There were strange ways of catching prisoners in Perugia. We find one statute which shows us that every artizan was obliged to hang certain hooks and gaffs to his house walls “ready to help in the capture of a criminal, and all were expected to help in this said capture.”[54]
But if there was rude cruelty shown to prisoners it is fair to say there was also an occasional rude mercy. No doubt the latter was excited in the Perugians by their extreme religious superstition. We hear of an old custom of liberating prisoners “pro amore Dei.” “Every six months, two buon’ uomini (or good men) were chosen to elect certain officials who were given full power to let out five condemned prisoners on Holy Friday, two at Christmas, two on the feast of S. Ercolano, and two on Corpus Domini. Also two women on every feast of the Virgin Mary. In the choice of women, only those condemned for minor offences must be liberated. The men let out must have suffered six months’ imprisonment, and the women one month, and neither must have been liberated in this manner (pro amore Dei) on previous occasions.” Also there was to be strict silence on the nature of the offence. The Podestà published the names of the freed prisoners in three parts of the town so that the citizens might protest if they happened to be so minded. Three days later the prisoners were free and went to render thanks in the Church of S. Ercolano, after which they presented themselves before the civil authorities at the Palazzo Pubblico. These scarcerati pro amore dei, as they were called, were excluded from all public offices, “it not being decent,” says the statute, “that they should be on the same level as the rest of the Perugians.”
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