Researchers have proved that the Lion of Venice statue which stands in St Mark’s Square, Venice, originated in China. - Photo: Shutterstock via SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
THE winged Lion of Venice watches over St Mark’s Square in the north Italian city, just as it has done for hundreds of years. But now a team of scientists in Italy have found evidence that the statue originated in China.
Having come to symbolise the city of Venice, the winged lion also happens to be the traditional emblem of the patron saint of the square it inhabits: St Mark.
Researchers have now showed that it was most likely originally a tomb guardian cast during the Tang dynasty (618-907) using bronze from the lower Yangtze River basin in southeast China. But the question of just how the 2.8-tonne statue made its way across continents to the top of a granite column in Italy sometime in the 13th century remains unanswered.
The discovery has been more than 30 years in the making. Lead archaeologist on the research team Massimo Vidale, an associate professor at the University of Padua in northern Italy, said when the statue was taken down for restoration between 1985 and 1990, scientists took the opportunity to perform various technical studies, including a lead isotope analysis.
“This is a very refined chemical analysis which measures the relative proportion between different isotopes of lead. The specific proportion between different isotopes is a kind of ID card that pinpoints precisely in the world the location of the mine from which the copper was extracted,” he said.
At the time of the tests, archives were not as rich as they are today, so scientists were not able to match the samples with the source, he said.
According to records, when Marco Polo returned to Venice from a place he called Catai in 1295, he brought back sublime tales of another world. Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World told of paper money, a burning black stone (coal), precious spices (pepper, nutmeg, cloves), and Kublai Khan’s sumptuous palace at Xanadu.
Contemporaries questioned the veracity of Polo’s accounts, a position echoed, for different reasons, by modern scholars. Still, Polo endures as a vital point of contact between Europe and dynastic China. New research conducted around the 700th anniversary of the Venetian explorer’s death, however, suggests fruitful exchange between the maritime city and China predated Polo.
One symbol of this connection is the bronze Lion of Venice sculpture that stands atop one of the two columns in St. Mark’s Square.
THE winged Lion of Venice watches over St Mark’s Square in the north Italian city, just as it has done for hundreds of years. - AFP
Fresh analysis from researchers at the University of Padua, which boasts a world-leading archive of lead isotopes, has connected the statue to Chinese copper ore deposits in the lower Yangzi River, an area with a mining history dating back 3,000 years to the late Shang dynasty.
It was long known that Venice’s sculpture, a cross of a lion and a griffin that symbolizes Saint Mark the Evangelist, originated elsewhere, but previous research had suggested a Near Eastern Anatolian source between roughly the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.E.
Lead researcher Vidale, however,was never convinced by thinking that placed the sculpture in the Hellenistic world.
“I always had the impression that the lion was a Chinese hybrid, a deeply manipulated Chinese statue,” Vidale said via email.
“Now, we have solved for good, a long-inherited archaeological riddle and the stylistic and chemical data are in perfect agreement with the hypothesis that the Venice Lion was made in China.”
The winged lion became the official symbol of Venice between 1261 and 1264 and though it is unknown precisely when the statue was mounted in St. Mark’s Square, academics are certain that it predated Polo’s return. In the wake of the chemical analysis, historians have drawn comparisons between the bronze lion and Tang dynasty (618 to 907 C.E.) tomb guardians.
While much of Tang dynasty bronze record has been melted down or destroyed, porcelain artifacts evidence strong similarities in nostrils, teeth, facial expression, and hair patterning.
Further proof arrives through the holes in the sculpture’s head, which researchers believe would have once held horns, and ears which have been rounded off. The sculpture, which is known to have arrived in parts and reassembled, was essentially modified to look more lion-like.
In Vidale’s view, the next step is for historians to systematically study all of the Chinese pre-Ming dynasty pottery that have been found in Venice.
As evidenced by late 13th-century porcelain found in the city, there were pre-Polo trade routes that ran from southern China, through the port cities of Sumatra, and along the west coast of India, before heading overland across modern day Iran and Turkey towards Western Europe.
Pottery would have travelled alongside other commodities and further research would recast the role Venetian tradesmen and explorers played in the city’s development long before Marco Polo’s book was written.
“It shows the unprejudiced nature of their view of the world,” Vidale said. “A global context in which a frightening monster guardian could be transformed in the holy image of one of the four apostles.”
The ideal course of action, Vidale said, would be to take the statue down for a thorough examination. Though, he admitted, that is “wishful thinking.
