Iconic winged lion statue in Venice may actually be from China's Tang dynasty, study finds

A bronze statue of a winged lion that has long graced the center of Piazza San Marco in Venice is from a faraway land, according to a new study. It was made in China as a tomb guardian over 1,000 years ago and may have been imported to Italy by Marco Polo's father via the Silk Road in the 13th century, the researchers found.

"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," study co-author Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua, said in a statement.

In the study, published Thursday (Sept. 4) in the journal Antiquity, Vidale and colleagues identified the source of the bronze used to create the iconic lion, which became an official symbol of Venice in the early 1260s but whose exact origins are murky.

The researchers examined a series of nine samples from different parts of the lion and used mass spectrometry to identify the ratios of lead isotopes in the metal. Metal alloys like bronze — which is a mixture of copper and tin — contain small amounts of lead, the researchers wrote in the study, and the variations in lead atoms can indicate the geological source of the copper.

By comparing the lead isotope ratios from the Venetian lion to worldwide reference databases, the researchers narrowed down the origin of the bronze to the Lower Chang (Yangtze) River in what is now China. This area of East China has large-scale deposits of several important ores, including iron, copper, zinc and gold. These deposits were used for other artifacts; for instance, a previous study by another research group showed that an artifact from the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1050 B.C.) has the same lead isotope signal as the Venetian lion.

The revelation that the bronze originated in China may help to explain some of the odd stylistic choices in the Venice lion, the researchers suggested; it does not look like other medieval lions of the 11th to 14th centuries found in Europe.

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But the Venice lion does bear some similarities to Chinese art of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 to 907) — particularly "zhènmùshòu," or "tomb guardians," according to the study. These monumental statues often depicted hybrid creatures with lion-like muzzles and manes, pointed ears, horns and raised wings. The Venice lion has several of these features, as well as metal "scars" where one or two horns may have been removed.

One possible explanation for the Venice lion, the researchers suggested, rests with the Venetian merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, the father and uncle of Marco Polo. In the 13th century, the brothers traversed the Silk Road and set up trading posts, eventually reaching the city known today as Beijing and spending four years in the court of Kublai Khan. Perhaps the Polos encountered a "tomb guardian" statue there that fit their notion of what a lion looked like, the researchers proposed.

In the 13th century, when the Republic of Venice controlled eastern trade routes, its symbol was a winged lion resting on water with the gospel of St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice, under its paws. This imagery, which also appeared on the Republic's flag, symbolized Venice's dominance over the seas.

"In the general effort to spread the [Venetian] Republic's new powerful symbol, the Polos may have had the somewhat brazen idea of readapting the sculpture into a plausible (when viewed from afar) Winged Lion," the researchers wrote. The merchant brothers may have shipped the statue back to Venice in pieces, trusting a local metalworker to refit it into the symbol now associated with St. Mark.

"Of course, this is only one possible scenario based on the intersection of historical and archaeometallurgical data," the researchers wrote. "The word now goes back to the historians."