vivacity, the answering animation of master and child, is among the better internal arguments for that view.
Geometry and Music
Geometry opens the quadrivium’s spatial sciences, and her panel — the legend GEOMETRIA incised above the frame — is the cycle’s most complete image of intellectual labour. The Art sits in profile on a low rounded seat, folded almost double over her work: her back curves in a single continuous arc, her coifed head drops until it nearly meets her extended arm, and her right hand, holding the drawing instrument, reaches out across the sloped board or tablet propped before her. Above her, running on the diagonal from the upper edge of the field toward her bent head, descends a long straight element — a rule or measuring-rod, the drawn line itself made monumental — under which the whole figure works as under the sign of her science. The drapery pools over the seat and gathers at her feet; nothing in the panel is at rest except the geometry.
The posture is the meaning. Where other cycles give Geometry her compass held decorously aloft, the Perugian carver has rendered the act of the science — the body folded over the board, the reaching arm, the concentration that bends the spine — and in doing so has deliberately rhymed the intellectual with the manual labour of the neighbouring calendar. Geometry bent over her table answers the reaper of June bent over his sheaf and the fisherman of February hunched above his line: on this basin, thought and toil share one body-language of absorption, and the equivalence is the cycle’s deepest argument. The surveyor’s and builder’s science — the geometry that laid out the aqueduct whose water fills the basins, that measured the fields of the contado and the plots of the city — takes its place in the year’s work beside ploughing and vintage.
Nor is the panel’s relevance to the monument itself accidental. The Fontana Maggiore is, before it is anything else, a feat of applied geometry: the twenty-five-sided lower polygon, the twelve-lobed upper basin turned against it, the concentric diminution of the three stages — a design of calculated rotational complexity, prefabricated in the workshop and assembled true on site. Geometry on the lower basin is, in a real sense, the fountain’s self-portrait among the Arts, the discipline by which the object that bears her was made; the diagonal rule above her head could stand as the monument’s own working drawing.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, carved in the cycle’s low relief; the veined stone of this face is particularly handsome, the grey figuring of the marble reading almost as atmosphere behind the white figure, and the state of preservation — the intact profile of the bent back, the reaching hand — is among the best in the group. Authorship follows the cycle: design within Nicola’s overall conception, execution associated by the 1993 analysis with Giovanni and the workshop — and the expressive, weight-bearing curve of the folded body, anatomy pressed into the service of psychology, is characteristic of the younger master’s temper.
Music, second of the quadrivium’s sciences on the basin, shares her face with Geometry, and her panel — the legend MUSICA above the frame — is one of the most delicately imagined of the whole fountain. The Art sits in three-quarter profile, her head lifted and turned upward; across her lap lies a psaltery, its strings finely scored in parallel lines, steadied by her left hand; and her right hand rises beside her shoulder holding a small long-handled hammer. Along the upper edge of the field, the object of her attention: a rank of bells — five or six of them, graded, hanging in a row like fruit from the frame — toward which the hammer is lifted and the face is turned. She is caught in the instant before the stroke, the note not yet sounded.
The double apparatus presents Music whole, as the quadrivium conceived her. The strings on her lap belong to musica instrumentalis, the art as performance; the tuned bells struck with the hammer belong to the science of proportion — the Pythagorean discipline of interval and ratio, taught throughout the Middle Ages precisely by the graded percussion of bells, the legendary discovery of Pythagoras at the smithy translated into the classroom. Practice below, theory above: the panel is a diagram of the discipline disposed across the body of one woman, her hands bridging the two.
The suspended gesture — hammer lifted, sound withheld — is a small marvel of sculptural intelligence. Marble cannot ring; the carver therefore gives not the note but its imminence, the raised face and the poised hammer, and the panel becomes an image of listening. The civic resonances are close at hand. The commune’s life was ordered by bells — the bell of the council, of the curfew, of alarm and festival — and the fountain’s own voice was the continuous water-music of its jets and spouts, the iocundo murmure, the joyful murmur, that the great verse inscription on the basin above invites the passer-by to attend to. Music among the Arts names what the monument itself performs; of all the panels of the cycle, this one has a soundtrack.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the cycle’s shallow, refined relief; the row of bells, the scored strings and the little hammer survive with remarkable crispness, and the veined ground, as in the adjoining Geometry, lends the white figure a painterly depth. The attribution follows the group — the Arts given to Giovanni Pisano in the 1993 analysis, within the double authorship that the fountain’s inscription attests — and the panel’s poised, listening delicacy, drama made from anticipation alone, is entirely consonant with that reading.
Astronomy and Philosophy
With Astronomy the quadrivium reaches the heavens, and the panel proves one of the cycle’s most beautiful. The legend ASTROLOGIA stands above the frame — the standard medieval name for the science of the stars, embracing without distinction what modernity divides into astronomy and astrology. The Art is seated in profile, a crowned or coifed woman in long drapery whose folds break over the knees and cascade to her feet; with both hands she raises a great sphere — the globe of the heavens — lifting it level with her face, so close that she seems to press her cheek toward it, while a sweep of drapery or curtain rises behind, drawn up beside the sphere like the vault of the sky itself.
The intimacy of the gesture is the panel’s genius. The European cycles give Astronomy her attributes at a decorous distance — the sphere held out, the astrolabe displayed; the Perugian carver instead brings the heavens into an embrace, the scholar and her globe cheek to cheek, contemplation rendered as tenderness. It is the same humanising instinct that turned Grammar’s discipline into a caress and Arithmetic’s science into a game of hands, here applied to the loftiest of the sciences: the stars, on the Perugian fountain, are studied with love.
The panel converses across the basin with the calendar it neighbours. The zodiac signs scattered small through the fields of the months — the crab of June, the lion of July, the scales in the September treader’s grip — are Astronomy’s alphabet; her panel is, so to speak, the title-page of the celestial writing that the labours read all year. Time on the lower basin is doubly told, by the work of the fields and by the wheel of the heavens, and Astronomy personifies the second telling. That the science shares its panel-pair with Philosophy, the sequence’s crown, marks its rank: the last of the seven, the closest to wisdom.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, carved in the cycle’s low relief; the marble here is of notable whiteness, and the state of preservation — the crisp profile, the intact folds — is among the best in the group. The attribution follows the Arts as a whole: assigned to Giovanni Pisano by the 1993 analysis, within the collaborative campaign of both Pisani that the dedicatory verse records; the caressing invention of the raised sphere, psychological before it is emblematic, may stand as the panel’s own argument for the younger master’s presence.
Philosophy closes the sequence, and the basin marks her rank unmistakably. The legend FILOSOFIA stands above the frame, and beneath it — uniquely in the entire cycle of the Arts — the figure turns to face the beholder. She is enthroned and frontal: a crowned woman, chaplet on her brow, seated in state, her long veil spread wide to either side — lifted at the edge by her raised right hand so that it opens behind her like a canopy or a pair of wings — while her left hand rests at her lap upon a rounded object, an orb or closed volume. Even in majesty she is not inert: the raised veil gives the figure the suggestion of movement that the descriptive literature notes, breath stirring the queen of the sciences on her throne.
The frontality is a considered rhetoric. Every one of the seven Arts is seated in profile, absorbed in her transaction — teaching, examining the serpent, writing, computing, drawing, listening, contemplating; Philosophy alone confronts us, because she is not one discipline among others but their sum and sovereign, the figure to whom, since Boethius drew her at his bedside in the Consolation, the whole hierarchy of learning ascends. Her spread veil gathers the sequence visually as her concept gathers it intellectually: the seven lessons conclude in a presence, and the schoolroom of the basin becomes, for one panel, a throne room.
Here the honest chronicler of the fountain must enter the cycle’s one genuine textual difficulty. The panel in the basin is inscribed FILOSOFIA, and the standard descriptive listing names Philosophy as the eighth figure of the group; yet part of the modern attributional literature — including the 1993 analysis — speaks, among the reliefs assigned to Giovanni, of a figure of Theology, and a personification of Theology is likewise reported among the statues of the upper basin beside Saint Paul. Whether these notices refer to distinct figures on the two basins, or whether a single relief has circulated in the literature under both names, cannot be resolved from the verified sources; the discrepancy is reported here, as it must be, rather than harmonised. What the marble itself declares is the name incised above the crown: Philosophy.
The panel is Carrara marble of 1277–78, carved in the shallow, luminous relief of the cycle and exceptionally well preserved, the whiteness of the stone almost undimmed. The attribution follows the group’s — the Arts with Giovanni Pisano in the 1993 analysis, under the double authorship of the dedicatory verse — and the figure’s combination of hieratic frontality with the animated, lifted veil holds in a single image the two temperaments, the father’s gravity and the son’s motion, whose meeting is the fountain’s style. Between the heraldic beasts of the commune that open the sequence and the signed eagles of the sculptor that close it, Philosophy enthroned states the basin’s boldest claim: that in Perugia, in 1278, wisdom belonged in the public square — crowned, frontal, and freely available, like the water below her.
The Two Eagles: The Signed Panels of Giovanni Pisano
The eagle pair is the attributional keystone of the entire fountain, and the panels themselves are among its most powerful carvings. Each eagle stands in the round-shouldered majesty of its kind upon a rocky mound — the crag rendered as a broken, naturalistic mass filling the base of the field — talons gripping the stone, the legs clothed in the ruffled ‘trousers’ of feathering that the carver has cut with evident delight. Each raises its wings asymmetrically, one swept high and back, the other half-folded, in the tense, gathered posture of the bird about to rise or just alighted; the breast feathers fall in long, overlapping tongues. The right-hand eagle preserves its head, turned down and back so that the great hooked beak presses toward the breast; the head of its companion is largely lost to damage, a void in the marble where the turned neck once was — a wound of the monument’s seven exposed centuries, and a reminder that even the signed face of the fountain has not escaped them.
Along the upper frame of the right-hand panel runs the inscription that makes this pair unique: the fragmentary signature verses, in the small, abraded lettering of the workshop, in which the abbreviated name IOH(ANNE)S — Giovanni — is still legible together with words of the sculptor and opus family. This is the only autograph mark on the entire monument. The great dedicatory verses on the basin above name Nicola and Giovanni together, father first and in superlative terms; here alone, on a panel of his own carving, the son names himself. The precise wording of the fragmentary verses should be taken from the epigraphic edition of the fountain’s inscriptions rather than reconstructed from the weathered stone; what no reading disputes is the name, and the fact that everything the modern literature argues about the division of hands on the fountain must orbit this one fixed point.
The choice of the eagle for the signature is a piece of learned wit entirely worthy of the cycle it closes. The eagle is the symbol of Saint John the Evangelist — Giovanni’s name-saint — so that the signed panel functions simultaneously as maker’s mark and as personal device: the sculptor signs under his own bird, name and emblem in one. At the same time the eagle on its crag belongs to the antique repertory of imperial and funerary art that the Pisano workshop knew from the sarcophagi of Pisa, and the pair’s position on the basin — closing the sequence of the Arts, adjoining the opening of the Genesis panels — sets the sculptor’s self-assertion at the very hinge between human knowledge and sacred history.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, the veined stone here again lending the white birds a turbulent ground; the carving is the deepest and most plastic of the whole Arts face, the wings and breast-feathers undercut with a vigour that points forward to the master’s independent career at Pistoia and Pisa. Authorship, for once on this monument, is documented: the right-hand eagle is signed by Giovanni Pisano, and the pair as a whole is universally given to his hand — the son of the flos sculptorum, twenty years before his great pulpits, setting his name and his name-saint’s bird at the close of the fountain’s curriculum, where Perugia’s learning ends and the sculptor’s begins.
Read as a whole, the eight panels compose a curriculum in marble, and their originality lies less in the choice of subject — the Arts were a common inheritance — than in its dramatisation and its placement. Every discipline is a scene or a living act: Grammar’s embrace over the book, Dialectic’s serpent turned in the hands, Rhetoric’s framed text, Arithmetic’s counting fingers, Geometry’s folded, reaching body, Music’s hammer poised at the bells, Astronomy’s embraced heavens; knowledge on the Perugian basin is never a static attribute but always something done, rendered in the low, ivory-like relief that distinguishes the group within the fountain’s fabric.
And the whole is set not above a cathedral door but at the lip of a public fountain, between the lion and griffin of the commune and the eagles that bear Giovanni Pisano’s signature — learning framed by citizenship and craft, in Carrara marble, in the single prodigious campaign of 1277–78, by the workshop of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano: the father named first in the verses as the flower of sculptors, the son named by his own hand a few panels away, and between their two names the seven Arts and their queen, teaching Perugia at its water’s edge.
Origins and Fables: The Third Cycle of the Fontana Maggiore
The third and final cycle of the lower basin gathers three traditions that the thirteenth century held in a single hand and modernity has since divided: the sacred history of Genesis, the legendary history of Rome, and the moral zoology of the Aesopic fable. Fall and Expulsion, Samson and David, the she-wolf and the twins, the wolf with the crane and the wolf with the lamb — the panels set biblical origin, civic origin and ethical instruction side by side without hierarchical separation, and the juxtaposition is the cycle’s meaning: the beginnings of humanity, the beginnings of the city, and the beginnings of justice, told in the same marble at the same scale. One caution governs everything said about their arrangement. The panels of this cycle were dispersed and reassembled after the earthquake of the mid-fourteenth century in an order the modern literature describes as arbitrary; the sequence in which they are read today is a catalogue convenience, not the design of 1278, and any interpretation resting on their precise order rests on a disturbed text.
The panels are white Carrara marble, carved within the campaign of 1277–78 attested by the fountain’s dated inscription, framed by the basin’s alternating colonnettes of white marble and travertine, with their identifying Latin legends — ROMULUS, REMUS, GOLIAS, the SANSON FORTIS of the Samson pair — still legible along the upper frames. Authorship follows the fountain’s general condition: the dedicatory verse names Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni; no panel of this cycle is signed; and the division of hands is argued from style alone, with one instructive documented oscillation noted below in its place. One panel of the cycle, finally, is not what it appears: the relief of the she-wolf, damaged in the uprising of 1859, is represented on the monument today by a copy, the damaged original being conserved in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria — a fact any photographic study of the basin in situ must declare.
The Fall of Adam and the Expulsion from Paradise
The Genesis pair opens the cycle’s account of origins at the absolute beginning. In the left panel Adam and Eve stand together beneath the tree of knowledge, which rises at the left edge of the field with the serpent wound visibly through its branches, its head inclined toward the woman. Eve turns toward Adam, one arm raised between them in the gesture of offering — the fruit passing at the fatal moment — while Adam stands frontally beside her, and the two nude bodies, softly modelled, still carry themselves with the unselfconscious uprightness of innocence. The legend above, though abraded, preserves the wording of the transgression. It is the instant of the Fall rather than its aftermath: the offer made, the hand extended, nothing yet lost.
The right panel gives the aftermath, and the contrast of body-language between the two fields is the pair’s achievement. The same two figures now move to the right, driven from the garden: at the left edge the summarily indicated presence of the expelling angel presses them out of the frame, Adam’s arm is raised — half in protest, half in shame — toward Eve’s shoulder, and both figures have folded inward, hands drawn across their bodies in the immemorial gesture of discovered nakedness, knees bent in the first steps of exile. The legend above carries the vocabulary of sin. Between the two panels, across the fluted colonnette, the whole theology of the Fall is told as a change of posture: the open, frontal bodies of innocence become the huddled, lateral bodies of guilt.
Within the basin’s program the pair does double duty. It is sacred history — the origin of the human condition, the beginning of the labour that the calendar cycle a few faces away depicts; and the sequence Fall-then-labour was, in the standard medieval reading, a sequence of punishment. But the Perugian cycle, as the scholarship on its imagery has emphasised, conspicuously declines to present the labours of the months in penitential terms — work on this fountain is dignity, not sentence — and the Genesis pair therefore reads less as the calendar’s cause than as its foil: this is what was lost, says the garden; this is what was built, answer the months. The juxtaposition with the Roman panels of the same cycle sharpens the point, for the literature has justly observed that the cycle runs from the sin of the first parents to the fratricide of Rome’s founding — origin stories that are also stories of transgression, over which the commune’s ordered present is raised.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, the stone of this face pale and finely veined, the nudes carved in the low relief of the basin with a softness of transition — belly, thigh, shoulder — that shows the workshop’s study of the antique at its most direct: the sarcophagus tradition of paired standing nudes lies close behind these Adams and Eves. Attribution follows the fountain’s general condition — the collaborative campaign under Nicola and Giovanni named together in the verse — and the pair’s blend of classical body and Gothic pathos, gravity in the standing, urgency in the going, once more holds the two temperaments of the workshop in a single face of the basin.
Samson and the Lion; Samson and Delilah
The Samson pair compresses the strong man’s whole tragedy into two adjoining fields, and the legends above — SANSON FORTIS, Samson the strong, over the first; Samson’s name again over the second — spell out the theme. In the left panel the hero bestrides the lion: a bearded figure in a short belted tunic, his long hair falling forward, planted with one knee on the beast’s back, his hands wrenching apart the jaws of the lion whose great maned head twists up beneath him and whose body collapses along the base of the field. It is the feat of Judges 14, the young Samson tearing the lion barehanded, and the carver has organised the panel as a single descending diagonal of force — shoulders, arms, jaws — from the man’s bent back to the beast’s yielding mouth.
The right panel is the undoing, and its composition deliberately rhymes with the first in order to reverse it. Samson now lies across the field, his mighty frame sunk down, his head fallen into the lap of Delilah, who sits above him — occupying exactly the dominant upper position the hero held over the lion — her hands at his bowed head, at the hair in which his strength resides, in the act of the betraying haircut. The strong man who broke the lion’s jaw is himself broken by a gesture of tenderness; the panel’s violence is entirely implicit, carried by the echo of the composition beside it. Whoever devised the pairing thought in diptychs: strength conquering, strength betrayed, the same body up and then down.
