When Jacopo della Quercia (c. 1374–1438) completed his Fonte Gaia for the city of Siena it secured his reputation as one of the preeminent Italian sculptors of the early Quattrocento. In his famous Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1550 and revised and extended in 1568), Giorgio Vasari noted that the sculptor, following his completion of the Fonte Gaia, was ‘no longer called Jacopo dalla Quercia, but Jacopo dalla Fonte [Jacopo of the Fountain] forever after’. The sobriquet was an apt one, as the fountain's influence and innovation would define della Quercia's work and his legacy for centuries. The Fonte Gaia, above all others, positioned him alongside such figures as Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti. Beyond its initial impact the carving style and iconographic programme of the fountain left a lasting impression on contemporary and later artists in Tuscany and beyond, the most notable of whom was Michelangelo.

Located in the Piazza del Campo in the heart of the city, the Fonte Gaia is a sculpted expression of local pride and civic ideals. With its roughly rectangular shape, closed on three sides, the fountain seems to open its arms toward the square and the seat of civic government, the Palazzo Pubblico. In its style and form the fountain was groundbreaking, and was very likely the first monumental public fountain of the Italian Renaissance. The sculptures that once adorned its lateral balustrades, often identified as Acca Larentia and Rhea Silvia, were among the first free-standing statues of the Renaissance. Beyond its aesthetic merit, the fountain was a significant feat of engineering, supplying precious water to the Sienese. Girolamo Gigli, writing in the eighteenth century, went so far as to claim that the fountain's name derived from the gaiety (‘gaia’) felt by the citizens upon seeing the arrival of water in the Campo, something made possible only by the monument.

Yet the fountain in its current iteration in Siena's Campo is not the original, fifteenth-century masterpiece completed in 1419 by Jacopo della Quercia; rather, it is a nineteenth-century reconstruction commissioned from Tito Sarrocchi (1824–1900) by a committee of leading Sienese citizens.