A baptismal font is the basin that holds the water used for the rite of baptism, and unlike the large sunken pools of an earlier, separate baptistery building, the font is typically a comparatively compact object, usually of carved stone, raised on a pedestal to a convenient working height and positioned inside the main body of the church rather than in a dedicated separate structure. Fonts are traditionally placed near the church's main entrance, at the west end of the nave, a positioning laden with deliberate symbolic weight: baptism is the rite through which a person formally enters the Christian community, so encountering the font immediately upon entering the physical building echoes and reinforces that same idea of entry, letting every subsequent worshipper who walks past it toward the altar pass, at least symbolically, by the point of their own or the community's initiation into the faith.
Font design and decoration received serious artistic attention across many periods and regions, from elaborately carved medieval stone fonts depicting biblical scenes or the seven sacraments around their base, to towering, architecturally ambitious font covers built in later centuries to protect the font and mark its importance, and the font remains, alongside the altar, one of the relatively small number of essentially universal fixed furnishings found in some form in virtually every church building regardless of tradition or period.