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 [Illustration: THE REAPER. DETAIL IN PANEL ON THE FOUNTAIN]