The moral is the cycle’s recurring lesson in the vanity of force, and it belongs with the fables a few panels away: the wolf overcome by cunning, the strong man overcome by love, power everywhere shown to be conditional. For the communal audience of the basin — a polity that had replaced the rule of the strong with the rule of statute — the exemplum had civic bite, and the placement of Samson beside David, the giant-killer whose victory was skill and faith rather than muscle, completes the argument: the basin’s Old Testament is a meditation on what strength is and is not. It is worth noting too how the pair extends the basin’s gallery of the body: after the labouring bodies of the months and the teaching bodies of the Arts, Samson gives the cycle its heroic anatomy — and its ruin.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the shallow relief of the basin, the raking light of the monument’s south exposure giving the Samson fields their strong shadows; surfaces are weathered — Delilah’s features are largely lost — but both compositions survive intact. Attribution is undocumented and follows the workshop campaign of the two Pisani; the wrestling group of man and lion, with its compact interlocked masses, descends recognisably from the animal-combat repertory of the antique sarcophagi that formed Nicola, while the slack, fallen body of the betrayed Samson has the expressive pathos the literature associates with the younger generation of the shop.
David and Goliath
The David pair is the cycle’s study in the economy of victory, and it divides the duel across the colonnette with cinematic instinct. In the left panel the boy David is alone: a small, wiry figure in a short tunic, caught at the climax of the sling’s action — legs scissored wide in the stride, torso twisted, one arm flung up behind the head with the sling at full extension, the other thrown across the body for balance. Nothing else occupies the field; the panel is the throw, the whole composition a coiled spring of diagonals. The carver has understood the mechanics of the sling as exactly as the calendar’s carvers understood the flail and the scythe, and has given the shepherd boy the same body-language of competent labour: David’s victory, the panel proposes, is a piece of skilled work.
The right panel, under the legend GOLIAS, delivers the result. The giant fills the field diagonally, collapsing: a huge armoured figure — the mail of his sleeve carefully scored — sinking to his knees, his great crested or helmeted head snapping forward, one hand flung to his brow where the stone has struck. The moment chosen is again the instant of the event, not its aftermath: not the beheading that the iconographic tradition loved, but the strike itself, the mountain of armour just beginning to fall. Across the two panels the cause and the effect face each other — the small body in perfect action, the great body in ruin — and the colonnette between them stands in for the distance the stone flew.
The exemplum reads in series with its neighbours. Samson beside it shows strength betrayed; David shows strength irrelevant — the armoured giant undone by a shepherd’s tool competently used. For the popolo of Perugia, a polity of craftsmen whose basin everywhere honours skill — the finger-reckoning of Arithmetic, the folded concentration of Geometry, the timed swing of the thresher — the David panel is the political moral of the whole: right order does not belong to the biggest. The traditional reading of the pair as an image of courage is not wrong, but the carving itself argues something more precise: courage plus craft, the commune’s own virtues, against mere mass.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the basin’s low relief; the stone of this face is greyer and more heavily shadowed, and the surfaces — Goliath’s face especially — are much abraded, though both compositions read clearly. Attribution once more rests on style within the double authorship of the verse inscription: the slinging David, all torsion and flying hem, is regularly felt to belong to the dynamic register the literature associates with Giovanni, and the pair’s dramatic construction — action and consequence split across two frames — is of a piece with the narrative intelligence that would build his pulpits.
Romulus and Remus as Falconers
The Roman panels begin not with the she-wolf but with the twins grown: two adjoining fields, each under its surviving legend — ROMULUS on the left, REMUS on the right — each showing one brother seated with a bird of prey. Romulus sits in profile, a curly-headed youth in a belted tunic and mantle, bent attentively over the falcon that stands on his gauntleted fist, his free hand raised toward it in the gesture of feeding or manning the bird. Remus answers him in the adjoining field, similarly seated, his falcon held before him, a second smaller head — a companion or attendant — visible at his shoulder, and traces at the field’s edge of further apparatus of the hunt. The two panels mirror one another like the heraldic beasts of the Arts face: the founders as a matched pair, each absorbed in his bird.
The iconography is remarkable and remarkably chosen. Nothing in the canonical legend requires the twins to be falconers; the choice translates them into the visual language of contemporary nobility — falconry being the defining aristocratic accomplishment of the thirteenth century, the art of kings and of the emperor Frederick II’s famous treatise — and thereby does for Rome’s founders what the May panels of the calendar do for the living aristocracy: it seats them within the courtly register of the monument’s own age. The founders of Rome appear on the Perugian basin as young lords of the Duecento, hawks on their fists; legendary origin is dressed in present costume, exactly as the commune itself dressed its Roman pedigree in contemporary political clothes.
Within the cycle the pair prepares the she-wolf panel beside it: first the twins as men, then — in the adjoining field — their infancy at the wolf’s teats, the story told, as the basin’s disturbed order now presents it, in reverse. Whatever the original sequence, the pairing of grown founders and suckled infants frames the Roman origin as the commune wished it read: Perugia, Augusta Perusia, claimed antiquity through and alongside Rome, and the twins on the basin are ancestors by adoption — the deep past from which the city’s present authority, personified on the upper basin, descends. The falcons, meanwhile, quietly bind the Roman panels to the courtly May of the calendar: one visual culture, from legend to living nobility.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the basin’s shallow relief, the surfaces sun-bleached but well preserved, the legends among the most legible on the monument. The pair carries a specific and instructive attributional history: the catalogue of the fountain’s sculptures first issued in 1969 placed the Romulus relief in the circle of Nicola, and its revision of 1985 moved the same carving to Nicola himself — a documented oscillation, within a single scholar’s work, that illustrates better than any argument how attributions on this monument migrate. The grave, self-contained profiles of the seated twins do indeed sit naturally with the old master’s classical temper; the attribution remains, as everywhere on the basin, a judgment of style under the double authorship of the inscription.
The She-Wolf with the Twins, and Rea Silvia
The she-wolf panel is the emblematic image of the Roman group. The wolf sits in profile beneath a tree whose stylised canopy fills the upper left corner, her long neck raised, her ears pricked, her head turned watchfully away over the two infants who kneel beneath her — the twins, small nude figures pressed side by side at her belly, reaching up to nurse. The carver has given the she-wolf the alert, maternal monumentality of her antique models: the composition descends, ultimately, from the bronze Lupa of Roman tradition, mediated through the sarcophagus repertory the workshop knew, and the panel is the basin’s most direct act of homage to the visual patrimony of Rome herself. In the adjoining field sits the twins’ mother: Rea Silvia, a seated woman of full, calm volumes, her hair bound, holding upon her knees — the detail the photographic documentation makes unmistakable — a domed birdcage, carried before her like an attribute.
The cage is the pair’s enigma and its poetry. It has no fixed place in the iconographic tradition of Rea Silvia, and its meaning on the basin is not documented; but its language is legible enough. The caged bird beside the mother whose children were taken from her and cast to the river reads naturally as an image of captivity and guarded life — the Vestal confined, the infants enclosed and then released to the wolf’s wild nurture — and the juxtaposition across the colonnette could hardly be more pointed: in one field the cage, in the other the beast; enclosure and wilderness, the mother’s loss and the wolf’s gift. The interpretation is offered as interpretation; the marble itself declares only the woman, the cage, and the wolf beside her.
Here the material history of the monument must interrupt the iconography. The relief of the she-wolf was damaged in the civic uprising of 1859, together with the statue of Rome on the basin above; the damaged original was removed and is conserved in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, and the panel that stands on the fountain — the panel the photographic campaigns record in situ — is a copy. Any study of the carving’s style, therefore, and any argument built on its surfaces, must be referred to the original in the museum; what the basin now offers is the composition, faithfully transmitted, without the thirteenth-century hand. It is the third cycle’s sharpest instance of the general truth about the Fontana Maggiore: the monument in the square is a palimpsest, and the connoisseur’s fountain is partly indoors.
The panels are — in their original substance — Carrara marble of the 1277–78 campaign, the Rea Silvia in situ preserving its medieval surface, the she-wolf represented by the post-1859 replacement. Attribution belongs with the Roman group as a whole: the documented catalogue history of the adjoining Romulus relief, moved between 1969 and 1985 from Nicola’s circle to Nicola himself, defines the terms in which the wolf and the mother are discussed, and the grave, antique-derived monumentality of both compositions supports the association with the elder master’s designs — executed, as the whole basin was, by the collaborative workshop that the dedicatory verse places under father and son together.
The Wolf and the Crane; The Wolf and the Lamb
The cycle — and with it the whole figured program of the lower basin — closes in the fable-world of Aesop and Phaedrus, and the two panels are among the most vivid animal carvings of the Italian Duecento. In the left field the wolf sits upright on his haunches, tail curled around his feet, jaws open; before him stands the crane on her long legs, her serpentine neck extended, her head and beak thrust deep into the wolf’s mouth — the famous cure in progress, the bone being drawn from the throat. The long inscription running above the pair carries the fable’s moral. The composition is a single interlocking curve, neck into jaw, the two incompatible anatomies — the sinuous bird, the massy predator — locked into one continuous line: the carver has made the fable’s uneasy contract visible as form.
The right field gives the second fable its landscape — the only true landscape on the basin. A rocky slope descends diagonally across the panel; at its top the wolf stands braced, head lowered, muzzle thrust down the incline; at its foot, small and woolly, stands the lamb, and between them, implied by the fall of the ground, runs the stream of the story — the wolf upstream, the lamb below, and the accusation (“you muddy my water”) already absurd on the carved terrain itself, where all water runs from wolf to lamb. The panel stages the fable’s whole logic topographically: the slope is the argument, and the beholder standing at the fountain’s edge — water actually falling past the panel from the basin above — completes it.
The two fables are jurisprudence in animal form, and their selection for the basin was an act of civic pedagogy. The crane’s story teaches the ingratitude of the powerful — the promised reward that turns out to be merely having survived the wolf’s jaws; the lamb’s story teaches the pretext of the powerful — the accusation invented to license the devouring. Both are fables about the abuse of power, and their currency in communal Perugia is independently documented: the same two subjects recur in the fresco decoration of the Sala dei Notari, painted around the turn of the century in the palace across the square. On a fountain built by a commune of law, facing the seats of its justice, the closing panels of the encyclopedia are warnings addressed to power itself — the strong told, in the people’s oldest stories, what the whole basin has argued: that force without justice is wolfishness, and the commune exists to answer it.
The panels are Carrara marble of 1277–78, in the basin’s low relief, the surfaces crossed by old cracks but the carving crisp — the crane’s neck and the lamb’s fleece surviving with particular delicacy. Attribution is undocumented and follows the collaborative campaign of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano named in the dedicatory verse; the naturalism of the animals, observed with the same unheraldic attention as the oxen of November and the dog of December, is the workshop’s common language, and the topographic wit of the wolf-and-lamb field — narrative built into terrain — belongs to the forward edge of that language, the edge on which Italian relief was about to change.
The Twenty-Four Statues of the Upper Basin
If the lower basin unfolds a compendium of time, work, knowledge and history, the upper basin turns to the city itself and its place in a larger sacred and political order. The twenty-four statues set at the junctions of the twelve faces are organised, in the reconstructed arrangement, around a wind-rose of four cardinal figures, with the personages most closely related to each gathered around it. At the north stands Euliste, the legendary founder of the city; at the south, Augusta Perusia, the personification of Perugia; at the east, Solomon; and at the west, Rome.
The southern group is the richest in civic meaning and the one that faces the axis of the later Corso Vannucci. In the description of the city’s official museum service, this triad shows “Augusta Perusia… seated on a throne between Domina Clusi (the figure holding a sheaf of wheat in allusion to the granaries of Chiusi) and Domina Laci (the figure holding a fish in reference to the waters of Lago Trasimeno),” together symbolising the cornucopia of foodstuffs. Augusta Perusia herself, enthroned with a cornucopia, reprises a title of honour that reached back to the Roman age and is recorded on the city’s Etruscan arch; the two territorial dominae represent the granary and the fishery, the two great sources of the city’s nourishment.
It must be pointed out that the grain-bearing figure is sometimes read as a personification of Chiusi, but the inscription’s Clusium more probably denotes the fertile Chiugi di Perugia between Chiusi and the lake. Nearby stand the city’s patron saints, Lawrence, to whom the facing cathedral is dedicated, and the local martyr Herculanus, each accompanied by a cleric. Among the statues, too, are the two communal officers of 1278, Matteo da Correggio and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, placed — remarkably — among prophets and biblical figures, a juxtaposition that asserts the sacral dignity of the contemporary commune. The presence of a traitor cleric, associated with the betrayal of St Herculanus during the Gothic siege of the sixth century, adds a note whose precise motivation remains unclear.
The east–west axis situates the city within universal history. Solomon at the east evokes Jerusalem, the ancient capital and the fountainhead of Christian wisdom; Rome at the west stands as the new capital of Christendom, flanked by St Peter with the personification of the Roman Church and St Paul with the personification of Theology. The remaining statues extend the sacred company: Moses, David, John the Baptist, Salome holding the head of the Baptist, the archangel Michael, Melchizedek, St Benedict and St Maurus (a Benedictine pairing appropriate to the Silvestrine director of the works), and a figure of Victory. The full catalogue is transmitted with minor variation, and the arrangement is, again, a reconstruction: the earthquake and its aftermath disturbed the upper basin as they did the lower, and the mid-twentieth-century restoration sought to recover an order that had long been lost.
Saint Peter – The Opening Figure of the Upper Basin
The statue of Saint Peter stands at a junction of the upper basin of the Fontana Maggiore, framed — like all twenty-four of his companions — against the slender pilaster between two panels of the basin’s red-veined marble revetment, beneath the projecting dentilled capital whose weight he appears to carry, in the caryatid convention that makes the figures of this stage at once statuary and architecture. His legend survives on the frame: the saint’s name to the left of the head, and to the right, clearly legible, the completing title — APOSTOLUS, the Apostle — while fragments of the fountain’s Latin hexameters run along the mouldings above and below the panel. In the traditional reading of the cycle, Peter is the first figure: the procession of the upper basin opens here, with the prince of the apostles, and closes twenty-three junctions later in Victoria — the ring of the commune’s history beginning at the rock on which the Church was built. Behind his right shoulder, at the angle of the adjoining junction, rises a crowned head: his neighbour in the ensemble, the personified Church of Rome, so that the photograph captures what the design intends — the apostle standing literally beside the institution he founded.
The figure is a bearded elder of massive presence. The head is the statue’s glory: a dense mass of short, deeply drilled curls covers the skull and merges into the full, spiralling beard, framing a broad face whose weathered features still carry the alert, frontal gravity of the apostolic portrait tradition — this is the square-headed, curly-bearded Peter that Italian art had inherited from the early Christian centuries, rendered with the drill-worked vitality of the late Duecento. He stands with the weight gathered and the body wrapped in a great mantle drawn diagonally across the chest and caught up over the left arm, its every edge finished with the delicately beaded, lace-like hem that distinguishes the finest figures of the basin, cascading in a long zigzag of bordered folds to the bare feet planted on the foliate plinth. The right hand emerges from the mantle at the breast, fingers extended in a gesture midway between blessing, address and demonstration — the apostle as speaker; the left hand grips the gathered drapery at the waist, where the saint’s canonical attribute, the keys, is to be recognised among the carved forms, their identification assisted by the tradition though the weathered surface now renders them summary. Nothing about the figure is decorative repose: the turned glance, the speaking hand, the churning hem make Peter the most rhetorically active of the basin’s elders.
His meaning governs the sector he opens. The western reach of the upper basin is the Roman axis of the program’s wind-rose: Peter, then the crowned Ecclesia Romana with her model church, then Roma herself enthroned as caput mundi, the exalted Divinitas, and Paul with the sword — the complete statement of the order to which Guelph Perugia professed allegiance. That the commune’s fountain should begin its ring of statues with Peter is therefore a political declaration as much as a devotional one: the city that carved its own magistrates of 1278 among the prophets a few junctions away here places the whole ensemble under the apostolic keys, Rome’s authority acknowledged at the head of the procession exactly as the Guelph lion stands beside the griffin on the basin below. And the adjacency is eloquent in the medieval manner of meaningful neighbours that recurs around this basin — Salome beside the Baptist, the traitor beside Sant’Ercolano: Peter shoulder to shoulder with the personified Roman Church is doctrine stated by placement, the man and the institution, rock and building, side by side under the falling water.
The statue is white Carrara marble, carved within the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, and set against the pink-and-red revetment quarried at Bettona that gives the upper basin its governing chromatic contrast of pale figure on veined ground. No statue of this stage is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic argument — and here the argument has been unusually confident, for the vigorous apostolic figures of the Roman sector, Peter and Paul above all, with their drilled, palpitating hair and their monumental, mobile drapery, belong to the register that criticism has most consistently claimed for Giovanni Pisano, the manner that would unfold at Siena and Pistoia in the following decades. The attribution remains, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, a judgment of style under the double authorship of the inscription; the figure itself, weathered but complete, restored with the basin in 1948–49 and 1995–99, still performs the office the design of 1278 assigned it — to open the commune’s marble procession, keys in hand, at the head of the ring.
Ecclesia Romana
The statue of the Roman Church stands at the junction adjoining Saint Peter on the upper basin of the Fontana Maggiore, her identification secured by the clearest pair of legends on the whole stage: ECLESIA incised on the frame to her left, ROMANA on the frame to her right, the personification named in full across the two panels she divides. Like her companions she performs the basin’s caryatid office, set against the slender pilaster beneath the projecting dentilled capital, a figure who is also a support; and beneath her, along the base moulding, runs a fragment of the fountain’s dating hexameters of exceptional interest — the words legible to her right, …ter(tius) papa fuit N…, belong to the verse that dates the monument by the reigning pope, Nicholas III, so that the personified Roman Church stands, by design or by the fortune of the reassembly, directly above the line that names the pontiff under whom the fountain rose. Behind her shoulder, at the angle of the next junction, the adjoining figure of the Roman sector is just visible: she is the middle term of the sequence that runs from Peter through herself to Roma enthroned.
