The Lion of St. Mark's Square in Venice Is Chinese
103 comments
·October 24, 2024metalman
s1artibartfast
The ancestry of greek and roman columns are fascinating. People tend to think of the white marble ones, but many of the temples were adorned with beautiful colored marble columns. These were sourced from throughout the empire and conquests. A good book or guide can outline much of greek, roman, and islamic history using columns alone.
metalman
the aqueducts and sisterns ander various currently habitated ancient cities are sometimes supported by forests of even more ancient columns and what we see today in areas where marble was the building material of choice is the stuff that escaped the lime kilns,where mountains of ancient statuary and architectural marble, was burnt to make lime, to put on the fields of those living in the abandoned cities littering the ancient world and the fate of bronze statuary and architectural elements, was of course the same as the lead roofing, as a target for plunder and to be recast and rededicated to a new god
hammock
“Greek fire(1) can’t melt Corinthian columns”
jsrcout
What a fantastic idea. You should absolutely write this.
null
stelliosk
The lion may be Chinese but the four horses in St Mark's Basilica are Greek looted from Constantinople during the fourth crusade (1204).
Perhaps the lion was also looted and brought to Constantinople originally which would fit with pre Marco Polo's travels.
tsimionescu
If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right? Just because they spoke Greek doesn't make them Greeks. Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?
kitten_mittens_
At the time, Romans would have said they spoke Roman (Romaic[1])--not Greek.
stelliosk
Not made in Constantinople, made in ancient Greece by Lysippos.
noncoml
> Or had they been taken from Greece to Constantinopole before being looted in the crusades?
There is no such thing as Greece before 1821. So they would have to travel back in time.
tsimionescu
I meant the Greek Peninsula, but fair enough.
digging
If they're Byzantine, calling them "Greek" is not wrong.
Byzantine = specific, inaccurate. Romans = accurate, nonspecific. Greek = a bit of both
tsimionescu
To my mind, calling them Greek is a bit like calling people in, say, Belize "English". If I brought a vase from Belize and said "I brought you an English vase", would you not find that odd?
Just because someone speaks a related language (and I'm pretty sure the Greek of Constantinople was different from the Greek of Athens at the time), doesn't mean that they are the same people. The Byzantines had hundreds of years as a distinct culture from the Greek islands and peninsula, with a major Roman influence.
rsynnott
> If they were made in Constantinople, they're Byzantine(as we tend to call the empire) or Roman(as they would have called themselves), not really Greek, right?
I mean, define 'Greek'. Byzantium was a Greek city before the Romans got there, Greek was always its major language, and so on. It's not within modern Greece, granted, but nor are a lot of classical Greek cities.
tsimionescu
Well, I think we could define it by what the people living there considered themselves to be. And generally, from what I know (but I'm not well read on this subject, so I'm happy to be corrected), the inhabitants of the area would have called themselves Romans, at least by the time the city came to be known as Constantinople.
Also, the culture of Athens or Sparta or Crete or any of the other places that would have called themselves, or at least accepted the term, Greeks (well, Hellenes) was quite different from the culture of Constantinople, at least, again, by the time the city came to be known by that name.
beezlebroxxxxxx
A better question would be, would the inhabitants at the time in question call themselves "Hellenes", "Graeci" (Greeks), or "Romans"?
sbdhzjd
Looting a collapsing empire just across the Mediterranean is easy.
Looting an empire halls way across the world is a tad harder.
rsynnott
I think their theory is that the lion was brought to Constantinople by legitimate means, then looted _from_ there by Venice.
ithkuil
It's a common misconception that the crusades were a crime of white christians versus non-white non-christians. In reality crusades were just as well a crime against other white christians as against non-white christians, white non-christians, non-white non-christians, an excuse would be found for any of these targets
mr_toad
> There is no historical record of when or how the lion arrived in Venice, but it was already installed atop the column in St. Mark’s Square by the time Marco Polo returned from China in 1295.
Venice had trade agreements with the Mongol empire for decades prior to that. It’s not hard to imagine that the Mongols took it from China and traded it to Venetian merchants.
goodcanadian
Mongols ruled China around that time.
