L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2025 www.italoamericano.org 14 L'Italo-Americano T he winged lion o n t h e g r a n i t e c o l u m n t h a t marks the edge of St. Mark's Square is perhaps one of the most r e c o g n i z a b l e s y m b o l s o f Venice, but have you ever thought about its origins? While it's easy to think it was "born and bred" on the lagoon, recent research sug- gests a more complex story, as scientific tests and stylistic comparisons show the statue was likely created far from La Serenissima, was adapted more than once, and only later took on the features that identify it with the evan- gelist Mark. Archival records are thin, but crucial: the earliest docu- m e n t t h a t m e n t i o n s t h e bronze dates to May 1293 and already describes it as in need of repair; after that, the t r a i l g o e s q u i e t u n t i l t h e upheavals of the late eigh- t e e n t h c e n t u r y , w h e n Napoleon dismantled Venet- ian monuments and sent the lion to Paris. From there, he returned only in 1815 and not i n t a c t . W i t h s u c h s p a r s e entries, it is other tools that have to do the heavy lifting, if we want to learn more about the lion: enter metallurgy and art history. A team led by scholars at the University of Padua s a m p l e d t h e b r o n z e a n d measured its lead-isotope "fingerprint," whose ratios match copper ores from the Lower Yangtze basin in China, a region with long traditions of large-scale cast- ing. The research appears in the peer-reviewed journal A n t i q u i t y a n d d a t e s t h e original figure most plausibly t o t h e T a n g d y n a s t y ( A D 6 1 8 – 9 0 7 ) . S t y l i s t i c c l u e s point in the same direction: the stance, the mane treated as tongues of flame, and the likelihood that the creature once had small horns align it with a class of Chinese tomb guardians known as zhèn- m ù s h ò u r a t h e r t h a n w i t h M e d i t e r r a n e a n l i o n s . T h e s t u d y d o e s n o t c l a i m absolute certainty, but the convergence of chemical and visual evidence makes the Chinese origin hard to dis- miss. I f t h e c o r e i s A s i a n , though, how did it become the lion of St. Mark? Quite simply, in the name of reuse. By the time the figure is first recorded in Venice in 1293, the city had already adopted Mark as patron and used the w i n g e d l i o n i n s e a l s a n d reliefs. Over the following centuries, the bronze on the column was adjusted to fit t h a t i c o n o g r a p h y : w i n g s w e r e a t t a c h e d o r r e m a d e w h e n n e e d e d ; t h e b o o k under the paw, a hallmark of the Venetian emblem with its Pax tibi Marce motto, was affixed; damaged parts were recast. Of course, none of this is unusual, as bronze statuary of great prestige w a s r o u t i n e l y r e p a i r e d , r e p u r p o s e d , a n d v i s u a l l y " u p d a t e d " a c r o s s t h e medieval and early modern periods, but in this case, the long history of interventions i s c l e a r l y v i s i b l e i n t h e object's patchwork surfaces and in elements that look younger than the core cast- ing. In 1797, after the fall of the Republic, the lion was s h i p p e d t o P a r i s a s w a r booty, with contemporary accounts and later studies agreeing that it suffered in transit and during display; when it was returned after Napoleon's defeat, it arrived in pieces and needed heavy work before it could go back on its column. Nineteenth- century repairs included new wings in a neoclassical key and various metal patches, all practical choices that also shaped how the figure reads t o d a y : a n c i e n t , b u t a l s o oddly composite. The route by which the bronze first reached Venice remains an open question. One hypothesis, treated by s c h o l a r s a s p l a u s i b l e b u t unproven, connects the jour- ney to the Polo family's travels: Niccolò and Maffeo P o l o , M a r c o ' s f a t h e r a n d uncle, crossed Central Asia in the 1260s and reached the Mongol court, and a move- ment of high-status objects along those routes is well documented. It takes only a few steps, albeit still specula- tive, to imagine a Chinese guardian, valued for its scale and metal, joining that flow and being adapted once it reached the Adriatic. The new scientific work does not prove this story, but it makes a Silk-Road transfer more c r e d i b l e t h a n o l d e r i d e a s that placed the bronze's ori- gin in the ancient Near East or the Hellenistic world. What changes with this new origin story is not the symbol itself, rather, it is our u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f w h a t i t represents; the lion has long been the visual shorthand of Venice and of St. Mark, and knowing its core may have started as a Chinese tomb guardian reinforces rather than weakens this identity, because it aligns with a city that built wealth and status b y m e d i a t i n g b e t w e e n worlds. The icon looks stable w h e n y o u s t a n d i n t h e square; looked at closely, it records centuries of deci- sions, some pragmatic, some devotional, all connected to how Venice operated. I n t h i s , s c i e n c e a g a i n helps to understand details t h a t m i g h t o t h e r w i s e b e t a k e n f o r g r a n t e d : f o r instance, current research notes that the present book and wings do not belong to the oldest layer of metal and that the pose – more upright than many European lions – makes better sense if you start from the Asian compar- isons. Even the long gap in t h e d o c u m e n t s b e c o m e s m e a n i n g f u l : i f t h e c i t y ' s c l e r k s w r o t e a b o u t t h e bronze only when something went wrong, most of its his- tory would be in the metal rather than on paper. That's w h y t o d a y ' s l a b o r a t o r y results should be considered the missing archive of the lion's history. For readers used to think- i n g o f V e n i c e i n t e r m s o f mosaics and marbles, a Chi- nese bronze on the Piazzetta may sound surprising, yet objects moved this way all the time. We know the Hors- es of St. Mark were taken f r o m C o n s t a n t i n o p l e ; w e know Venetian churches are full of spolia, and the lion fits that ecosystem perfectly. W h a t t h e n e w s t u d y c o n - tributes is specificity: not just "from the East," but a likely metallurgical origin in the Yangtze region, a likely date within the Tang period, and concrete reasons to see a zhènmùshòu where we had assumed a Mediterranean beast. That precision turns a local icon into a case study in how global connections get absorbed into civic identity. CHIARA D'ALESSIO The long journey of the Lion of St. Mark The bronze lion of Saint Mark's Square (above) was probably cast in China (Photo: Marco Ledda/Dreamstime) HERITAGE MEMORIA IDENTITÀ STORIA RADICI

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