The figure is a matron, not a queen. Her head is closely veiled, the cloth drawn over the hair and gathered in a wimple beneath the chin — the modest coif of the ecclesia as bride and mother rather than the diadem of worldly dominion — and her face, weathered but intact, is carried slightly lifted and turned, gazing past the beholder with the abstracted attention of the allegorical figures of this basin. She is wrapped in a mantle whose deep collar folds around the shoulders and whose edges carry the delicately beaded, lace-like hem that runs through the finest figures of the stage, falling in a long diagonal cascade over the gowned body to the bare feet on the foliate plinth; a band of ornament — the suggestion of an embroidered orphrey — crosses the breast beneath the collar. Her attribute is held high against the left shoulder, pressed to her cheek almost as a mother holds a child: a model of a church, carved in loving miniature detail — the arched portal with its receding jambs, the coursed masonry, the crenellated or gabled crown — the building cradled in both hands, the right arm folded beneath it across the body. The tenderness of the grip is the invention: the Church holds the church, institution embracing edifice.
Her meaning is completed by her neighbours, in the basin’s recurring rhetoric of significant adjacency. To one side stands Peter, the rock; here rises the building raised upon it, held in the arms of its own personification; beyond her the sequence ascends to Roma, caput mundi, and onward through the exalted Divinitas to Paul — the complete western, Roman axis of the program’s wind-rose, the ideological pole toward which Guelph Perugia oriented itself. The commune that placed its griffin beside the papal party’s lion on the basin below here spells the alliance out in figures: the city’s fountain carries the Roman Church herself among its supporters, and the dating verse beneath her feet ties the whole monument to the pontifical year. Yet the conception is notably unimperial — no tiara, no keys, no throne: the Perugian Ecclesia is a veiled woman holding a building, the Church presented as guardianship rather than dominion, an inflection entirely consonant with the tender, humanised register that governs this workshop’s allegories from Grammar’s embrace on the basin below to Astronomy’s cradled sphere.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated inscription, standing against the pink-and-red Bettona revetment whose veined ground sets off the pale figure — the upper basin’s governing chromatic device, nowhere more painterly than in the deep-marbled panels flanking this junction. No statue of the stage is signed, and authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, refined only by stylistic argument; here the argument carries particular weight, for the detailed attributional analysis published in 1993 assigned the Ecclesia Romana specifically to Giovanni Pisano, in company with the Liberal Arts reliefs and the signed eagles, and the figure’s combination of monumental wrap and intimate gesture — the great mantle, the cheek inclined to the little church — sits naturally in that reading of the younger master’s early manner. The attribution is reported, as everywhere on the fountain, as considered judgment rather than document; the statue itself, restored with the basin in 1948–49 and 1995–99, still holds her building above the falling water, the Church carrying the church at the head of Perugia’s marble procession.
Roma Caput Mundi – The Western Cardinal Figure
The enthroned figure of Rome occupies the western cardinal point of the upper basin’s wind-rose, and her legends declare her rank in full: to the right of the crowned head runs CAP(UD) MUND(I) — head of the world — completing the name incised at her left. She is one of the very few seated figures of the twenty-four, raised not on the standing figures’ modest polygonal plinths but on a broad, projecting foliate console, a corbel-throne that carries her out from the basin’s wall; the majesty of the seat is itself the iconography. And beneath her, on the base mouldings to either side, the photograph captures a conjunction of exceptional documentary interest: to the left the continuation of the verse naming the reigning pope — …fuit Nicolaus… — and to the right, clearly legible, RODULFUS MAGN…, the opening of the line naming the emperor Rudolf of Habsburg. The fountain’s dedicatory poem dates the monument by the two universal powers of Christendom, pope and emperor, and both dating verses run directly beneath the throne of Rome — the city that was, in the medieval conception, the seat of the one and the crown of the other. Whether the correspondence is original design or the fortune of the post-earthquake reassembly cannot be decided; that the stone now states it is a fact of the monument.
The figure is a young queen. A crenellated diadem — the mural crown of the personified city, its towered circuit miniaturised into ornament — rests on a veil that falls from beneath it to the shoulders, framing a smooth oval face turned in calm three-quarter profile. Over the gown she wears a great mantle drawn about the shoulders and knees, its edge finished with the beaded hem of the basin’s finest figures, and fastened at the breast by the statue’s most memorable detail: a clasp carved as a feline mask, the lion’s head worn as a morse — Rome pinning her cloak with her own beast. She sits erect but at ease, the body carrying the fashionable forward-curved posture of the Gothic thirteenth century, the rounded abdomen and high girdle of the courtly silhouette; one hand rests at the lap, the other holds a long stem — sceptre or palm — laid diagonally across the body, while at her side, against the throne, a small carved element survives from the seat’s original apparatus. Everything in the conception is regal without being martial: no armour, no orb, no wolf — Rome as sovereign lady, the capital as a crowned young woman at rest.
Here, before interpretation, the material history of the monument must interrupt the description, more insistently than anywhere else in the statue cycle. The Roma was damaged in the civic uprising of 1859, together with the she-wolf relief of the basin below; the damaged original was removed and is conserved in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, and the figure that occupies the junction today — the figure the photograph records, and whose surfaces are conspicuously crisper than those of her weathered neighbours — is the replacement. The composition is faithfully transmitted, and everything said above about crown, clasp, throne and posture describes the design of 1278; but any argument from the carving itself — the handling of the face, the cutting of the hems, the quality of hand — must be referred to the original in the museum, a few steps away in the Palazzo dei Priori. The Roma in situ is the monument’s most prominent instance of the general truth that the Fontana Maggiore in the square is a palimpsest, and that its connoisseurship is partly an indoor discipline.
In the program, Rome answers Jerusalem. The wind-rose of the upper basin sets Solomon at the east — the old capital, the throne of wisdom — and Roma at the west, the new capital of Christendom, flanked by her own axis: Peter and the personified Ecclesia Romana on one side, the exalted Divinitas and Paul on the other, the complete Guelph profession of the commune carved into the ring. Yet the figure also converses across the basin with her southern counterpart, for the only other enthroned woman of the cycle is Augusta Perusia herself: capital and commune mirrored as two crowned ladies on two corbel-thrones, deference and self-assertion held in a single visual rhyme — Perugia acknowledging Rome’s headship of the world while claiming, in identical majesty, the headship of her own. The original statue is white Carrara marble of the 1277–1278 campaign attested by the fountain’s dated verses, produced within the unsigned collaborative enterprise that those verses place under Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni — the division of hands, for this figure above all, a question that must now be put to the damaged original in the Galleria Nazionale rather than to the replacement that keeps her seat, crowned and clasped with the lion, above the two verses of pope and emperor and the falling water of the commune’s fountain.
Roma Caput Mundi, the Original – Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria
This is the statue itself: the Roma of 1277–1278, removed from the western cardinal junction of the Fontana Maggiore after the damage of 1859 and conserved today in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, in the Palazzo dei Priori a few steps from the fountain where her replacement keeps the seat. Displayed in the museum as an allegorical figure from the fountain, she is identified as the Roma by the exact correspondence of her composition with the copy in situ — the crenellated mural crown over the veil, the mantle fastened at the breast by the feline-mask clasp, the enthroned pose on the corbel — and by the documented history of the 1859 removal; behind the broken crown the foliate crockets of her junction survive, torn from the basin with her, so that the statue carries a fragment of the fountain’s architecture into the museum on her shoulders. Everything argued from the carving of the Roma must be argued here, before this battered original, and not before the crisp nineteenth-century figure in the square; the two analyses — of the copy in its setting, of the original in its case — are complementary halves of one object’s study.
The damage announces itself first, and it is itself historical evidence. The face is obliterated — the features beaten to an unreadable oval, the crown’s crenellations snapped, the surfaces of veil and lap bruised and pitted — the wounds of the 1859 assault preserved unrestored, the statue kept as the event left it. But around the destruction, wherever the original surface survives, the museum’s raking light reveals what seven centuries of weather and one century of copying have withheld from the fountain: a courtly apparatus of chased and punched ornament of astonishing refinement. The mantle’s borders are worked with running incised patterns; across the breast the garment is crossed by decorated bands meeting at the lion-mask clasp — the morse now legible in detail as a feline face carved in miniature; the high girdle carries punched enrichment; and at the lap survives the statue’s revelation, a rectangular panel filled with an incised arabesque of scrolling vinework, a passage of pure surface decoration — plausibly the bed for gilding or polychrome finish, in the manner of thirteenth-century marble enrichment — of which the copy on the basin gives no account. In the crook of the right arm rests a damaged fluted or feathered form, the remains of the long attribute — sceptre or palm — that the replacement renders whole.
This is what the original teaches, and why the indoor half of the fountain’s connoisseurship matters. The Roma of the square is a composition; the Roma of the museum is a work — and the work, where it survives, is of the basin’s highest quality: the fall of the veil beside the ruined face, the beaded hem breaking over the knee, the miniature confidence of the lion clasp, the goldsmith’s delicacy of the incised panel all bespeak a principal hand and a figure conceived, at the western head of the wind-rose, as one of the cycle’s summits. The ornament also opens a question the fountain in the square cannot pose: whether the upper basin’s statues, or its chief figures at least, originally carried gilding or colour on such prepared surfaces — a possibility the incisions suggest and the evidence does not settle, and which is offered here as observation rather than conclusion. And the destruction is not merely loss to be regretted: the defaced Roma is a document of 1859, of a moment when the personification of papal Rome on Perugia’s civic fountain became a political target — the monument’s imagery proving legible, and combustible, six centuries after its carving. Few objects state so plainly that the fountain’s program went on meaning things.
The statue is white Carrara marble, carved in the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, within the unsigned collaborative enterprise that the verses place under Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni; no document divides the hands, and the attribution of this figure — its grave, enthroned monumentality on one side, the nervous refinement of its ornament on the other — has moved between the two masters’ registers in the literature, a judgment that must now rest on precisely the surviving passages this original preserves. Removed after 1859, succeeded on the basin by the copy, conserved through the museum’s custody while the fountain outside underwent the campaigns of 1948–49 and 1995–99, the Roma of the Galleria Nazionale is the statue cycle’s essential indoor chapter: the queen of the world with her face struck away and her goldsmith’s finery intact — history and craft, violence and delicacy, holding together in one broken marble what the Fontana Maggiore has always been.
Divinitas Excelsa – The Upward Gaze of the Roman Axis
The statue stands in the Roman sector of the upper basin, between the enthroned Roma and Saint Paul, and the marble names her with a clarity that settles one question and opens another: DIVINITAS on the frame to her left, EXCELSA on the frame to her right — the exalted Divinity, the Godhead on high. The naming matters, because part of the descriptive and attributional literature on the fountain transmits, in exactly this position beside Paul, a personification of Theology — and the discrepancy between the transmitted name and the incised one is a small, exemplary problem of the monument’s study, sibling to the Philosophy/Theology confusion in the Liberal Arts of the basin below. Whether the cataloguers’ Theologia and the marble’s Divinitas are one figure under two names — the science of God and God’s own exaltedness being, for a medieval deviser, two faces of a single idea — or whether the reassembled basin has shuffled the referents, cannot be decided from the sources; what can be said is that the stone itself, photographed here, reads Divinitas Excelsa, and the analysis follows the stone. Beneath her, on the base moulding to the right, runs a further gift of the epigraphy: a cross followed by the imperative ASPICE — “look!” — the verb with which the fountain’s great inscription famously addresses the passer-by, legible directly under the feet of the one figure on the basin who is herself wholly absorbed in looking.
For the upward gaze is the statue’s entire invention. She is a veiled woman — the cloth bound close over the brow and falling to the shoulders, the profile framed in its oval — whose head is tilted fully back, the chin lifted, the eyes raised past the capital she carries toward the sky above the fountain: alone in the ring of twenty-four, she looks neither at the beholder nor across the piazza but straight up, out of the monument altogether. Her right arm rises with the gaze, the hand carried to the height of her face — a gesture poised between shading the eyes, veiling the mouth in awe, and simple yearning, and left, by the weathering of the surface, to keep its ambiguity. Under the left arm, held against the body at the waist, she carries a large closed book, the hand spread beneath its lower edge; the sleeve above it finishes in a delicately beaded cuff, and the mantle, drawn diagonally across the figure, breaks over the gown in the long zigzag cascade of bordered folds — the lace-like hem of the basin’s finest figures — down to the bare feet on the foliate plinth. Closed book below, open gaze above: the composition is a theology in two gestures.
Her meaning completes the axis she stands in. The western, Roman reach of the wind-rose ascends by deliberate steps — Peter the man, Ecclesia the institution, Roma the capital — and here the sequence lifts off the earth entirely: between the city of the world’s head and the apostle of the Gentiles stands the figure whose whole body is an act of looking beyond both, the Divinity on high acknowledged at the summit of the Guelph profession. Read as Theology, she is the science that crowns the arts of the basin below, the closed book of doctrine in her arm and its object in her eyes; read as the marble names her, she is that object’s own exaltedness personified, the axis’s vanishing point given a veiled body. On a monument whose statues everywhere teach by adjacency and gesture, the placement of the imperative ASPICE beneath the figure who looks is, whether by the design of 1278 or the fortune of the post-earthquake reassembly, the basin’s most perfect conjunction of word and image: the fountain commands the passer-by to look, and shows him, directly above the command, what looking ultimately is.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the 1277–1278 campaign attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the red-veined Bettona revetment of the upper basin, and preserved — as the photograph shows — in notably fine condition, the beaded hems and the profile of the lifted face surviving crisply. No statue of the stage is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic argument — and this figure belongs, with Peter, Paul and the Ecclesia Romana of the same sector, to the group that criticism has most consistently associated with Giovanni: the detailed analysis of 1993 assigned the sector’s personification (under the transmitted name of Theology) to the younger master, and the statue’s expressive economy — a whole figure organised by a single tilt of the head — sits naturally with that reading, here reported, as always on the unsigned fountain, as judgment rather than document. Restored with the basin in 1948–49 and 1995–99, she keeps her office at the head of the ring’s ascent: the exalted Divinity above the word aspice, looking up so that the city, filling its jugs below, remembers where the water of the bonum commune was believed, in 1278, finally to come from.
Saint Paul – The Sword-Bearer Closing the Roman Axis
The statue of Saint Paul stands at the junction that completes the western, Roman sector of the upper basin — the five-figure profession that runs from Peter through the personified Ecclesia Romana and the enthroned Roma to the upward-gazing Divinitas Excelsa, and ends here, in the apostle of the Gentiles with his sword. The framing is that of the whole ring: the figure set before the slender pilaster between two panels of the red-veined Bettona revetment, beneath the projecting dentilled capital he shoulders in the basin’s caryatid manner, the fragments of the fountain’s hexameters running on the mouldings above and below, a bronze animal-head spout discharging at the corner beneath his plinth. The architecture of the sequence is itself the first meaning: the axis opens with one prince of the apostles and closes with the other, Peter and Paul bracketing Church, City and Godhead between them — the two patrons in whom medieval Rome recognised her true founders, the pair who, in the commonplace the whole tradition repeated, refounded in Christ the city that Romulus and Remus had founded in blood. That the fountain carries the first founders too, as young falconers on the basin below, completes the correspondence: the two Romes, twin-founded both, stacked one above the other on Perugia’s fountain.
The figure is the canonical Paul, rendered with the basin’s fullest energy. The head carries the portrait type the tradition had fixed since the early Christian centuries — the high, domed, balding forehead, the long face, the great beard descending in twisting, deeply drilled strands to the breast — lifted and turned with an alertness that answers Peter’s speaking gesture across the sector. The attribute governs the composition: a sword of deliberately monumental scale, its broad blade rising diagonally past the right shoulder to the capital itself, its hilt gripped at the breast in the right hand — the weapon not worn but presented, carried upright against the body like a standard. The left hand, emerging at the waist, gathers the drapery and grasps a second, smaller form — the rolled letter of the epistolary apostle is the natural reading, though the weathered surface counsels description over insistence. The mantle is drawn across the body in the sector’s grand diagonal manner, every edge finished with the beaded, lace-like hem that marks the basin’s principal figures, breaking in a rich cascade over the gown to the bare feet on the stepped plinth; the whole figure has the wrapped, columnar mass of its neighbours, animated — as everywhere in this sector — by the counterpoint of turned head and gripping hands.
The sword bears the sector’s double meaning. It is, first, the instrument of the martyrdom — Paul beheaded at Rome, the blade the sign of the death that sealed the city’s second founding; and it is, inseparably, the scriptural figure the Middle Ages never read it without: the word of God sharper than any two-edged sword, the sword of the Spirit of the apostle’s own epistle — so that the outsized blade rising to the cornice is simultaneously execution and eloquence, what Rome did to Paul and what Paul’s word does in the world. Closing the axis, the figure thus balances its opening: Peter carries the keys that bind, Paul the sword that pierces — office and word, institution and mission, the two powers of the apostolic city held at the two ends of the Guelph profession, with the exalted Divinity gazing upward between them. For the commune that built the fountain, the statement was contemporary politics as much as sacred history; for the program’s designer, it was one more demonstration of the basin’s governing method, meaning built by sequence and adjacency around the ring.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, well preserved — the drilled beard, the sword’s edge and the hems surviving crisply — and restored with the basin in 1948–49 and 1995–99. No figure of the stage is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, refined only by stylistic judgment — and here, as with his counterpart Peter, the judgment has been unusually concordant: the vigorous apostles of the Roman sector, with their palpitating drill-work and their monumental, mobile wrapping, are the statues most consistently claimed for Giovanni Pisano, the manner that would carry him to the façade of Siena and the pulpits of Pistoia and Pisa. The attribution stands, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, as considered argument rather than document; the figure stands, as the design of 1278 intended, at the end of the Roman profession — the sword of the word raised beside the falling water, the axis of Peter closed by Paul.