Leary
"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."
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bronze-venice-lion-from-ch...
Neonlicht
Interesting I wonder if the Chinese at the time knew what a lion was?
yread
There is also a (bit wild) theory that St. Mark's relics in Venice are actually remains of Alexander the Great. The idea is that he was buried in Alexandria in Egypt and when the Christians started looting and pillaging someone swapped them for St.Mark's remains as those would be protected from them
simonebrunozzi
I was at St.Mark's Basilica just a few days ago (I live in Venice). An informed archeologist pointed to a specific stone decoration on the north facade, telling me that it was depicting Alexander the Great, and this was confirmed only by very recent studies in Alexandria (where she was going to go back the following week).
stonethrowaway
Can we get Graham Hancock to weigh in on this theory?
waldothedog
I see some speculation around the addition of the wings but does anyone know when the seagull was added to the head?
GTP
The seagull added itself to the sculpture in modern times, not long before the picture was taken :D
walrus01
To me the face and mane of the lion resemble artwork/designs I've seen from historical Iranian-adjacent/Persian empire related sites all along the historical maximum extent of the Farsi speaking world, much of which overlaps with the historical land based trade routes to/from western China.
tedk-42
As an Asian person having grown up with a bit of South Chinese culture, it does appear a bit like a Chinese lion statue, but the wings really throw it off for me.
paganel
Could be that the wings are a later addition, like they might have been added in the 1100s-1200s in Venice or those whereabouts.
jakub_g
> Lead isotope analysis of the bronze alloy provided indisputable evidence of the Chinese origin of the materials used in the statue.
Is there some more detailed source explaining how this conclusion was reached? What's distinct about Chinese lead / how this kind of evaluations are done?
Isamu
The original article translated from Italian puts it this way:
>the results indicate that the colossal statue is most likely an elaborate reassembly of what was initially a zhènmùshòu (镇墓兽 "keeper of tombs") fused in the Tang period (609-907 AD) with copper from the mines of the lower basin of the Yang-tze River, the Blue River in southern China. This is confirmed by accurate analyses of lead isotopes, which leave in the bronze unmistakable traces of the original mines from which the copper was extracted.
The implication is that the mines themselves have different isotope signatures that have been established in previous archaeological studies.
potato3732842
I'm surprised they're using isotopes and not impurities for such a task.
Isamu
I believe these are impurities. This is talking about copper mines, producing the copper for the bronze casting.
So they are looking for the signature lead impurities in that copper. They use isotope analysis to find the lead impurities in the copper.
samus
Isotope ratios are very easy and reliable signals compared to impurities. Impurities can be all over the place depending on where the materials were mined. Impurities could have also been added inadvertently during the casting as well.
cameron_b
Perhaps based on time-mapping known regional mining activity
ceejayoz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_analysis_in_archaeolog... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_lead
Rebelgecko
I think they're looking for a study that was done on this particular item, not just info about isotopes in general
There's some more info on the lion's measurements here, but I haven't been able to find the study that was presented in September
https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2024/03/00/in5093/in5093....
wizzwizz4
Those links do not answer the question, separately or combined.
sct202
This one is specific to Chinese lead isotopes. Many Chinese bronzes have elevated levels of radiogenic lead. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30275-2
ceejayoz
They absolutely do answer the question.
noirchen
I would not jump to the conclusion solely based on isotope signatures. A decade or so ago, a prominent Chinese professor Weidong Sun specialized in geochemistry analyzed the ancient bronze artifacts dated back to the Shang dynasty and found isotope signatures pointing to a Mediterranean origin, and he had to answer that. Well there can be several explanations, for example, the Shang people traded with central Asian tribes and got the ores and perhaps the bronze smelting tech too. But Sun, based on some ancient documents on some mythical long travel of the ancestors of the Shang people, concluded that the only reasonable explanation is that the Shang people are offsprings of those tribes, who are offsprings of the Sumerian people.
rsynnott
> Lions were initially introduced to the Han court by emissaries from Persia
I wonder when "showing up with a weird animal" went out, as a form of diplomacy. It definitely seems to have been A Thing for a while.
