For hundreds of years, the winged lion of Venice has guarded the city from its perch atop a column in St Mark’s Square, becoming its best known symbol.
Where the lion came from, however, has always been a mystery — but now, Italian archaeologists think they have solved it.
A study of its metal content has revealed the lion to be a migrant that almost certainly arrived in the city by a path well-trodden over the millennia by camels taking silks to ancient Rome and containers supplying iPhones to modern suit pockets.
The lion appears to have been made in China, and the archaeologists theorise that it was brought back to the city by Marco Polo’s father and uncle after their first expedition to the court of the Mongol Khan.
The study, presented in the journal Antiquity, took a fragment of the bronze statue and used lead isotope testing to determine the origins of the copper element in the alloy. Isotopic content is in metallic terms a fingerprint, and the copper matched deposits from the Lower Yangtze river valley. The find led archaeologists from the University of Padua and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice to reassess common theories about the history of the lion, whose provenance is not recorded. It is not mentioned in texts until a reference to its restoration in the late 13th century, a hundred years after the erection of the column on which it stands. However, it was always known to be much older, and theories have ranged from its being ancient Assyrian to being a product of the late Hellenistic period. Many of Venice’s treasures, including the Four Horses that stand over the loggia of St Mark’s Basilica near by, were stolen from Constantinople when it was destroyed and looted by Crusaders in 1204. However, there was no reference to a winged lion being among them. The entrance to the Qingyang Gong (Green Goat Temple), Chengdu, Sichuan Province, is also adorned with lion features ALAMY The archaeologists have re-examined the lion’s head, which showed signs that it had been altered — possibly to remove horns. The readdition of horns would make it resemble very closely lions set up to guard graves in the Tang Dynasty that ruled China from the 7th to 10th centuries. One of these would have been a suitable gift to Venice for a traveller hoping to impress — the winged lion was long associated with St Mark, the city’s patron. “This suggests the sculpture was originally a Tang Dynasty tomb guardian, later modified to remove the horns and shorten its ears once it reached Europe, making it better fit the image of a winged lion desired by the Venetians,” the archaeologists conclude. The association with Niccolò and Maffeo Polo is more speculative. Their first mission to the east reached the court of Kublai Khan in 1266, returning to Venice three or four years later. It was on their second mission that they were accompanied by their chronicler, Marco, Niccolò’s son. • 14 of the best Silk Road tours However, as the excitement generated by his account shows, trade and contacts between Europe and the Far East were at that time in abeyance compared with the earlier period of the silk trade or the later Ming dynasty, when exports boomed again, and the Polos brought gifts in either direction. The researchers are confident in their findings. Dr Massimo Vidale of Padua university said: “Venice is a city full of mysteries, but one has been solved: the ‘Lion’ of St Mark is Chinese, and he walked the Silk Road.” Some might ask why no one mentioned the gift nearer the time — particularly Marco Polo himself. But then again it would not be the most startling omission from his memoirs, which also failed to mention chopsticks and the Great Wall.