The Cleric of Saint Lawrence
The statue stands in the southern sector of the upper basin, in the company of the city’s patrons, and its legends name not a person but an office: CLERIC(US) on the frame to the left of the head, B(EA)TI LAURE(N)TI(I) to the right — the cleric of blessed Lawrence, the attendant of the saint who stands at the adjoining junction. He is one of the two figures of the ring identified purely by function, the other being his dark counterpart, the clericus proditor who stands beside Sant’Ercolano; and beneath him, on the base moulding to the right, the photograph catches the opening word of one of the fountain’s most affecting verses — ERCULANE — the invocation that runs along this stretch of the basin calling on the two patrons together, Herculanus and Lawrence, to pray for the city that raised the monument. The anonymous server thus stands directly above the prayer his own church addressed to his own saint: office, invocation and adjacency composed, in the basin’s habitual manner, into a single statement.
The figure is the plainest of the ring, and its plainness is its character. A young man — the face broad, frontal and alert under a cap of short curls, carried high toward the capital he shoulders — stands in strict columnar verticality, wrapped in the long, unornamented garments of his station: the ankle-length tunic falling in a few broad, quiet folds, an ample vestment laid over the shoulders whose open front frames the figure’s one act. For he holds, raised against his chest in both hands, a large book — carried frontally, presented rather than read, the liturgical volume borne as the server bears it in procession, the object at once shield, badge and duty. There is no beaded hem, no drilled curl-work, no rhetorical gesture: where Peter speaks and Divinitas gazes and Paul presents the sword, the cleric simply stands and carries — and the sculptor has found, in that reduction, a genuine dignity, the anonymous minister rendered with the same grave frontality as the saints he serves.
His meaning lies in the company he keeps and the figure he answers. The southern sector is the basin’s civic heart — the enthroned Perusia between her nourishing nymphs, flanked by the two patron saints — and the designer has given each patron his cleric: Lawrence, the deacon-saint of the facing cathedral, attended by this faithful server; Ercolano, the bishop-martyr, attended by the traitor who betrayed him to the Goths. The two clerics are a moral diptych stretched across the sector — fidelity and treachery, the office honoured and the office defiled — and the anonymous figure with the book is the positive term: the ordinary, nameless clergy of San Lorenzo admitted to the ring of prophets and patrons exactly as the magistrates of 1278 are admitted among them a few junctions away. It is the same communal instinct in both cases: the fountain’s heaven has room for the city’s working personnel, the podestà beside the prophets, the server beside the saints — the bonum commune staffed, in marble, by its actual staff.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the deep red-veined Bettona revetment of the upper basin — the panels flanking this junction among the most richly figured of the stage — and restored with the monument in 1948–49 and 1995–99. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment — and honesty about that judgment cuts here in the opposite direction from the Roman apostles: the simplified carving, the summary drapery and the quiet frontality of the cleric belong to the workshop’s plainer register, the manner of the trained assistants executing the masters’ design, which is precisely what a campaign of twenty-four statues in a single year required and what the collaborative enterprise of the inscription implies. The attribution to the workshop is not a demotion but a description: on the fountain of the commune, the anonymous figure was carved by the anonymous hands — and stands none the worse for it, book to breast, above the prayer to his saint, in the ring he has held up for seven and a half centuries.
Saint Lawrence
The statue of Saint Lawrence stands in the southern sector of the upper basin, among the figures of the city’s own devotion, his name surviving in the legend at the left of the head — (SCS LA)URENTI(I) — and his identity doubly secured by his station: he is the titular of the cathedral that rises directly beside the fountain, the patron in whose name the commune’s principal church faces the commune’s principal monument. Beneath his plinth, on the base moulding, the photograph captures the closing words of the verse whose opening ran beneath his attendant cleric at the neighbouring junction: …s(an)c(t)e rogate — “holy ones, pray” — the end of the invocation that calls upon Herculanus and Lawrence together to intercede for Perugia. The prayer thus runs, on the stone itself, from the servant to the saint: beginning under the anonymous cleric, ending under Lawrence — a distribution which, whether original design or the fortune of the reassembly, gives this pair of junctions the character of a single petition carved across two figures.
The figure is a young deacon in the full dignity of his order. The head — youthful, round-faced, capped with short curls, carried in alert three-quarter turn toward the beholder’s left — rises against the foliate crockets of the junction; and the body is vested, with a specificity rare on the basin, in the deacon’s dalmatic: the wide-sleeved tunic of the liturgy, rendered here with its ornamented apparels carved in loving detail — a patterned band across the breast and shoulders, punched and drilled with minute enrichment, and, at the lower edge, a deep hem filled with a running scroll of carved rosettes and rinceaux, the embroidered border of the vestment translated into stone with almost textile patience. Against his side he carries the deacon’s book — the Gospel it was his office to proclaim — held closed in both hands, the right laid flat upon the upper cover, the left spread beneath: not read but kept, the volume borne as the ministry itself. What is absent is as telling as what is present: no gridiron, no palm, no flame — the instrument of the famous martyrdom nowhere in sight. The basin’s Lawrence is not the sufferer of the Roman persecution but the minister in his vestments, serene, young and on duty.
His meanings radiate in three directions. As titular of the cathedral, he is the southern sector’s anchor in the actual topography of the piazza — the fountain’s ring acknowledging the church beside it, the patron among the personifications exactly as the magistrates of 1278 stand among the prophets. As a Roman deacon — for Lawrence was archdeacon of Rome, martyred under Valerian — he quietly ties the civic sector back to the Roman axis across the basin, one more thread in the program’s weave of Perugia into the papal city’s history. And as the Church’s legendary almsgiver — the treasurer who, commanded to surrender the Church’s wealth, presented the poor as its true treasure — he is, of all conceivable patrons, the most eloquent to place upon a public fountain: the saint who gave the Church’s goods freely to the people presiding over the monument that gives the commune’s water freely to whoever comes with a jug. The designer needed no gridiron; on this monument, Lawrence’s charity, not his martyrdom, is the working iconography.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the red-veined Bettona revetment, and preserved in fine condition — the vestment’s carved borders, the young face and the book surviving crisply through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment, which here must register a middle register between the sector’s extremes: finer than the workshop plainness of the adjoining cleric — the ornamented apparels and the sweetly turned young head bespeak a capable, careful hand — yet without the drilled vehemence of the Roman apostles that criticism assigns to Giovanni. The figure belongs, on the honest reading, to the upper range of the collaborative execution that the verses’ double authorship implies: the masters’ design, an accomplished hand’s carving — the cathedral’s deacon rendered by the workshop at its best, book in hand, above the last words of his own city’s prayer.
Domina Clusi
The statue stands at the heart of the upper basin’s southern sector, first of the two nymphs who flank the enthroned Augusta Perusia, and her legend survives with full clarity on the frame beside her head: DOMINA CLUSII — the Lady of Clusium. The name requires, and the scholarship supplies, a precision: though the word evokes the ancient city of Chiusi, whose granaries the descriptive tradition invokes, the territory personified is more probably the Chiugi of Perugia — the fertile lowland between Chiusi and Lake Trasimeno that the commune held and farmed as its granary — so that the figure embodies not a foreign city but a possession, the corn-land of the Perugian contado given a body and a title of courteous dominion. Fragments of the fountain’s hexameters run on the mouldings above and below her, the verses of this stretch celebrating, in their broken words, the seat and the abundance of the city she serves; and her own attention declares her office, for the young head is turned — alone among the standing figures of the sector — toward the throne beside her: the Lady of the grain-lands looks to Perusia, whom she feeds.
The figure is among the most gracious of the ring. A young woman, her hair drawn back from a high smooth brow and gathered in coils over the ears, stands in the gentle contrapposto sway of the basin’s finest maidens, the head inclined and turned in three-quarter profile; the face — remarkably preserved — carries the soft, full-cheeked serenity of the workshop’s sweetest register. She wears a long gown, close over the bust, and a mantle drawn diagonally around the body, caught up over the left hip so that its edge — finished with the beaded, lace-like hem of the principal figures — descends in a rich zigzag cascade past the knee; the right hand gathers the drapery at the waist in a motif of courtly ease. Her attribute is carried in the crook of the left arm, against the hip, as a mother carries a child or a bride her flowers: a sheaf of wheat, the stalks gathered in her hand, the ears individually carved in a dense, tactile cluster — the harvest of the Chiugi presented not poured or scattered but held, personally, tenderly, to the body. She stands barefoot on the foliate plinth, the whole figure a single soft S-curve from inclined head to gathered hem.
Her meaning binds the basin’s two stages together. On the lower basin, the calendar labours the grain through the year — November’s ploughman and sower, June’s reaper, July’s thresher; here, one stage above, the result of all that work stands personified, the sheaf finished and carried in a lady’s arm: the vertical reading of the fountain, from labour below to abundance above, is nowhere more literal than at this junction. Within her own register she is one term of the triad that constitutes the program’s civic centre — grain-land, city, lake; bread, throne, fish — the cornucopia of foodstuffs, in the museum service’s phrase, arranged around Augusta Perusia as the material foundation of her rule. And the courteous fiction of the title deserves its note: domina, lady, is the language of feudal possession turned to grace — the territory Perugia dominated presented as a gentlewoman freely offering her sheaf, dominion sweetened into service, the contado’s subjection to the city recast, in marble, as devotion. It is the commune’s ideology at its most disarming.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the red-veined Bettona revetment — the panel to her right bearing, incised across the coloured stone, lines of the later Gothic lettering that records the fountain’s fourteenth-century vicissitudes — and preserved, through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99, in a condition that keeps face, sheaf and hem legible in fine detail. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment — and the Clusi belongs, with her sister of the lake and the sweetest figures of the basin, to the graceful register that criticism has generally placed in the orbit of the younger master and the workshop’s finest hands: the inclined head, the flowing hem, the tender carriage of the sheaf are of a piece with the Grammar and the Astronomy of the reliefs below. The attribution stands, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, as considered judgment; the figure stands, as the design of 1278 disposed her, at her queen’s right hand — the grain-lands in waiting, sheaf in arm, above the water that made the whole abundance flow.
Augusta Perusia
At the centre of the upper basin’s southern sector, between the Lady of the grain-lands and the Lady of the lake, the city itself sits enthroned: the legend on the frame beside her head reads (AU)GUSTA P(ER)USI(A), and to the right the hexameter continues with the word that is her whole program — FERTILIS, fertile. The title is itself an inheritance and a claim: Augusta Perusia is the honorific the city carried from the Roman age, the style recorded in antique letters on the Etruscan arch a few streets from the fountain, so that the statue’s name binds the commune of 1278 to its deepest civic past — the medieval city enthroned under her imperial Roman title, antiquity worn as a crown. And the stone around her keeps writing her history: incised across the red-veined panel at her side, in the angular Gothic letters of a later hand, runs the fourteenth-century inscription recording the restoration of the waters in 1322 — the city’s continuing chronicle carved, by the accident or instinct of the monument’s long life, directly beside the city’s own personified body. No junction of the ring gathers more of the fountain’s meaning into one place: the name, the fertility, the antiquity, the afterlife, and the queen.
The figure is the basin’s second enthroned woman, and the carving rises to the office. She sits — not on the standing figures’ plinth but on a projecting corbel of deeply undercut, pierced acanthus, the finest carved console of the stage, foliage worked almost in the round beneath her — with the erect ease of majesty: the head lifted and carried high, gazing out and slightly upward over the piazza toward the axis of the city she embodies; the face a smooth, full oval framed by the statue’s most distinctive adornment, long braided tresses that fall in plaited ropes over the shoulders beneath a coronal dressing of the hair — the coiffure of a queen who is also a maiden, sovereignty worn with youth. Her gown is girt high under the bust; over the knees the mantle spreads in broad, weighty folds whose every edge carries the beaded lace-like hem, descending in a double cascade to break in rich curls over the corbel’s foliage. And on her lap, cradled in both arms — the left encircling it, the right laid across the body toward it — she holds her attribute: a wide basket heaped with the fruits of her land, grapes and orchard fruit rounded against each other in a carved abundance, the cornucopia of the descriptive tradition rendered as a countrywoman’s laden basket held with a mother’s gesture. The queen does not display her plenty; she embraces it.
Her meaning is the program’s civic sum. The two nymphs turn toward her from either side, sheaf and fish converging on the throne: grain-land and lake in waiting upon the city, the contado’s abundance arranged as a court — and in her basket their offerings are gathered and exceeded, field, orchard and vine composed into the single fruitfulness the verse above her names. Across the basin she answers her counterpart: the ring’s only other enthroned woman is Roma, caput mundi, at the western cardinal point — and the rhyme of the two queens, prepared in the Roma analysis, completes itself here: capital and commune in identical majesty, Perugia acknowledging Rome’s headship of the world while claiming, throne for throne and crown for crown, the headship of her own. Facing the city’s great street with the fruits of the city’s land in her arms, above the water the city brought to itself, Augusta Perusia is the bonum commune given a body: what the aqueduct, the calendar’s labours, the nymphs’ territories and the magistrates’ government all exist to produce sits here, personified, at the fountain’s civic front — the city enthroned upon her own achievement.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the Bettona revetment whose panels flank her with the deepest reds of the stage, and preserved — through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99 — in a condition that keeps braids, basket, hems and the pierced corbel crisply legible. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment — which has placed this figure, consistently, among the summits of the cycle: the tender monumentality of the seated body, the goldsmith’s delicacy of braid and basket, and the sheer quality of the console beneath her argue a principal hand, and the graceful register aligns her, like her two ladies, with the orbit of the younger master at his sweetest, while the enthroned gravity keeps the elder’s design in view. The attribution stands, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, as judgment; the figure stands as the design of 1278 enthroned her — the fertile Augusta, fruit-laden, braided, antique of title and young of face, holding the whole argument of the Fontana Maggiore in a basket on her lap.
Domina Laci
The statue stands on the far side of the enthroned Augusta Perusia from her sister of the grain-lands, completing the nourishment triad at the civic heart of the upper basin: she is the Domina Laci, the Lady of the Lake — the personified fishery of Trasimeno, the great water of the Perugian contado. Her identification is carried both by her attribute and by the most charming survival of the sector’s epigraphy, legible on the frame to the right of her head: FERES PISCES — “you shall bring fish.” The hexameter does not merely label the figure; it addresses her, the fountain’s poem speaking to its own statue in the second person, assigning her office in the future tense of a standing command — and she obeys it perpetually, the fish in her hands, the promise of the verse fulfilled in the marble beneath it. Nowhere else on the basin do word and image converse so directly; whether the conjunction descends from the design of 1278 or from the post-earthquake reassembly, the stone as it stands makes the Lady of the Lake the one figure of the ring with her duty written beside her and discharged below it.
The figure is the twin, in grace and in office, of the Domina Clusi. A young woman — the hair waving softly back from the brow beneath a short veil that falls behind the shoulders, the face lifted and turned in the direction of the throne she serves — stands in the gentle sway of the basin’s maidens, wrapped in a mantle drawn diagonally across the gown, its edge finished with the beaded, lace-like hem descending in the sector’s characteristic zigzag cascade to a rippled, fringe-like lower border breaking over the bare feet on the foliate plinth. Her attribute is held before the breast in both hands: the fish of Trasimeno, its elongated body laid across her palms — the left hand spread beneath it, the right touching it from above — presented with the same personal tenderness with which her sister carries the sheaf: not a basket poured out but a single creature offered, the lake’s yield in a lady’s hands. The two nymphs are composed as mirrored terms, sheaf and fish, right hand and left of the queen, their turned heads converging on the throne between them.
Her meaning completes the triad’s, and adds a resonance of its own. Grain-land, city, lake — bread, throne, fish: the material foundation of Perugia’s rule stands personified around its personification, the cornucopia of foodstuffs of the museum service’s description arranged as a court. The vertical reading of the fountain holds here as it held for the grain: the absorbed angler of February on the basin below catches what the Lady of the Lake, one stage above, presents — labour transfigured into abundance as the eye rises. And the pairing itself carries an overtone no thirteenth-century beholder could miss, though the program nowhere insists on it: bread and fish together, offered to the city beside the water, are the food of the Gospel’s multiplication — the commune’s plenty quietly rhymed with the feeding of the multitude, civic abundance framed in the oldest image of providential nourishment. It is offered here as resonance rather than doctrine; the designer, as everywhere on this basin, teaches by arrangement and lets the echoes sound.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the red-veined Bettona revetment of the upper basin and preserved, through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99, with face, fish and hems intact — the weathering of the features slightly heavier than her sister’s, the composition undiminished. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment, which places the Laci where it places the Clusi: in the graceful register of the basin’s finest maidens, the orbit of the younger master and the workshop’s best hands — the two nymphs so evidently conceived and carved as a pair that they are best judged, and will one day be best exhibited, side by side. The attribution stands as considered judgment; the figure stands as the verse commands — bearing fish, at her queen’s left hand, above the water whose abundance she was carved to promise.
Sant’Ercolano
The statue of Sant’Ercolano — Herculanus, bishop of Perugia — stands in the southern sector of the upper basin among the figures of the city’s devotion, the second of the two patrons whom the sector’s invocation verse calls upon by name to pray for the commune. If Lawrence, at his junction nearby, is the patron of the cathedral, Ercolano is the patron of the city itself: the bishop who, in the account transmitted by Gregory the Great, led Perugia through the Gothic siege of the sixth century and was martyred at its fall — the defensor civitatis, the shepherd who died with his walls. Civic legend added the detail that fixed him in Perugian memory: betrayed at the last by one of his own clergy — and the basin remembers the betrayal too, for at the adjoining junction stands the clericus proditor, the traitor cleric, placed beside his victim in the ring’s most severe instance of its rhetoric of meaningful adjacency. Around the sector, then, the clerical figures compose their full moral architecture: Lawrence with his faithful server, Ercolano with his faithless one — ministry honoured and ministry betrayed, flanking the enthroned city they variously served and sold.