I mean, I suppose there's pandas.
ttepasse
Queen Elizabeth II still got horses as a present.
For those ancient animal gift exchanges I always wonder about the practicality. Travelling overland and over the Himalayas with lions does not seem like the best thing to do.
Also: Back in 801/802 Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne send an emissary - Isaac, the jew - to the Caliph in Baghdad, Harun Al-Rashid. Yes, that one. For the return journey the caliph gave a present, an elephant called Abul Abbas. And according to the historical chronicles Isaac really travelled with Abul Abbas from Badghad to todays Tunesia, crossed the Mediterranean on a ship and travelled to the emperor's court in Aachen, in western Germany. Charlemagne used the elephant in his campaign against the saxons. Abul Abbas seems to have survived until 810, when he died in todays northwestern Germany.
I do love the origin of the term white elephant:
> Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the recipient now had an animal that was expensive to maintain, could not be given away, and could not be put to much practical use.
rsynnott
> For those ancient animal gift exchanges I always wonder about the practicality. Travelling overland and over the Himalayas with lions does not seem like the best thing to do.
Presumably that was part of the point; it's a good gift because it's difficult and expensive.
> Also: Back in 801/802 Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne send an emissary - Isaac, the jew - to the Caliph in Baghdad, Harun Al-Rashid. Yes, that one. For the return journey the caliph gave a present, an elephant called Abul Abbas.
That just seems rude. It's one thing to _bring_ an elephant as a gift; quite another to make the recipient responsible for getting the damn thing home.
From wikipedia:
> It seems that in 831, Harun al-Rashid's son al-Ma'mun also sent an embassy to Louis the Pious.
No word on whether Louis sent some sort of inconvenient animal back, as revenge.
roughly
Literally a White Elephant
permo-w
China still loans out pandas for diplomatic purposes
cameron_b
Don't miss the power play. Giving of a few beautiful birds would be one thing. Now the emperor can create beauty in the realm.
But Lions. Lions are apex predators, and though they hadn't been seen, the trade routes would surely have brought their reputations ahead of them. Lions kill people, they eat camels, they devour. Kill one and you're mighty. Capture one, and you're very powerful, skillful and brave. Double up and you're formidable. Have a breeding pair and you're a warlord with no need for an army.
The Chinese Imperial story has a lot to do with being the presiding authority of knowledge and power. Check out the preoccupation with celestial events. The emperor made sure that he not only knew when and where an eclipse would take place in the realm, but he went there to make sure people knew that the mysteries of the sky were known by the Emperor.
If you want to cozy up to a ruler like that, you show him that you also know similar power, and you have enough to share ~ "tell your people you can make lions now, thanks to your friends in Persia"
Nowadays it just looks more like 5th gen fighter contracts.
ngcc_hk
Like elephant, lion is not a native animal. Not in the folklore at least.
Four main direction are dragon, tiger, special bird, Tortoise … wonder if you present a lion to old emperor what does it meant. Giraffe is a good example.
5040
Not necessarily just a singular weird animal either. Sometimes a breeding pair was given. Take this interesting excerpt about Plato's stepbrother:
By 413, Demos had inherited his father's peacocks, descendants of an original breeding pair given to Pyrilampes s.v. on one of his embassies to the Persian court. They were such beautiful εὐόφθαλμος and expensive birds—a pair valued at a thousand drachmae (Ael. NA 5.21)--that visitors would arrive from Sparta and Thessaly to see them, and in hopes of obtaining some of their eggs. Apparently Demos continued the tradition his father had begun, more than thirty years previously, of admitting the public on the first day of each month to view the birds.
UberFly
Went looking for more info. Some good pics of where this is in Venice:
https://www.guidedtoursinvenice.com/en/blog/a-guided-tour-in...
I have toyed with a slightly absurd but factualy correct history of the ancient world, told from the point of view of roofers. One of the main objectives of many, many, many conquests was to steal the lead roofing that was used to cover and seal/water proof the roofs of countless civic and religious and religious buildings,another main target were.....are.... the collums used to support said roofs, or lions or dragons,horses,whatever....