At the end of 1408 Jacopo della Quercia returned to his native Siena after nearly a decade of honing his skills as a carver in Florence, Ferrara, and Lucca. The decision of the Sienese government, probably in 1406 or 1407, to replace the fourteenth-century fountain of the Campo (Siena’s main civic space) – then and thenceforth called the Fonte Gaia – with a new, grander structure enticed Jacopo to return home, and he received the fountain commission in December 1408.1 Over the next ten years he and his shop assistants worked on the project: charting out its design, managing the selection and delivery of materials, carving its numerous decorative and narrative reliefs and statues and its monumental architectural framework, and finishing their surfaces. By the nineteenth century, when the Fonte Gaia (Fig. 220) was removed from the Campo and replaced with a copy, weather and human contact, which wore away segments of the porous, fragile marble and caused certain elements to topple over, had severely damaged the reliefs and statues (e.g., Figs. 221–224) that adorned the three low walls bordering the main pool.2 Large sections of stone are missing, and the surfaces of the sculptures, which once were, as we shall see, gilded and painted, have been nearly completely obliterated. As a result, the cycle today exists as much in the imagination as in reality. Even when in pristine condition in the early fifteenth century, however, the fountain’s carved elements were incomplete without imaginative interventions from viewers that tied the reliefs and statues – and the stories and figures they portray – thematically to the water that flowed past and pooled before them. Their full meaning emerges when beholders connect them to that water, which was, since it arrived in the Campo in 1343, a visual focus of those who approached the fountain.