The figure is a bishop in the complete solemnity of his office, and the carving of the vestments is the most sumptuous on the basin. He stands frontally, a low mitre of the early form on his head, above a face that is the sector’s most individualised: mature, heavy-jowled, wide-eyed, the fleshy features of a portrait rather than a type — whether by intention or by the carver’s naturalist habit, a particular man’s face on the city’s particular saint. The body is built up in the full layering of pontifical dress — the long fringed dalmatic beneath, its lower border finished in a carved row of tassels; the great chasuble over it, falling from the shoulders in broad conical folds — and across these surfaces the carver has spread a continuous delicate enrichment of punched and drilled diapering, the textile patterns of the liturgical silks translated into stone with the same patience lavished on Lawrence’s apparels and, once, on the chased finery of the original Roma. The left hand, wrapped in the vestment’s edge, grips the tall staff of the crozier rising beside the body; the right is raised before the breast, closed around a rounded form which the weathered surface leaves between readings — held emblem or gathered gesture — and which is better described than named. Beside the mitre, among the crockets of the junction, small carved heads peer from the foliage: the capital zone itself inhabited, a detail unique in the ring.
His meaning is the deepest layer of the sector’s civic argument. Lawrence connects the fountain to the cathedral and to Rome; Ercolano connects it to the city’s own blood. The bishop who fed his people through the siege — legend told how he strove by stratagem to make the starving city seem provisioned — and who was killed when treachery opened the walls, stands here above the fountain that made the city’s provisioning sure: the defender of Perugia’s life presiding over the monument of Perugia’s water, his martyrdom the dark foundation under the basin’s imagery of abundance. That the commune placed his betrayer in the same ring is the measure of the program’s seriousness: this is not a gallery of comfortable patrons but a civic examination of conscience in marble — fidelity and treason, siege and plenty, the city’s worst hour set beside its proudest achievement, with the invocation running beneath the sector asking both patrons, the Roman deacon and the Perugian bishop, to keep the second from ever again becoming the first.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the red-veined Bettona revetment and preserved — through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99 — with the vestments’ diapering, the tasselled hem and the remarkable face intact. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment: the sumptuary refinement of the surfaces places the figure with Lawrence in the accomplished upper range of the collaborative execution, while the blunt, individualised naturalism of the head — so unlike the idealised maidens of the triad — suggests a hand, or a moment, of direct observation that criticism has associated with the workshop’s most advanced tendencies. The attribution stands, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, as considered judgment; the bishop stands as the design of 1278 stationed him — mitred, vested, crozier in hand, the defender of the city at his post above her water, his betrayer forever beside him and his people’s prayer forever beneath.
The Traitor Cleric
The statue stands at the junction beside Sant’Ercolano, and its legends identify it by crime rather than by name: the transmitted reading of the frames gives CL(ER)ICUS P(RO)DITOR — the traitor cleric — completed, in the words clearly legible in the photograph to the right of the head, by S(AN)C(T)I hERCULANI: the betrayer of Saint Herculanus, the man defined forever by the victim at the neighbouring junction. He is the counterpart, in every structural sense, of the faithful cleric who attends Saint Lawrence across the sector: two figures named by office alone, two anonymous clergymen flanking their respective patrons — but where the one carries the liturgical book in loyal service, this one is stationed beside the bishop whom, in the civic legend of the Gothic siege, he sold. Why the traitor’s motive was what it was, the tradition does not securely transmit — the sources on the fountain concede the point — and the basin does not explain him; it simply keeps him, at his post, beside his victim, for as long as the marble lasts.
The figure is a young man whose very gentleness is the disquiet of the composition. The head — capped with soft curls, tilted slightly, the face smooth, youthful, almost sweet in expression — rises against the foliate crockets like any of the ring’s gracious figures; nothing in the physiognomy is villainous, and the carver has refused the easy grotesque. The body is wrapped in the long garments of his clerical station, a flat panelled overgarment descending the front of the tunic to the shod feet on the plinth — footwear where the sector’s saints go barefoot, one of the quiet distinctions of the figure — and the pose delivers the meaning the face withholds: the arms are drawn in and folded across the body, the right hand sliding flat beneath the breast of the garment, half-concealed in the clothing, the left withdrawn into its sleeve. In the gesture-language the Middle Ages read fluently, the open, visible hand is faith; the hand hidden in the bosom is its opposite — concealment, reservation, the withheld troth. The traitor is identified not by a monstrous face but by what his hands are doing: the whole figure is a portrait of bad faith, treachery rendered as body-language, a pleasant young man whose hands cannot be seen.
His meaning is the sternest statement on the fountain. The commune of Perugia erected, at its own expense, on its proudest monument, a statue to a traitor — not to honour but to expose him: a pillory in marble, infamy monumentalised, the sculptural counterpart of the pittura infamante, the defaming images that Italian communes painted on public walls to perpetuate the shame of their betrayers — a parallel offered here as interpretive context, for the practice is documented in communal Italy even as the statue’s singularity on the basin remains its own. The anonymity that dignifies the faithful cleric — humble office, nameless service — is here inverted into punishment: the name erased, the crime remembered, the man reduced eternally to proditor. And the placement completes the sentence: he stands beside Ercolano forever, the betrayer bound to his victim’s company without end, while beneath the sector runs the invocation calling on the betrayed saint to pray for the city. Read with the wolf-fables of the basin below — the abuse of power, the false accusation — the traitor cleric is the upper basin’s contribution to the fountain’s jurisprudence: the commune’s memory, the program declares, has room for its enemies, and its justice extends to marble.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the pale rose-veined Bettona revetment of this stretch of the basin, and preserved — through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99 — with the pose, the tell-tale hands and the disquietingly gentle face intact. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment, which places the figure — like his faithful counterpart — in the workshop’s plainer register of execution, the simplified drapery and quiet frontality of the trained assistants working to the masters’ design; yet the design itself, the refusal of caricature and the concentration of the entire moral content into the hands, is conception of the first order, wherever the chisel-work fell. The attribution stands as judgment; the traitor stands as the commune sentenced him — curls, soft face, hidden hands, shod feet — beside the saint he sold, above the water of the city he betrayed, serving out, in his eighth century, the only sentence a statue can: to be seen.
Saint Benedict with his Disciples
The junction of Saint Benedict is unlike any other on the upper basin: where twenty-three positions carry a single figure, this one carries a group. The patriarch of Western monasticism stands under the capital with the legend S(AN)C(TU)S BE(NE)DIC(TUS) surviving on the frame; at his knee kneels a young monk, hands lifted; and behind his shoulder, half-emerging from the junction’s depth, appears the head of a second disciple — three figures where the ring elsewhere allows one. The composition resolves, in the most concrete way, a small crux of the fountain’s catalogues: the listings of the twenty-four that count a “San Mauro” among the statues are counting the company within this group, for no independent Maurus stands at any junction — the kneeling disciple is most naturally read as Maurus, the shoulder companion as Placidus, the two favourite sons of the Benedictine tradition gathered to their father, though the figures carry no individual legends and the identifications are offered as the tradition’s, not the marble’s. And beneath the group, on the base moulding, the photograph captures an epigraphic conjunction of real significance: the words …LAUDAND(US) BE(NE)DIC(T)I DOTE… — “…worthy of praise… with the gift of Benedict…” — the fragment of the dedicatory verse that celebrates Fra Bevignate, the fountain’s Benedictine director of works, through the name of his own patriarch. The monk who built the monument is praised, on the stone, directly beneath the monk who founded his order: whether by the design of 1278 or the fortune of the reassembly, the fountain signs its administrator under its saint.
The group is a lesson caught in the act. Benedict stands cowled and bearded, the monastic hood framing a grave, weathered face inclined toward his disciples; and against his breast, turned outward for the kneeling monk — and for the beholder — to read, he holds an open book whose pages carry, incised in the marble, the words AUDI FI(LI)… : “Listen, my son” — the opening of the Prologue of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the founding sentence of Western monastic obedience, quoted verbatim on the page of a statue’s book. The right hand extends over the text toward the disciple below; and the kneeling Maurus answers the gesture completely — the young cowled figure sunk on his knees against the master’s side, face lifted, both hands raised open toward the book and the blessing, the body a single arc of attention. Behind Benedict’s shoulder the second young head inclines into the group, listening. No other junction of the ring attempts narrative; here, uniquely among the statues, the basin stages a scene — the Rule being given, obedience being learned — the master-and-pupil formula of the Liberal Arts below (Grammar’s embraced child, Arithmetic’s answering hands) raised to the upper stage and consecrated.
The meanings gather thickly. Benedict’s presence on the fountain is, first, the homage of the enterprise to its own director: Fra Bevignate, the Silvestrine — the reformed Benedictine — who as operis structor carried the whole project, honoured through his patriarch’s statue and, as the verse beneath declares, through his patriarch’s very name. The inscribed AUDI FILI makes the group the upper basin’s figure of teaching and obedience — the virtues on which both a monastery and a commune’s great public works depend. And for those who knew their Gregory the Great, the kneeling Maurus carried one resonance more, almost too apt for the setting: Maurus is the disciple who, in the Dialogues, walked upon the water at Benedict’s command to save the drowning Placidus — obedience so perfect it forgot that water does not bear — so that the group of master and disciples stands, on the rim of the city’s water, remembering the miracle in which obedience mastered water itself. The program nowhere insists on the allusion; on this basin, as everywhere, the designer arranges and lets the echoes sound.
The group is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the pale rose Bettona revetment and preserved — through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99 — in remarkable condition, the inscribed book crisply legible, the kneeling figure’s drapery and lifted hands intact, the whole standing on a plinth whose carved foliage breaks like foam beneath the scene. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the dedicatory verses naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment — which must reckon here with the most ambitious composition of the stage: a three-figure narrative group carved for a one-figure station, its interlocking bodies and its speaking book conceived with an inventive freedom that argues the masters’ direct design, whatever hands executed the parts. The attribution stands, as everywhere on the unsigned fountain, as judgment; the group stands as the design of 1278 composed it — the father of monks giving the Rule above the verse that blesses, with Benedict’s own gift, the Benedictine who gave Perugia its fountain.
Salome, the Puella Ferens
The statue stands at the junction adjoining Saint John the Baptist, and the marble names her not by name but by act: PUELLA FERENS, legible in full on the frame to the left of her head — “the girl carrying,” the continuation of the phrase lost to the weathered frame but its object held, unmistakably, in her hands. The naming is doubly exact. She is the third figure of the ring defined by deed rather than identity — with the faithful cleric and the clericus proditor, one of the basin’s small company of the unnamed, characterised entirely by what they do — and the word itself is scriptural: the Gospel accounts of the Baptist’s death never name the dancer, calling her only puella, the girl, and the Vulgate’s own noun is the one the carver incised. The marble quotes the Gospel’s reticence; the name Salome belongs to Josephus and the commentators, and the analysis uses it as the tradition’s convenience while the stone, more austerely, keeps to “the girl.” Beneath her, on the base moulding to the right, the photograph captures one of the great epigraphic survivals of the basin: a cross followed by NOMINA SCULPT(ORUM)… — the opening of the verse nomina sculptorum fontis sunt ista bonorum, “these are the names of the good sculptors of the fountain,” the line that introduces the praise of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. The girl carrying the head stands directly above the words that carry the makers’ names — a conjunction of the reassembled basin that the analysis records without forcing.
The figure is built on a single, terrible contrast. She is the slenderest of the ring’s maidens: a slight body in a long, close-fitting gown that opens along the side over the advancing leg in the courtly fashion, the drapery falling in a few unbroken lines to the plinth; a small, smooth head — the hair drawn back, a long braided tress dropping over the shoulder — turned in impassive profile, gazing away over what she bears. And what she bears fills her arms: the severed head of the Baptist, carried at the breast in both hands like a vessel — a head nearly the scale of her own torso, its wild locks tumbling over her fingers, the bearded face carved with open mouth and heavy-lidded eyes, suffering rendered at full pathos in the very object the girl holds without looking. The composition gives everything to the disproportion: the great anguished head against the slight indifferent bearer, weight against slightness, expression against blankness — horror stated not by her face but by the fact that her face states nothing. The post-restoration surfaces, crisp in the photograph, keep both registers intact: the polished economy of the girl, the churned drama of the head.
Her meaning works, as everywhere on the basin, by adjacency and echo. She stands beside her victim: the Baptist at the neighbouring junction carries the lamb of his preaching, while the girl at his side carries his head — cause and consequence, the ring’s most unsparing pairing, sterner even than the traitor beside Ercolano, for here the instrument of death bears the death itself in her arms forever. The Gospel scene is compressed into the two figures: the banquet, the dance, the oath and the charger all implied in the puella ferens and what she ferries. And a quieter echo sounds across the basin’s stages: the lower basin carries Delilah with the sleeping Samson — the upper, the girl with the Baptist’s head — the two women through whom God’s strong men were undone, one a stage above the other, the program’s meditation on strength and its betrayals extended from the reliefs to the ring. The designer, as always, arranges; the beholder, then as now, completes.
The statue is white Carrara marble of the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated verse inscription, set against the pale rose Bettona revetment of this stretch, and preserved — and recently conserved, as the fresh surfaces of the photograph attest — through the restorations of 1948–49 and 1995–99. No figure of the ring is signed; authorship rests on the verses beneath this very statue naming Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, and on stylistic judgment — which must here hold two manners in one figure: the girl’s slender, linear courtliness belongs with the basin’s gracious maidens, while the Baptist’s head, worked with drilled, expressive vehemence, belongs to the dramatic register that criticism assigns to Giovanni — so that the statue, like the fountain entire, may preserve the collaboration in miniature, the bearer and the borne answering to the enterprise’s two temperaments. The attribution stands as judgment; the girl stands as the Gospel’s own word placed her — puella ferens, carrying what she carried, above the names of the men who made her, in the eighth century of her errand.
Saint John the Baptist
The statue of Saint John the Baptist occupies one of the twenty-four junctions of the upper basin. There, full-length figures stand at the angles and at the centre of each side, set on projecting bases and capped above by consoles aligned with the upper profile of the basin, and are carved in three-quarter round. The program of this register is organised around four cardinal figures, Solomon to the east, Rome to the west, Euliste to the north and Augusta Perusia to the south, with the remaining figures grouped around them. The Baptist belongs to the eastern sector, where the group running from Moses to Benedict of Norcia, including David, John the Baptist and Salome, has the prophet-king Solomon as its core. Within that group he finds his narrative counterpart in Salome, shown holding the bearded head of the Baptist, so that the story of his martyrdom is distributed across two separate statues. The present sequence should nonetheless be read with caution: the earthquake of 1348 damaged the fountain and led to a haphazard reassembly, followed by restorations in 1948–49 and again in 1995–99. In the band beneath the figure, incised capitals survive, but they are too fragmentary in this view to be transcribed, and the identification rests on the saint’s attributes. Below the base projects one of the bronze animal heads through which water passes from the upper basin into the lower one, and which are twelve in number.
The Baptist is conceived as a tall, columnar figure whose body faces the viewer while the head turns sharply into profile towards his right. It is an abrupt rotation that gives the statue its sense of alert attention. The head is the most intensely worked passage of the sculpture: the hair and the long, forked beard are rendered as dense clusters of corkscrew curls, hollowed by deep drill channels that break the surface into strong accents of light and shadow.
The face beneath, with its aquiline nose and heavy brow, has the gaunt gravity appropriate to the ascetic of the desert. His right shoulder and arm appear bare, and the right hand is raised against the chest with the index finger extended towards the small lamb cradled in the crook of his left arm. Behind the shoulder rise lobed, ear-like forms whose reading is not self-evident. They may belong to the folded upper edge or the animal head of the camel-skin garment, and they would repay examination at close range. The mantle falls in long, shallow vertical folds to the calves, where its hem is carved as a ragged, tufted fringe, a deliberate evocation of the rough camel hair of the Gospel narrative (Matthew 3:4; Mark 1:6). The feet, broad and firmly planted, rest on the projecting base, anchoring the figure against the polished stone panels behind.
The gesture is a sculptural rendering of the words with which John designates Christ in the Fourth Gospel, Ecce Agnus Dei (John 1:29, 36). It is the canonical formula of Baptist iconography, and it defines his role as the one who points beyond himself. As the last of the prophets and the first witness of the New Covenant, John is the natural hinge between the Old Testament figures of the eastern group, Moses, David and Solomon, and the Christian saints who complete it.
His prominence here also carries a meaning specific to the monument: in the fountain’s program he is given an eminent place in the east because of the role of water as an essential and sacred element. On a civic fountain inaugurated to celebrate the arrival of aqueduct water on the acropolis of Perugia, the saint of the Jordan sanctifies the element that the commune had brought into the heart of the city. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius read the upper figures as a whole under the sign of regnum, sacerdotium et studium, and in that scheme the Baptist belongs to the sphere of prophecy and priesthood that frames the city’s political self-representation. The choice also has a precedent within the Pisano workshop: on Nicola’s pulpit in the Pisa Baptistery, the corners of the intermediate register already present the Virtues, Saint John the Baptist and the Archangel Gabriel.
The figure is carved in white marble and set against the panels of the upper basin, the fountain as a whole being built of white and pink stone. The fountain was designed by Fra Bevignate, its hydraulic system executed by Boninsegna of Venice, and its sculpture carried out by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. Its Latin inscription names all the participants and gives 1278 as the year of completion, while the bronze basin bears an inscription dated 1277 with the name of the founder, Rubeus. A date of 1277–1278 for the statue is therefore secure. Attribution within the workshop is more delicate.
As the fountain demanded twenty-four statues, fifty reliefs and extensive architectural elements in a short time, the prevailing practice was to have several craftsmen work on the same piece simultaneously or in succession, which accounts for the monument’s stylistic unity. Francesco Cavallucci recognised Nicola’s hand and style in a group of figures that includes the Baptist and Salome. The deeply drilled curls of this head, however, recall the features that criticism has associated with Giovanni, whose presence is sensed in the more vigorous statues of the upper basin, marked by drill-work, expressive faces and dynamic figures. The most prudent formulation is therefore Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop, with the design plausibly Nicola’s and the finishing of the head open to Giovanni’s intervention.
