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The Fontaine des Innocents was built and decorated during the years 1547-49. In its original form it was a rectangular building on a corner, presenting facades of two bays on one street and one bay on the other. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, it was reconstructed as a free-standing square block. Its sculptured decoration, most of which is now in the Louvre, consisted of six tall, narrow reliefs of nymphs, three long reliefs with nymphs and tritons, three more with puttie and, finally, Victories filling the spandrels. The long reliefs of nymphs and tritons show more clearly than any other of Goujon's works the influence of Cellini's Nymph of Fontainebleau, particularly in the drapery, which is disposed in close parallel folds and floats as a background to the nudes without any functional connection with them. The figures themselves, however, have a lightness and delicacy far beyond Cellini's, recalling rather the drawings of Primaticcio.
The relief from the base of the Fontaine des Innocents shows a Nymph (a Naiad) and a putto mounted on a sea dragon. In Greek mythology, the Naiads were a type of nymph who presided over fountains, wells, springs, streams, and brooks.
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