The Fountain.
There is one remarkable object in the Piazza of S. Lorenzo which has little or nothing to do with individual factions or with the affairs of Church and State, and this is the famous fountain which we are told was ever “dear as the apple of their eye to the people of Perugia.” Indeed the citizens were in the habit of declaring that their fountain was “unique not only in Italy but in the entire world.”
This beautiful bit of early Renaissance sculpture needs but a slight description here, for its form is familiar to most people either through engravings or through photographs. It is, however, a rather common error to suppose, as Vasari himself did, that the Pisani were the sole architects of the fountain. The only certain work which they did for it was the ornamentation of the panels and probably the statues. The whole plan of the fountain was supplied by the Perugian architect, Fra Bevignate, and it was he who called in other sculptors to help in the building.[55] In 1277 he applied to Charles of Anjou for permission to employ the Florentine, Arnolfo di Lapo, to help with the sculptures on the second basin, and in the same year a certain Rosso designed and made the third bronze basin with its pillar and its ornaments of Nereids and of griffins on the top.[56]
The fountain rises from the square—a broad pile of marble now almost black with age, upon a circle of stone steps. The second basin is supported on a forest of slender columns which give an airiness and a necessary lightness to the whole. The designs upon its panels, which are infinite in their variety, were made by Niccola Pisano and carried out by his son Giovanni. These two big marble basins are crowned by a third in bronze with the figures of three Nereids rising from it, and bearing on their heads the eternal griffin of Perugia, without which fascinating beast no single house or building in the city would ever seem complete.
Niccola Pisano and his son must have studied the tastes of the Perugians with exquisite care and tact, combining these with the more general artistic taste of the age in which they worked. The panels on the first large basin are a fascinating study: the months of the year, and Æsop’s fables, scenes of domestic life and Roman legend, the griffin and tales from the Old Testament, the Umbrian saints, the sciences and arts, all wonderfully intermingled upon the separate panels. Even the old joke about the fishes is gracefully treated by the Florentine sculptor, for Lake Trasimene, as a beautiful woman, clasps three large lasche in her rounded arms. S. Ercolano, too, is here in all his glory, together with S. Louis of Toulouse and S. Costanzo.
One cannot help wondering how Perugia got her drinking water in early days. We may imagine that it
was entirely through wells, and wells on the top of a hill are apt to run dry. Thirst, therefore, was probably a far stronger factor in times of siege than the cowardice of her inhabitants, and the city must often have been driven to capitulate through the terrible need of water, rather than through the fear of foreign arms. As the city grew, a sense of inadequacy on this particular point grew too, and people began to wonder how water could be procured from some fresh running spring upon the neighbouring hills; yet to bring it up to such a height seemed to the Perugians an almost insuperable difficulty. An early genius nearly solved it for them, but like other early geniuses he failed. In 1254 Frate Plenario, an obscure preaching friar, wandering through the woods and hills around Perugia, conceived, what in those days seemed the most hazardous scheme, of bringing water into the piazza of the city by means of a large aqueduct from the hill of Monte Pacciano, which lies three miles or so to the north of the town. Plenario urged his scheme upon the magistrates, they approved it, and after certain difficulties as to the necessary funds they determined to embark on the adventurous undertaking. Frate Plenario was put at the head of the works, and Messer Bonomi chosen as architect. But the plan was large, the execution very difficult. The arches were built too small and fragile, and carried at too low a level. They fell to ruin in the woods, and the poor little priest and his friend Bonomi vanished with the desolation of their works. Their plans, however, never died, they merely remained to be carried out by stronger if not subtler minds.
In 1274 the question of a fountain again became paramount in Perugia. More solid channels were built across the hills and the ambitious magistrates called in the most skilled sculptors of the day to decorate a receptacle for the precious water when it should arrive. It came for the first time on the 15th of February 1280, and we can fancy the joyful pride of the citizens as they saw it running over the lovely marble and brass basins which had been so carefully prepared for it.
The most elaborate and stringent laws were made for the guardianship of the fountain and the use of its waters. It was enclosed, as it is to-day, with iron railings, and was, as the ever sarcastic Bonazzi rightly says, “the subject of most grave solicitude.” We hear that there were seven troughs which gathered the water outside the railing, but “beasts, barrels, unwashed pots, and unclean hands were forbidden the use of the water, and indeed this was guarded with such jealous care that it seemed as though the people of Perugia had built their fountain for the sake of beauty only.... Yet,” adds Bonazzi, “the five hundred florins which were annually given over to its maintenance, without counting extra expenses and the wages of its special porters and superior officers, would have been ill-spent indeed if beauty had been missing in the monument.”
But if it was difficult to bring the water it was equally difficult to keep it always running. The elegant pile of marbles, the thing that the Podestà, the priests and the people all combined in literally doting on, was for ever running dry, and growing lifeless. In this nineteenth century the Prefect of Perugia is about to send some forty miles instead of three to fetch his people water, but the great fountain will be there to hold it when it comes, and the first aqueduct will remain to break with exquisite lines the little copses and the fields away to the north of the city.
We know of few lovelier points about Perugia than the place where its water is stored on the lower hills of Monte Pacciano—low wooded hills where the
white heath grows in spring-time amongst the copses of crimson-stemmed arbutus, and where one can lie for hours on the turf looking away to Trasimene, and all the waving hills and smaller hill-set cities of the Umbrian country. Here the Perugians catch and store their drinking water in three great reservoirs. The first of these was built some time at the end of the thirteenth century. The masonry is rough and massive, and the water seems more green and more mysterious in the mediæval basin than in those of this practical nineteenth century. We went there late one April afternoon, and lingered long in the cool and cavernous places where the water is gathered together. As we came home we traced the course of the old aqueducts which have long since been abandoned. The springs to-day are carried underground in a sort of switch-back fashion over the sloping hillsides. But the ruins of the earlier conduit remain in their old places. Seeing them, we thought of the times in which they had supplied the men and horses crawling home from some hot skirmish on the plain, and of how the water had washed the blood of nobles from the steps of the Duomo and quenched the thirst of preaching friars and painters. How dead, how gone, that passionate past, how hum-drum, and how dreary seemed the clatter of the table d’hôte when we got back that evening.
But in describing the water supply of the city, we have wandered rather far afield from the subject of the piazza. A great flight of steps leads from the back of the fountain up to the cathedral.