King Solomon
The statue of Solomon holds one of the four cardinal positions around which the entire figural program of the upper basin is organised. In the disposition of the twenty-four figures, four central elements emerge — Euliste to the north, Augusta Perusia to the south, Rome to the west and Solomon to the east — with the remaining statues gathered around them. Solomon is thus not one figure among many but the anchor of the eastern arc, the core around which the group running from Moses to Benedict of Norcia, and including David, John the Baptist and Salome, is constituted. Like his counterparts, he stands at an angle of the twelve-sided basin, set on a projecting moulded base and framed above by a foliate console whose crocketed leaves curl behind his shoulders, aligning with the upper cornice. In the band beneath the cornice, fragmentary incised capitals are visible in this photograph — part of the lettering that runs along the upper basin — but they are too worn and too obliquely lit to be transcribed with confidence from this view. Below the base, a bronze animal-head spout with erect ears, one of the twelve ferine protomes through which water descends from the upper to the lower basin, still performs its original function, the jet issuing from its mouth.
The figure is upright and columnar, the body presented frontally while the head turns slightly to its left, gazing outward over the piazza with a composed, almost impassive expression. The face is smooth and youthful — a striking choice for a king more often imagined in venerable old age — with regular features, a straight nose and firmly closed lips, framed by hair that falls to the jaw beneath the headdress. That headdress is a low cylindrical cap with a raised band at the brow, its upper edge now abraded; whether it was originally carved as a crown with points, or always intended as this flat-topped regal cap, cannot be decided from the photograph, and the surface loss counsels caution. Across the torso runs the statue’s most distinctive element: a broad, flat band descending diagonally from the right shoulder to the left hip, most plausibly to be read as a scroll or unrolled phylactery, the emblem of the king’s authorship of the sapiential books, held at its lower end while the other hand gathers the edge of the mantle at the hip. The long tunic and mantle fall in calm, parallel folds of shallow relief to the feet, a drapery language of measured verticality that gives the figure the gravity of a column given human form.
Solomon’s meaning within the program operates on several registers at once. Geographically, as the eastern pole he stands for Jerusalem, the ancient capital and fountainhead of Christian wisdom, in deliberate correspondence with Rome on the western side: the axis running through the fountain thus binds the old holy city to the new capital of Christendom, with Perugia physically and symbolically between them. As the rex sapiens and rex pacificus of the Old Testament, the builder of the Temple and the archetype of the just judge, Solomon offered the medieval commune its most authoritative biblical model of good government — a resonance hardly accidental on a civic monument raised between the cathedral and the seat of communal power. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, in her study of the fountain’s program, read the upper-basin figures as an articulation of regnum, sacerdotium et studium, and Solomon is the one figure in whom all three spheres converge: king, temple-builder and sage. The scroll across his chest makes the last of these visible, presenting him not enthroned in judgement but standing as the author and transmitter of wisdom, the Old Testament counterpart to the doctrinal personifications — Ecclesia Romana and Divinitas — that flank Rome on the opposite side of the basin.
The statue is carved in white marble, set against the smooth panels of the upper basin within a fountain built of white and pink stone from the quarries of Assisi. Its dating rests on the securest of foundations: the great dedicatory inscription of the fountain names all the protagonists of the enterprise — Fra Bevignate as director of works, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors, Boninsegna of Venice for the hydraulics — and gives 1278 as the year of completion, while the bronze basin above carries the founder Rubeus’s signature dated 1277; the statue therefore belongs to 1277–1278. Attribution within the workshop must remain collective. The commission required twenty-four statues, fifty reliefs and the entire architectural apparatus within a very short span, and the shop practice of setting several carvers to work on the same piece in succession, rather than assigning each statue to a single hand, produced the monument’s remarkable unity while defeating any confident connoisseurship. It is worth noting that Francesco Cavallucci’s list of figures in which he recognised Nicola’s hand and style — including the Baptist and Salome from this same eastern group — does not name Solomon, and no strong individual claim for either master attaches to this statue in the literature consulted. The prudent formulation is Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop, within a design whose overall conception the elder master plausibly governed.
King David the Psalmist
The statue of David stands at one of the twenty-four junctions of the upper basin, within the eastern sector whose figures — running from Moses to Benedict of Norcia, and including John the Baptist and Salome — are gathered around the cardinal statue of Solomon. Father and son thus stand near one another on the fountain, the psalmist beside the sage, and the pairing has deep roots in the Pisano workshop’s own habits: on the façade of Siena cathedral, Giovanni would later place the two Old Testament kings, David and Solomon, together above the central portal. Like its companions, the figure occupies an angle of the twelve-sided basin, raised on a projecting moulded base and capped by a foliate console whose volutes curl behind the head, carrying the line of the dentillated cornice around the corner. Below the base projects a bronze spout in the form of a bull’s head, its horn-tips bright against the dark patina, one of the twelve ferine protomes through which the water falls from the upper into the lower basin.
The figure presents the columnar frontality common to the series, animated by a turn of the head to its right, in the direction of Solomon’s pole, and by the quiet asymmetry of the arms. David is shown as a mature man, his face framed by tight, drilled curls and a full, short beard parted into locks; a small projection survives at the crown of the head, perhaps the stump of a lost or abraded element, and whether the king originally wore a carved diadem cannot be decided from this view. The identification rests instead, securely, on the attribute: against the left side of the chest he supports a small quadrangular stringed instrument — a psaltery or cithara — its upper edge articulated by a row of knob-like tuning pegs, its taut strings rendered as fine parallel ridges, while the right hand crosses the body to pluck them. The instrument is not merely held but played, a gesture of arrested performance rather than static display. The long tunic falls in vertical folds to the ankles, and the mantle, drawn across the body, terminates at the right hip in a scrolled fold whose hem — like the lower border of the garment — is carved as a decorated, tufted edge, an ornamental refinement this statue shares with the neighbouring Baptist. The feet in flat sandals rest firmly on the projecting base.
Within the program, David completes the genealogy of sacred kingship that the eastern arc lays out: Moses the lawgiver, David the anointed king and psalmist, Solomon the temple-builder and sage, and John the Baptist, the last prophet, form a chain that carries the Old Covenant to the threshold of the New. David’s own role in that chain is defined by his music. As the author of the Psalms, sung daily in every church of Christendom, he is the biblical archetype of sacred song, and his sounding cithara on a public fountain resonates with the personification of Musica among the Liberal Arts carved on the basin below — a vertical correspondence between the divine singer above and the human science beneath, entirely in keeping with the ordering of regnum, sacerdotium et studium that Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius recognised in the upper register. Nor is the choice without civic point: David the shepherd raised to kingship, the slayer of Goliath whose duel is carved on the lower basin among the exempla of the commune, embodied for a medieval city-republic the victory of the small and just over the arrogant and strong. The fountain thus shows him twice, in action below and in majesty above, the giant-killer become the singing king.
The statue is carved in white marble and set against the smooth panels of the upper basin, within a monument built of white and pink stone. Its dating is fixed by the fountain’s dedicatory inscription, which names Fra Bevignate as director of works, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors and Boninsegna of Venice as hydraulic engineer, and records 1278 as the year of completion, the bronze basin above bearing the founder Rubeus’s signature with the date 1277; the figure therefore belongs to 1277–1278. As throughout the upper basin, attribution to an individual hand is hazardous: the workshop’s practice of letting several carvers work the same piece in succession preserved the unity of the whole at the cost of connoisseurial certainty, and David does not appear in Francesco Cavallucci’s list of statues in which he recognised Nicola’s manner, which within this same eastern group names the Baptist and Salome. The vigorous drill-work of the curls and beard belongs to the technical repertoire that criticism associates with the more expressive statues of the upper basin, where Giovanni’s genius is felt; but the prudent formulation remains Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop.
Moses the Lawgiver
The statue of Moses opens the eastern sequence of the upper basin, the group that runs from the Lawgiver to Benedict of Norcia by way of David, John the Baptist and Salome, all gathered around the cardinal figure of Solomon. It occupies one of the twenty-four junctions of the twelve-sided basin, but with a placement subtly grander than most of its companions: the figure stands upon a short moulded colonnette rising from the cornice of the parapet, and is crowned by a foliate console, flanked at shoulder height by two volutes, that carries the dentillated cornice of the basin around the angle. In this photograph the statue is caught beneath the veil of water falling from the bronze basin above, the element it presides over streaking the air around it — an accident of the shot that restores the fountain to its living function.
The figure shares the columnar verticality of the series while achieving an unusual density of surface incident. Moses is presented as an aged patriarch: the face is long and severe, with a furrowed brow, deep-set eyes and a massive beard that descends over the chest in thick, separately drilled locks, beneath heavy strands of hair — carved, it should be noted, without the horns that other medieval traditions gave the prophet after Jerome’s cornuta facies. In his right hand, held low and diagonally across the body, he grasps a slender rod: the virga, the staff with which he struck the rock of Horeb and brought forth water for Israel in the desert. Against the left side of the chest, supported on the forearm and partly veiled by a fold of the mantle drawn over the hand, rests a flat, squared object, to be read as the Tablets of the Law or a codex standing for them; the covered hand is the ancient gesture of reverence before a sacred object. The mantle crosses the body in a great diagonal sweep whose free edge is carved as a tufted, ornamented border — the same decorated hem found on the Baptist and David of this group — descending in zigzag folds of real plastic depth before breaking over the feet. The whole drapery system, calm above and increasingly agitated below, gives the old prophet a contained monumentality worthy of his rank.
Moses’ meaning on this monument is arguably the most site-specific of the entire upper basin. As Lawgiver he stands at the head of the chain of sacred authority that the eastern arc unfolds — law, kingship, wisdom, prophecy — culminating in Solomon and reaching its threshold in the Baptist; within the tripartite scheme of regnum, sacerdotium et studium that Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius recognised in the program, he is the founding figure of the law that underlies all three. But it is the rod in his hand that binds him to the fountain itself. The prophet who drew water from the rock is the Old Testament’s great miracle-worker of water, and his presence on a monument erected to celebrate the arrival of aqueduct water on the arid acropolis of Perugia turns the commune’s engineering triumph into a typological event: as God through Moses gave water to his people in the wilderness, so the city — through Fra Bevignate’s direction and Boninsegna’s hydraulics — has given water to its citizens. The eastern placement of the group, associated with the Baptist and the sacredness of water, reinforces the point. Few figures on the fountain so perfectly fuse biblical typology with civic self-celebration.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, within a fountain built of white and pink stone. The dating rests on the monument’s own epigraphy: the dedicatory inscription names Fra Bevignate as director of works, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors and Boninsegna of Venice as hydraulic engineer, and gives 1278 as the year of completion, while the bronze basin bears the founder Rubeus’s signature dated 1277; the figure therefore belongs to 1277–1278.
Attribution follows the pattern of the whole register: the workshop’s practice of passing each piece through several hands in succession produced the fountain’s unity and frustrates individual assignment, and Moses does not appear in Francesco Cavallucci’s list of statues in which he recognised Nicola’s manner — a list that, within this same eastern group, names the Baptist and Salome. The deeply excavated beard and the pathos of the aged face belong to the expressive register that criticism associates with Giovanni’s share in the upper basin, but the prudent formulation remains Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop.
Matteo da Correggio
With this statue the upper basin turns from sacred history to the living present of the commune. Matteo da Correggio belongs to the northern group, gathered around the cardinal figure of Euliste, the legendary founder of Perugia; the sequence of statues runs from David and Moses through Matteo da Correggio and the Archangel Michael to Euliste, Melchizedek and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, so that the two chief magistrates of the city frame its mythical founder, each accompanied by a celestial guardian. The figure stands at one of the twenty-four junctions of the twelve-sided basin, on a projecting moulded base beneath a foliate console whose crocketed leaves curl behind the shoulders. On the band beneath the statues, this photograph catches a run of incised Gothic capitals to the right of the base — too abraded for continuous transcription, but significant for their position: it is along this lower margin of the upper basin that the fountain’s great dedicatory inscription runs, the leonine hexameters that name Fra Bevignate as director of works, Boninsegna as hydraulic master, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors, and record the completion of the work in 1278, in the time of Pope Nicholas III and Emperor Rudolf I. Below the base, a bronze spout in the form of a slender equine head, one of the twelve ferine protomes, still delivers its jet of water into the lower basin.
The statue is a study in civic sobriety. The podestà is shown as a man in the prime of life, clean-shaven, with full cheeks and hair falling smoothly to the jaw beneath a low, flat-topped cap with a raised band — the dignified headgear of a magistrate rather than the crown of a king or the bare head of a saint. He wears a long, loose civic gown with wide sleeves, falling in a few broad, quiet folds to the ankles, its very plainness a statement: no fringed hems, no agitated drapery, none of the ornamental refinements lavished on the biblical figures of the eastern group. A band crosses the chest diagonally from the right shoulder, and in his right hand, held against the breast, he grasps a short cylindrical rod — the baton of command, the visible insignia of his jurisdiction — while the left hand opens outward in a gesture of address or demonstration, as if the magistrate were speaking to the citizens below. The head turns slightly to its left, animating the frontal pose. The whole figure has the measured, unemphatic realism of a portrait of office: not an individual likeness in the modern sense, but the exact image of a rank.
Matteo (III) da Correggio, of the great Emilian family, held the office of podestà of Perugia in 1278, the very year the fountain was completed; his counterpart Ermanno da Sassoferrato was capitano del popolo. It should be noted that part of the literature reverses the two offices, but the prevailing scholarly tradition, followed here, assigns the podesteria to Matteo. His presence on the fountain is one of the program’s boldest strokes: a serving magistrate, a living man, set in marble among prophets, kings and archangels. Together with Ermanno he constitutes one of the earliest instances in medieval Italy of the public statue of a contemporary civic official, and the placement is charged with meaning. The podestà — the foreign rector who administered justice — stands immediately beside Moses, bearer of the divine Law, and the Archangel Michael, wielder of the celestial sword; earthly jurisdiction is thus framed between its ultimate source and its ultimate guarantor. Within the scheme of regnum, sacerdotium et studium that Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius recognised in the upper basin, Matteo embodies the regnum in its communal, temporal form: the fountain proclaims that the government of Perugia in the year 1278 belongs to the same providential order as the history of salvation itself.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, within a fountain built of white and pink stone. Its dating is doubly secure: the dedicatory hexameters give 1278 as the year of completion, the bronze basin bears Rubeus’s signature dated 1277, and the subject himself dates the figure, since it portrays the magistrate in office in 1278 — a rare case in which iconography and chronology coincide to the year. Attribution follows the collective logic of the enterprise: the workshop of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, with its practice of passing each piece through several hands, and no strong individual claim for this statue emerges from the sources consulted; it is worth recording that some archival photographic catalogues caption the figure with a prudent question mark, “Matteo da Correggio?”, a reminder that the identification of the two magistrates rests on the fountain’s inscriptions and on the pairing of the offices rather than on portrait features. The earthquake of 1348 and the subsequent reassembly of the upper basin, only partly corrected by the restoration of 1948–49, counsel the usual caution about the original position; the sources consulted record no replacement of the figure with a copy, a point verifiable against the documentation of the 1995–99 restoration.
The Archangel Michael
The Archangel Michael belongs to the northern group of the upper basin, the civic arc gathered around Euliste, the legendary founder of Perugia: the sequence runs from David and Moses through Matteo da Correggio and Michael to Euliste, Melchizedek and Ermanno da Sassoferrato. The archangel thus stands between the podestà and the founder — the celestial soldier inserted into the very heart of the commune’s self-representation. Like Moses, the figure enjoys the more elevated placement of the series, standing on a moulded colonnette that rises from the parapet, beneath a foliate console that carries the dentillated cornice around the angle. The photograph is unusually generous with epigraphy. On the band above, to the left of the head, runs a line of Gothic capitals in which a word plausibly legible as ANG(E)L(U)S can be made out — likely part of the titulus identifying the archangel, since the figures of the fountain are named by Latin inscriptions — with further letters, including what may read NOBILI, continuing to the right. On the lower band, flanking the pedestal, appear two fragments of the famous leonine hexameters that run along this margin: to the left the word TE(M)PORE, clearly legible with its abbreviation mark, and to the right, after an incised cross, letters plausibly reading INGENIO CLA… — a formula of praise entirely at home in the dedicatory verses that name the makers of the fountain and its date. A full transcription would require closer photography, but the fragments anchor this stretch of the basin firmly to the monument’s principal inscription.
The statue is among the most remarkable of the series for its costume. Michael appears as a beardless youth with thick, waving hair, bareheaded, his rounded face turned slightly to its left with an expression of calm watchfulness rather than martial fury. He is dressed all’antica, as a Roman soldier: a knee-length tunic whose skirt falls in dense, regular pleats like the kilt of a legionary; above the waist, a fitted upper garment finished at the hips with a row of scalloped lappets, pierced by drilled holes, that translates the pteryges of ancient armour into Gothic marble; and on the legs, greaves with articulated knee-pieces — genuine leg-armour, rendered with an almost antiquarian precision. Behind the shoulders rise the wings, their long feathers ascending on either side of the head toward the console. The right hand is raised against the chest, gripping a rounded pommel — most plausibly the hilt of a sword, whose blade either descends unobtrusively along the body or has been lost — while the lowered left hand clasps a vertical shaft at his side, to be read as a lance or the scabbard; a diagonal strap crosses the right side of the chest. The state of the surfaces, worn by seven centuries of weather and falling water, counsels caution on these attributes, but the military identity of the figure is not in doubt.
The meaning of the archangel in this position is precise. Michael is the archistrategos, the commander of the heavenly host, the angel who cast down the dragon and who, in medieval devotion, weighs souls at the Judgement and guards the faithful against the enemy. Placed immediately beside Matteo da Correggio, the serving podestà, he extends the logic already observed in that statue: as Moses supplies earthly justice with its divine source, Michael supplies it with its celestial enforcement — the magistrate’s baton flanked by the Law on one side and the sword of heaven on the other. His proximity to Euliste adds a second register: the archangel as guardian of the city itself, the supernatural protector standing watch beside its founder. The choice of Roman military dress is no less eloquent than the placement. In clothing heaven’s soldier as a legionary, the workshop drew directly on the antique studies that were the foundation of Nicola’s art — the same classicism that produced the Hercules-Samson figures of the pulpits — and made the archangel a bridge between the Roman past celebrated on the western side of the fountain and the Christian present of the commune; within the scheme of regnum, sacerdotium et studium proposed by Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, he stands with the powers that guarantee the regnum.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, in a monument built of white and pink stone. The dating rests on the fountain’s own epigraphy — the leonine hexameters, fragments of which flank this very figure, record the completion of the work in 1278, in the time of Pope Nicholas III and Emperor Rudolf I, naming Fra Bevignate as director, Boninsegna as hydraulic master and Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors, while the bronze basin carries Rubeus’s signature dated 1277; the figure therefore belongs to 1277–1278. On attribution the literature preserves an instructive division: Francesco Cavallucci included Saint Michael in the group of statues in which he recognised the hand and style of Nicola — one of the few figures of this northern arc for which a named claim exists — while the general caution imposed by the workshop’s collaborative practice, in which several carvers passed over the same piece, still applies. The classicising armour speaks for a design close to the elder master; the prudent formulation remains Nicola Pisano, with Giovanni and workshop.
Euliste
With Euliste the series reaches the third of the four cardinal figures of the upper basin. In the disposition of the twenty-four statues, four poles emerge — Solomon to the east, Rome to the west, Augusta Perusia to the south and Euliste to the north — and around the founder gathers the civic arc already visited: the podestà Matteo da Correggio and the Archangel Michael on one side, Melchizedek and the capitano del popolo Ermanno da Sassoferrato on the other. The legendary founder thus stands guarded by an archangel and a priest-king, and flanked at one remove by the two chief magistrates of 1278 — myth enthroned amid the living government of the commune. The statue occupies its angle of the twelve-sided basin on a projecting base beneath a foliate console, carved, as an older observer already noted, almost fully in the round. The epigraphy in this photograph is exceptional. On the upper band, worn capitals run on either side of the head, plausibly including the founder’s titulus, though not securely legible here. On the lower band, however, two fragments of the dedicatory hexameters emerge with rare clarity: to the left, letters reading …TORE VIGILI…, and to the right — decisively — Q(UE) BONĒSING…, the enclitic -que followed by the name of Boninsegna, the Venetian hydraulic master, with its abbreviation bar intact. The founder of the mythical city stands, by a happy accident of the reassembled basin, directly above the verse commemorating the man who actually brought the water.
The figure is a study in ageless nobility. Euliste appears as a beardless youth — or rather as a man outside time, neither young nor old — with a full, rounded face and long, waving hair that falls to the shoulders beneath a narrow fillet or diadem circling the brow: the mark of princely rank without the crown of biblical kingship. He wears a long tunic beneath an ample mantle draped over both shoulders and gathered across the body, its free edge carved with the tufted, ornamented border that this statue shares with Moses, David and the Baptist, descending in a decorated diagonal to the hem. The right hand is raised before the chest with the index finger extended — the ancient gesture of speech and demonstration, the founder addressing his city across the centuries — while the left hand, at the waist, grasps a rolled scroll, its cylindrical form and banded ends clearly legible: the rotulus as sign of foundational authority, the account or law of the city he begot. The feet, apparently bare, rest on the projecting base. The head turns slightly to its left, animating the columnar frontality of the figure; the surfaces, though weathered, preserve the calm amplitude of the drapery.
Euliste is the most purely Perugian invention of the entire fountain. The legendary Trojan — or Etruscan — hero from whom the city traced its origin has been connected with Aulestes, the Etruscan leader named in Virgil’s Aeneid (10.207), and his presence here served a precise ideological need: to give the commune an antiquity as venerable as Rome’s own, a founder to set against Romulus, whose story is carved on the lower basin. The statue is, moreover, the earliest monumental witness of the myth: it precedes by two decades the Eulistea, the Latin epic on the founder that the commune commissioned from Bonifacio da Verona in 1299, so that the marble does not illustrate the poem but anticipates it — evidence that by 1278 the legend was already civic doctrine, worth proclaiming at the very summit of the city’s proudest monument. Within the program, the north–south axis that Euliste forms with Augusta Perusia is the civic counterpart of the east–west axis of Solomon and Rome: as Jerusalem and Rome bind Perugia to universal history, founder and personified city bind that universal history to Perugia itself. In the scheme of regnum, sacerdotium et studium read into the upper basin by Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Euliste anchors the regnum in its most intimate, municipal form — the sovereignty of the city over its own origins.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, within a fountain built of white and pink stone. The dating could not be more literally inscribed than here: the leonine hexameters flanking the figure’s own pedestal belong to the dedicatory poem that records the completion of the work in 1278, under Pope Nicholas III and Emperor Rudolf I, naming Fra Bevignate as director of works — the structor to whom the fragment …TORE VIGILI… may well pertain — Boninsegna for the hydraulics, whose name survives beside this very base, and Nicola and Giovanni Pisano as sculptors; the bronze basin above adds Rubeus’s signature dated 1277. The figure therefore belongs to 1277–1278. Attribution follows the collective pattern of the register: Euliste does not appear in Francesco Cavallucci’s list of statues in which he recognised Nicola’s manner, and no strong individual claim attaches to it in the sources consulted; the prudent formulation is Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop. The earthquake of 1348 and the reordering it occasioned — only partly remedied in 1948–49 — apply their usual caveat to the present position, though the founder’s place at the northern pole is secured by the programmatic readings.
Melchizedek
Melchizedek stands in the northern group of the upper basin, the arc gathered around Euliste: the sequence runs from Matteo da Correggio and the Archangel Michael through the founder to Melchizedek and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, so that the priest-king of the Old Testament occupies the place symmetrical to the archangel, the two supernatural guarantors flanking the mythical origin of the city. The figure enjoys the elevated placement already seen in Moses and Michael, standing on a moulded pedestal that rises from the parapet beneath a foliate console, with the veil of water from the bronze basin falling behind it.
In the epigraphy on the band above, the titulus survives almost intact, with …LSEDEC legible to the left of the head — the end of [MELCHI]SEDEC — and, fully preserved to the right, the word SACERDOS: the fountain itself names him “Melchizedek the priest”. On the lower band, flanking the pedestal, further fragments of the dedicatory hexameters appear: to the left letters reading …E DIGNA…, and to the right OP(US) EXEGIT DE… — “carried out the work” — a phrase from the verses praising the makers of the fountain, joining the TEMPORE, INGENIO CLA… and Q(UE) BONĒSING… fragments recovered beside Michael and Euliste.
The statue is one of the most solemn of the register. Melchizedek appears as an aged man whose head is covered — the mantle drawn up over the crown like a priestly veil, framing the face in deep shadow — with a long beard descending in two heavy, drilled masses over the chest. The veiled head is the key gesture of the whole figure: where Solomon wears the cap of kingship and Michael goes bareheaded as a soldier, Melchizedek is covered as one who ministers before God. The right hand spreads flat against the breast, fingers extended — a gesture of profession, of the heart pledged — while the left hand, emerging from the folds at the waist, grips by its handle an elongated, tapering object that descends diagonally along the body; its precise identity is uncertain from this view — a knife-like implement is the most immediate reading, though a horn or furled object cannot be excluded — and it is described here by its morphology rather than assigned a name. The drapery is exceptionally rich: the mantle crosses the body in deep diagonal folds, cascades in a zigzag of overlapping edges down the right side, and breaks over the sandalled feet, giving the old priest a gravity of mass that few statues of the basin equal.
The meaning of Melchizedek in this position is doctrinally the densest of the northern group. The king of Salem and “priest of God Most High” who brought forth bread and wine and blessed Abraham (Genesis 14:18–20) became, through Psalm 110 — “a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek” — and the Letter to the Hebrews, the great Old Testament type of Christ and of the eucharistic priesthood, the figure in whom kingship and priesthood are united in a single person. The fountain’s own titulus, SACERDOS, selects exactly this identity. Within the scheme of regnum, sacerdotium et studium that Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius recognised in the upper basin, Melchizedek anchors the sacerdotium in the northern civic arc precisely where the magistrates anchor the regnum: around the founder Euliste, the commune displays earthly rule (Matteo, Ermanno), its celestial defence (Michael) and its priestly sanction (Melchizedek) — the complete medieval anatomy of legitimate power, assembled from myth, office and Scripture. That the priest-king of Salem should bless, as it were, the founder of Perugia as he once blessed Abraham is a typological compliment of remarkable civic audacity.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, in a fountain built of white and pink stone; the dating rests on the dedicatory hexameters — fragments of which flank this very pedestal — recording completion in 1278, with the bronze basin signed by Rubeus in 1277, and the figure therefore belongs to 1277–1278. On attribution, Melchizedek carries a distinction unique in the series: it is the one statue of the fountain to which a dedicated modern study attaches. Max Seidel devoted an article of 1971 to a statue fragment in the Museo Guarnacci at Volterra, proposing a connection with the Melchizedek of the Fontana Maggiore and framing the question as a hypothesis on Giovanni Pisano — a proposal that, if accepted, would bear both on the attribution of the figure to Giovanni and on the material history of the statue now in situ, and which deserves verification against the restoration literature before anything firmer is said. Beyond this, the collective logic of the workshop applies as everywhere on the basin: several hands passing over each piece, unity purchased at the price of connoisseurial certainty, and the prudent formulation remains Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop, with Seidel’s hypothesis marking Melchizedek as a candidate for Giovanni’s share.
Ermanno da Sassoferrato
Ermanno da Sassoferrato closes the northern group of the upper basin, the civic arc gathered around Euliste: the sequence runs from Matteo da Correggio and the Archangel Michael through the founder and Melchizedek to Ermanno, beyond whom stands Victoria — so that the capitano del popolo has Victory herself for his neighbour, a juxtaposition of evident military eloquence. Symmetry governs the whole arrangement: the two chief magistrates of 1278 occupy the outer ends of the arc, each separated from the founder by a sacred guarantor, the podestà by the archangel of the heavenly host, the capitano by the priest-king of Salem. The statue stands at its angle of the twelve-sided basin on a projecting moulded base beneath a foliate console.
The photograph secures the identification epigraphically: on the band above, to the right of the head, runs the titulus, legible as hERMĀN(US) D(E) SA… — the beginning of “Hermannus de Saxoferrato,” with its abbreviation marks intact — joining MOYSES and MELCHISEDEC SACERDOS among the tituli recovered. Further worn capitals appear on the upper band to the left and on the lower band beside the pedestal, the latter belonging to the leonine hexameters that run along this margin; they remain too abraded for continuous transcription. Below the base projects a bronze spout in the form of a ram’s head, its curled horns clearly visible — the twelve ferine protomes varying their species from angle to angle — still delivering its jet into the lower basin.
The statue is the deliberate pendant of Matteo da Correggio, and the sculptor has played the resemblance and the differences with equal care. Ermanno appears as a clean-shaven man of mature years, his face longer and more angular than the podestà’s rounded features, with hair falling smoothly to the jaw beneath a low cap whose band circles the brow and whose upper edge rises in lobed points — a subtle variation on Matteo’s flat-topped cap, enough to distinguish the offices, or the men, without breaking the pair. He wears the same long civic gown with wide sleeves falling in a few grave folds to the ankles, crossed from the right shoulder by a diagonal band; a broad cuff marks the left wrist.
The gestures repeat the podestà’s formula: the right hand raised against the chest gripping a short cylindrical baton — the insignia of command — while the left hand opens across the body, fingers spread, in the orator’s gesture of address. The repetition is the point: two offices, one language of authority, carved as a matched pair flanking the founder. The head inclines slightly forward and to its left, and the weathered but legible surfaces preserve the same unemphatic, documentary realism — the portrait of a rank rather than a face — that governs its companion.
Ermanno da Sassoferrato held the office of capitano del popolo of Perugia in 1278, the year the fountain was completed, alongside the podestà Matteo da Correggio; as noted in the companion entry, part of the literature reverses the two offices, but the prevailing scholarly tradition, followed consistently here, assigns the capitanato to Ermanno. Where the podestà — a foreign rector, typically a nobleman — administered justice, the capitano del popolo commanded the armed companies of the popolo and defended its ordinances: the two offices together were the twin heads of the communal constitution, and the fountain sets them in marble as such. His neighbours interpret his office precisely: Melchizedek on one side lends priestly sanction to his authority, while Victoria on the other — the figure with which the whole cycle of twenty-four ends — promises the outcome of the arms he commanded. With Ermanno, the anatomy of legitimate power assembled around Euliste is complete: foundation myth at the centre, law and arms at the ends, heaven’s soldier and heaven’s priest between them. Within Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius’s reading of the upper basin as regnum, sacerdotium et studium, the two magistrates are the regnum made contemporary — the boldest gesture of the entire program, the commune of 1278 inscribing its serving officers into sacred history.
The statue is carved in white marble against the smooth panels of the upper basin, within a fountain built of white and pink stone. The dating is, as with its pendant, doubly anchored: the dedicatory hexameters record the completion of the work in 1278, the bronze basin bears Rubeus’s signature dated 1277, and the subject himself — the capitano in office in 1278 — dates the figure to the year. Attribution follows the collective logic of the enterprise: neither magistrate appears in Francesco Cavallucci’s list of statues in which he recognised Nicola’s manner, no strong individual claim attaches to the figure in the sources consulted, and the prudent formulation remains Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with workshop — with the observation that the two magistrates, so evidently conceived as a pair, are likely to share whatever hand executed them. The earthquake of 1348 and the reassembly it occasioned, only partly corrected in 1948–49, apply their usual caveat to the present position, though here the legible titulus above the figure anchors name to statue; the sources consulted record no replacement with a copy, a point verifiable against the documentation of the 1995–99 restoration.
Victoria Magna
The statue of Victoria stands at one of the twenty-four junctions of the upper basin of the Fontana Maggiore, set — like all her companions — against the slender pilaster that divides two of the basin’s red-veined marble panels, beneath the projecting, dentilled capital that her head almost touches, so that the figure reads simultaneously as statue and as architectural member, a caryatid who carries the cornice of the commune’s fountain. Her identifying legend, VICTORIA, is incised on the frame to her left, continued by a further word to her right that has been read as completing the phrase — great Victory — while along the base moulding beneath her run fragments of the monument’s Latin hexameters, among them the words fontes pendent super — “the fountains hang above” — one of the verses in which the inscription describes the marvel of the water suspended over the beholder’s head. In the traditional reading of the cycle’s order, Victoria is the final figure: the sequence of the upper basin opens with Saint Peter and closes here, so that the whole procession of apostles, prophets, saints, founders, nymphs and magistrates issues, at its end, in Victory.
The figure is a young woman, standing frontally with the slight, weight-shifted sway of the basin’s gentler statues, her head — framed by loose hair falling to the shoulders beneath a light veil or fillet — turned a little to her left, the face carried high on a long neck. She wears a long-sleeved gown, girdled at the waist, whose skirt falls in straight, closely-set folds to a delicately worked ornamental hem — the same lace-like border that recurs on the finest figures of the basin — above bare feet planted on the small polygonal plinth, itself carved with a fringe of foliage. Her attributes are carried at the breast: in her raised right hand a slender stalk rising toward the shoulder, most naturally read as the palm of victory, the immemorial sign of triumph sacred and civic alike; and cradled across her lower hands a compact rounded form — variously legible, in the statue’s weathered state, as a bird or a small orb — whose precise identity the surviving surface no longer allows one to fix with certainty, and which is better described than named. Behind her head the junction’s foliate crockets spread to either side like a vestigial aureole; she carries no wings, the antique Victory translated into the wingless, maidenly idiom of the Gothic thirteenth century.
Her meaning is the summation of the basin’s argument. That the cycle of the upper stage — Jerusalem’s kings at the east, Rome at the west, the founder Euliste at the north, nourishing Perugia at the south, the city’s saints and the year 1278’s own magistrates among the prophets — should conclude in a figure of Victory states in one word what the entire monument asserts at length: that the commune’s enterprise has succeeded, that the water has been brought, the city fed, the government legitimated, the enemies of the bonum commune overcome. Victoria on the fountain is not the memorial of a single battle but the personification of the communal triumph as such — Guelph Perugia victorious in its alliance, its autonomy and its works — and her position closing the ring returns the beholder, fittingly, to the beginning: walking the basin from Peter to Victoria, one traverses sacred history, civic myth and living politics, and ends at the idea in which the commune wished all of them to culminate. That the verse beneath her celebrates the suspended fountains is a happy conjunction, whether of design or of the post-1348 reassembly: Victory presides over the monument’s own boast.
The statue is white Carrara marble, carved within the campaign of 1277–1278 attested by the fountain’s dated inscription, and set against the pink-and-red marble revetment of the upper basin whose slabs were quarried at Bettona; the ensemble of white figure on coloured ground is the upper stage’s governing chromatic idea, and Victoria’s pale silhouette against the deep-veined panel is among its most effective instances. Authorship follows the condition of the whole monument: the dedicatory verse names Nicola Pisano, flos sculptorum, and his son Giovanni together, no statue of the upper basin is individually signed, and the division of the twenty-four figures between father, son and workshop remains an argument from style — the slender proportions, the sweet inclination of the head and the refined hem-work of this figure belonging to the graceful register that criticism has generally associated with the younger master’s orbit, an association here reported, as throughout the fountain, as considered judgment rather than documented fact. Weathered but structurally intact, restored with the basin in the campaigns of 1948–49 and 1995–99, Victoria still stands where the design of 1278 placed her: at the end of the procession, under the falling water, the last word of the commune’s marble sentence.
Overall, the political reading of the ensemble is compelling. The territory–nourishment axis of the southern group grounds the city’s legitimacy in the fertility of its land and lake and in the labour that the lower basin celebrates; the sacred figures of the other axes locate Perugia within the frame of salvation history and the Guelph, papal order; and the founder Euliste, presiding at the north, supplies the city with an antiquity to rival the Roman and Trojan pedigrees that other communes were then claiming for themselves. The name Euliste connects with the Auleste of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Etruscan king allied to the poem’s hero, and the recovery of such a founder — later celebrated in the Eulistea, the Latin poem the commune commissioned from Bonifacio da Verona in 1299 — is a characteristic gesture of the self-conscious commune, as Padua’s cult of Antenor and Genoa’s of Janus in the same decades attest.
The Bronze Crown on the top
Above the two marble basins, the Fontana Maggiore culminates in bronze: a great cup raised on a moulded shaft at the centre of the upper basin, bearing at its summit the group of three female figures who carry the vessel from which the water springs. This is the point toward which the whole monument ascends — Treccani’s entry on Giovanni Pisano observes that from the recessed reliefs of the lower basin to the free-standing bronzes of the crowning one witnesses a steady increase in plastic rendering, so that the fountain resolves itself, register by register, from picture into body.
It is also the point where the water begins its public life, jetting here and falling from the cup’s rim into the marble basin below, whence the twelve ferine spouts pour it onward. The photograph permits a reading of the monument’s second great inscription, incised around the rim of the cup: on the left arc,
RUBEUS ME FEC(IT), followed by a cross, AN(N)O D(OMI)NI, and on the right the date M·CC·LXXVI[I], then INDICT(IONE)·V and T(EM)P(OR)E REG… continuing out of view
“Rubeus made me, in the year of the Lord 1277, in the fifth indiction, in the time of…”
The literature reports the date as 1277; the apparent LXXVI of this view most plausibly loses a final numeral at the segment joint, and the fifth indiction is consistent with that year. With this, the fountain’s two signatures are both in the photographic dossier: the Pisani in the marble hexameters below, the bronze-caster on his own cup above.
The Bronze Crown, Rubeus’s Basin
The cup itself is a work of austere magnificence: a wide, deep bowl with flaring walls, its rim carried on a band bearing the inscription, its underside gathered into a moulded knop and a trumpet-shaped foot ornamented with a leaf calyx — a goldsmith’s chalice enlarged to architecture, the streaked grey-green patina of seven centuries recording the passage of water and weather. Upon it stands the group of the three water-bearers, back to back around a common axis: each a young woman in a belted tunic with a bloused overfold, knotted at the waist by a cord, her long hair falling in masses over the shoulders, both arms raised and bent to grip the ring-like base of the vessel poised above their heads, whose curving handles arch beside their faces. The figure facing the viewer bears the composed, wide-eyed frontality of an archaic goddess; the hand of a companion rests on her hip, binding the three into a single revolving body. The eye will notice at once that the group’s bright, uniform green differs from the weathered patina of the cup beneath — and rightly so: what stands on the fountain today is a copy, the original bronze group having been removed to the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria.
Who the three women are has never been settled, and the plurality of names is itself instructive. The civic tradition calls them nymphs, or simply the water-bearers — le tre portatrici d’acqua — girls of the fountain performing forever the gesture of every Perugian woman who came to draw water; the Comune’s own description reads them as the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; older literature has ventured the three Graces; Treccani, most neutrally, calls them caryatids.
Each reading captures a facet: pagan genii of the water harmonised — like Victoria among the saints below — into a Christian monument; the virtues crowning the anatomy of good government displayed on the basins beneath; or simply the human labour of water-carrying transfigured into the fountain’s finial. Treccani further records that the caryatids originally sustained a heraldic crowning of paired griffins and lions — the emblems of Perugia and of the Guelph cause, the same pair carved in relief on the lower basin — and bronze griffins from the fountain are today preserved in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria; the group now carries the vessel from which the water rises. At the summit of the monument, then, city and party once spread their wings over the whole program: the water of the commune ascended through sacred history to issue, at the top, under Perugia’s own sign.
The material is bronze, and the author, uniquely on this fountain, signs in the first person: Rubeus — Rosso, identified in the literature as the Perugian founder Rosso Padellaio — whose ME FECIT on the rim claims the casting of the cup, dated 1277, the year before the marble was completed; bronze-working was, as the museum literature notes, the avant-garde of the plastic arts in Perugia, and the fountain deploys it also in the twelve animal-head spouts of the upper basin.
The design of the caryatid group is a subtler question: whether the model came from the Pisano workshop, which governed the figurative program, or from the founder himself, the sources consulted do not decide, and the prudent formulation is a casting by Rubeus, 1277, within the enterprise directed by Fra Bevignate and sculpturally governed by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano — completed, as the hexameters below record, in 1278. The material history requires the same care as the Roma of the western arc: the group in situ is a modern copy — reported as fibreglass in the museum literature — with the original bronze in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, and the heraldic bronzes likewise removed; the cup itself remains, bearing its maker’s name to the sky over the piazza for seven and a half centuries.
Attribution and Style
The question of who carved what on the Fontana Maggiore is one of the classic problems of Italian medieval art history, and it is important to be clear about how little of it can be settled by direct evidence. There are only two epigraphic fixed points. The first is the verse inscription, which names both Nicola and Giovanni as sculptors of the fountain. The second is Giovanni’s signature on one of the eagle reliefs, the single autograph mark on the monument. Everything else is a matter of stylistic judgment.
The scholarly consensus that has emerged is a reasonable one: the overall design of the “machine” — the architectural and geometric conception of the whole — is attributed to Nicola, at the summit of his experience, while the execution was shared with Giovanni and a large workshop, with Giovanni increasingly prominent in the actual carving and, in the view of many, in the supervision of the sculptural campaign. Within this framework, critics have long tried to separate the two personalities.
The figures generally given to Nicola are the more composed and broadly conceived, with heavy, regular drapery folds that recall his study of Roman sarcophagi; those given to Giovanni are more nervous and dynamic, the bodies twisted, the heads projecting from their frames, the surfaces worked with the drill for expressive effect. On this basis the most vigorous of the upper-basin statues — the monumental Peter and Paul, the personifications of the Roman Church and of Theology — and the palpitating vitality of the two eagles have been claimed for Giovanni, together with much of the calendar. It is the same contrast of hands that critics read on the Siena pulpit, and it marks one of the passages at which Italian sculpture ceases to be medieval.
Beyond this broad agreement, the literature has oscillated. The catalogue of the works removed to the Galleria Nazionale, first issued in 1969 and revised in 1985, itself shifted its attributions, at one point placing a given relief in Nicola’s circle and later giving it to the master himself. These oscillations are not a scandal but a consequence of the monument’s nature: a work made at speed, by many hands, in a workshop that deliberately did not isolate individual authorship, resists precisely the kind of connoisseurial division that the modern discipline has wished to impose on it. The honest conclusion is that the fountain is a collective masterpiece whose design is Nicola’s, whose most personal passages are Giovanni’s, and whose fabric as a whole belongs to the workshop.
The Arnolfo Question
No discussion of the fountain’s authorship can avoid the name of Arnolfo di Cambio, and here the evidence and the tradition pull in different directions. The documentary starting point is a set of papers of the late summer of 1277 — the crucial one dated 10 September 1277 — in which King Charles of Anjou authorised Arnolfo di Cambio, then in his service in Rome, to go to Perugia. In the same period the commune was seeking to release him from his Roman work, and Fra Bevignate is reported to have suggested his appointment. It was long believed, on the strength of this, that Arnolfo was originally intended for the sculpture of the Fontana Maggiore, and that Nicola and Giovanni were substituted only when he could not be freed in time.
The prevailing modern view, however, distinguishes two fountains. Perugia built not one but two public fountains in these years: the great fountain in the piazza, and a second, smaller monument set, as the documents put it, “in pede platee” or “a piè della piazza grande,” at the foot of the square in the market area along the axis of the present Corso Vannucci.
It is this second, lesser fountain that the majority of scholars now assign to Arnolfo, who is documented completing it in January 1281; it was subsequently dismembered, and only a few fragments survive, conserved in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. On this reading, Arnolfo’s Perugian work is the lost Fontana Minore, not the Fontana Maggiore, and the 1277 documents concerning him refer to the beginning of his own commission rather than to a role on the great fountain. The biographical entry for Arnolfo in the standard national biographical dictionary treats this Perugian fountain of 1280–81 as his first documented independent work.
The older tradition that entangled Arnolfo with the Fontana Maggiore has a distinguished pedigree — it is reflected in the engraved corpus of the fountain’s imagery published in the 1830s — and a minority of scholars have continued to argue for some Arnolfian presence on the great fountain. But the weight of the documentary and stylistic evidence favours the separation of the two enterprises. The prudent formulation is that Arnolfo was in Perugia in these years and made a fountain there, that this was in all probability the smaller, now-lost fountain at the foot of the square, and that his hand on the Fontana Maggiore remains unproven.
Damage and Restoration
The fountain we see today is the product of nearly seven centuries of damage, repair, addition and subtraction, and its material history is essential to any responsible account of it. The first great blow was an earthquake in the mid-fourteenth century, conventionally dated to 1348, after which the fountain was reassembled; this reassembly was, by all accounts, arbitrary, and it is the principal reason that the original sequence of the reliefs and the arrangement of the statues cannot now be recovered with confidence. In 1508 came the addition of the bronze group of lions and griffins at the summit, an accretion that would survive for more than four centuries.
The nineteenth century brought both damage and the beginnings of scholarly attention. During the civic upheaval of 1859 the statue of Rome and the related relief of Romulus and Remus were damaged; these, together with other elements, were later replaced by copies, the originals passing to the Galleria Nazionale, where the damaged Rome and the she-wolf relief are now conserved. Conservation interventions continued through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The great modern campaign was the restoration of 1948–49, which undertook a philological recomposition of the monument, removed the 1508 bronze addition and the summit figures to the museum, and installed the present enclosure; the report on this campaign, drawn up by the then director of the Galleria, Francesco Santi, was published as an appendix to the foundational monograph of 1951 and remains a key document. That restoration has been criticised in retrospect for its use of inappropriate materials, cement in particular, which created problems for later conservators.
Because of those problems, and because of the continuing assault of frost and urban pollution on the exposed stone, a further and far more thorough campaign was undertaken between 1995 and 1999, during which the fountain was enclosed under a modern plexiglass dome that both sheltered the restorers and the work and allowed the public to observe the operation; the fountain was reopened in 1999. The most recent interventions have concentrated on the bronzes, in campaigns of 2012, 2016 and 2022. The 2022 restoration, financed through the Italian Art Bonus mechanism by the Perugian firm Kimia S.p.A. and carried out by the restorer Giacomo Perna, was a two-month intervention funded for €21,900; it addressed the surviving bronze animal-head spouts — the eleven protomi still awaiting treatment, one of the original twelve having become detached and fallen in February 2021 — together with the cup and the three water-bearing figures. The work treated the active corrosion known as “bronze disease,” the soluble copper chlorides that produce a micro-pitting of the surface, and removed the calcareous incrustation deposited by the fountain’s own water. The restorer’s public observation that the alloy of the cup rings like bell-metal points to a high-tin bronze, though no verified quantitative analysis of the alloy composition was available for this essay, and a specific archaeometric study sometimes associated with the bronzes could not be confirmed and should not be cited.
Reading the program
What does the whole ensemble mean? The most influential answer has been that the Fontana Maggiore is a kind of encyclopedia in stone — a speculum, a mirror of the world, a secular summa of late medieval knowledge, gathering the months and the zodiac, the liberal arts, sacred and Roman history, the fables and the saints, the territory and the commune into a single unified statement. On this view the fountain is the civic counterpart to the theological programs of the great church monuments, a comprehensive image of the cosmos and of history organised around, and culminating in, the city of Perugia itself.
The encyclopedic reading is attractive and, in its broad outline, hard to resist; the sheer range of the imagery invites it. But it must be held with real caution, for at least three reasons. First, the sequence of the reliefs was disturbed by the post-earthquake reassembly, so that any argument that depends on the precise order of the panels — on their reading as a continuous, legible narrative — rests on a reconstruction rather than on the medieval arrangement. Second, no documented literary source for the program survives: there is no text, no libellus, no set of instructions that we can point to as the blueprint the sculptors followed, and the encyclopedic hypothesis is therefore a modern synthesis imposed on the imagery rather than a recovered medieval plan. Third, and relatedly, no deviser of the program is known: we cannot name the learned person — a cleric, a notary, Fra Bevignate himself, someone in the commune’s service — who might have conceived so ambitious a scheme, and the silence of the sources on this point is itself significant.
What can be affirmed with more confidence is the ideological function of the ensemble, whatever the precise logic of its parts. The fountain is an argument for the legitimacy of the commune and its government, grounded in the bonum commune. It celebrates the abundance that good government secures — water, grain, fish, the ordered labour of the year — and it clothes the contemporary commune in the authority of sacred history, antique precedent and mythic foundation. It is difficult not to see in its landscape of plenty and its enthroned personification of the city an anticipation, by some decades, of the imagery of good government that Ambrogio Lorenzetti would paint in Siena around 1338–40.
Recent scholarship has begun to re-read the program in specifically juridical and institutional terms, relating its imagery to the legal and political culture of the popolo and to the commune’s self-understanding as a community of law; a study published in 2025, for instance, has proposed a fresh interpretation grounded in the historical, political and legal context of the fountain’s conception, while explicitly noting how many questions — Arnolfo’s role, the novelty of the architecture, the identity of the program’s deviser — remain open. Such readings are promising, but they remain hypotheses, and they should be received as contributions to an open debate rather than as settled conclusions. The prudent position is that the fountain is unmistakably a monument of communal ideology and civic self-representation, and that the more precise claim — that it constitutes a coherent encyclopedia with a single recoverable meaning — is a scholarly construction that the disturbed and undocumented state of the evidence cannot fully sustain.
Critical Fortune
The Fontana Maggiore has a critical history almost as instructive as the monument itself. Its earliest significant notice is in Giorgio Vasari3’s Lives of 1568, in the double biography of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. Vasari described the fountain in some detail — the three orders of vessels, two of marble and one of bronze, the twelve-faced plan raised on steps, the bronze summit resting on three figures — and he attributed the whole of it, in bronze and in marble, to the Pisani, and above all to Giovanni; he mentioned that the water had been brought to the city by the ingenuity of “a friar of the Silvestrines,” but he did not name Fra Bevignate. This is a revealing distortion. The bronze inscription and the verse epigraph both give Bevignate and Boninsegna their due, and the standard biographical account of Bevignate observes that Vasari either could not read the inscription or chose to ignore it, the better to assign the entire monument, architecture and sculpture alike, to the Tuscan masters he was championing. Vasari’s account thus inaugurated a long tendency to read the fountain through the lens of the Pisani and of the emerging story of the Renaissance, at the expense of the collaborative, communal enterprise that the monument’s own texts describe.
The modern study of the fountain rests on two foundational scholarly achievements. The first is the monograph of 1951 by Giusta Nicco Fasola, La fontana di Perugia, which combined a critical study of the monument with an edition of the archival documentation and incorporated Francesco Santi’s report on the 1948–49 restoration; it remains the documentary foundation of all subsequent work, valued precisely for its command of the archival record even where — as the entry on Nicola in the national biographical dictionary notes — that record proves “desolately silent” on the monument itself.
The second is the epigraphic edition by Attilio Bartoli Langeli and Loriano Zurli of 1996, which established the text of the verse inscription on secure paleographic and philological grounds and corrected long-standing errors of transmission — the recovery of iocundo murmure in the opening line being the emblematic instance. Between them, these two works exemplify the discipline that the fountain requires: the patient establishment of what the documents and the stones actually say, as the necessary check on the interpretive ambition that the monument so readily provokes.
That interpretive ambition has most often taken the form of a “proto-Renaissance” framing, in which the fountain is read as a way-station on the road from medieval to Renaissance art, with Nicola’s antique-inflected classicism and Giovanni’s dynamic naturalism marking the moment at which Italian sculpture ceases to be medieval. There is truth in this, but also risk. The framing tends to abstract the fountain from its own moment and purpose — a civic, communal, hydraulic monument of the Guelph popolo — and to enlist it in a teleological narrative it was never meant to serve. To read it as its makers and patrons intended is to read it not as a preview of the Renaissance but as the supreme monument of the medieval commune’s confidence in itself.
Open Questions and Conclusion
The Fontana Maggiore rewards study in proportion to the honesty with which its uncertainties are acknowledged, and it is worth gathering those uncertainties together at the close. The original sequence of the fifty reliefs is lost, disturbed by the reassembly that followed the earthquake, so that not all of the panels can be securely enumerated and their intended order can only be reconstructed. The distribution of Philosophy and Theology across the reliefs and the statues is reported inconsistently in the literature. The identity of the three bronze figures at the summit — nymphs, water-carriers, or theological virtues — remains undecided. The artistic personality of Rubeus, the founder, is little more than a name attached to documented castings. The division of hands between Nicola, Giovanni and the workshop can be argued but not proved beyond the two epigraphic fixed points. The deviser of the program, if there was a single one, is unknown, and no literary source for it survives. And the precise nature of Arnolfo di Cambio’s Perugian work, though most probably the lost second fountain, continues to be debated at the margins. Even the exact length of the aqueduct, and the precise wording of some verses of the great inscription, vary from source to source.
None of this diminishes the monument; it defines it. The Fontana Maggiore is a work made quickly, by many hands, for a community that wished to say something about itself and had the wealth, the confidence and the artistic resources to say it magnificently. It is the terminus of an aqueduct that took a generation to build, the signature of a director of works who brought a stalled enterprise to completion in months, the last great work of the most influential sculptor of the Italian Duecento and one of the first assertions of his son’s independent genius, and a sustained visual argument for the legitimacy and abundance of the communal city. It invites the passer-by, in the corrected words of its own inscription, to look at the fountains with their joyful murmur, and to see wonderful things if he looks closely. Seven and a half centuries later, the invitation still holds, and the wonder is undiminished — provided one looks closely enough to see, alongside the beauty, the honest limits of what can be known.