September 20, 2024

A Tang Dynasty Lion in Venice

Science stuff shows us an increasingly permeable medieval world

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

The piazzetta San Marco was the true gateway, the true entrance point, to the late medieval city of Venice. Medieval cities on land had walls and gates in the walls that controlled access to and from that city, but Venice had a lagoon. That meant that, with a boat one could enter at any point, dock at any of a thousand big and little wharves and jetties. And indeed, for much of Venice’s history the city was decentralized, with dozens of small shipyards, markets, and centers of authority. But by the late thirteenth century, the city had begun to centralize - the market economy focused on the Rialto; shipbuilding at the Arsenale; power and faith at the Ducal Palace and its (technically) private chapel, the Church of San Marco.

This “gate” was marked by two pillars topped with large sculptures - one St. Theodore, a military saint with spear, shield, and sword standing on top of a dragon (or crocodile, depending on who you ask). The other, a winged bronze lion that represented the evangelist St. Mark.

Theodore had been Venice’s first patron saint when it was a Byzantine colony. In independence, Venice reoriented themselves by stealing the relics of St. Mark from Alexandria and centering local devotional practice around him. That’s a long story (you could read David’s book about it, if you like!) but the reason David’s telling you this is that just in the last weeks, a new study revealed - based on both stylistic and isotropic (i.e. cool science stuff!) analysis - that the lion was actually a Tang Dynasty (Chinese) bronze sculpture probably forged sometime in the 8th century.

You can watch this video interview of the lead researcher. It’s in Italian, but I checked the subtitles and they’re good!

Some history of the lion.

If you go to Venice today, you’ll see a city of gleaming stone and marble, with the paved Piazza San Marco as the hub, spokes radiating out to take you through the city. But as late as the 12th century, Venice was largely a city of wood and grass, dirt. It’s only in the 13th century that Venetians began transforming their city into one of bright stone. And they did so for two reasons: First, they acquired significantly greater control over trading routes in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, when Venice provided the fleet and about half the manpower for what turned into the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and establishment of a new “Latin Empire.” They also got lots of art and fancy building materials out of Byzantine territories that they plundered and paired that with a slowly intensifying imperial rhetoric of Venice as empire. Second, in 1267, their enemies the Genoese partnered with the Paleologoi - a Byzantine noble family - to overthrow the Latin Empire and, for Genoa, block Venice’s access to trade wherever possible. This crisis made projecting power all the more important for Venetians, and (I wrote about this a lot in my scholarly life) sparked a wild couple of decades when it came to mythmaking through art, ritual, building, and more.

Our first mention of the lion atop a pillar is an authorization of funds to repair the sculpture from 1293, meaning it had been sitting watch over Venice for at least some decades before it. So we know roughly when it was put up, but not why, and not where Venice got the sculpture.

Venice could have acquired the sculpture at any time in the previous couple hundred years. They had a lot of cool stuff they bought, stole (through stealth), or looted (with armies) that they displayed, but always more stashed away here and there.

The video conjectures that it returned with the first voyage of the Polos (the uncle and father of the more famous Marco), and sure, that could have happened. Venetians did have a habit of acquiring cool lions everywhere they went and shipping them back home. But the neat thing about things is that they can move slowly, region by region, site by site, acquiring new stories and sometimes pieces (those wings are probably not Tang dynasty) before finding a new resting place. It could well be one of the many bronze statues that crusaders looted from Constantinople after 1204 — many were infamously melted down, according to a major Greek source, but the four bronze horses in Venice are examples of survivors that were preserved. If Venetians grabbed a quadriga, it’s not hard to imagine them also grabbing a lion. But without some kind of documentation, the lions actual itinerary will be hard to trace.

If you’re a regular at Modern Medieval, you know the next part. It’s where Matt and I talk about the permeability of medieval Europe, but that’s not such a surprise when it comes to later medieval Venice (as opposed to early medieval England). But what’s always interesting to me about Venice is not just that they have lots of stuff from all over the hemisphere, but how eager Venetians prior to the fourteenth century were to emphasize foreignness. We have no evidence whether or not Venetians understood this lion as Tang Dynasty (probably not) or even East Asian (possibly!), but we can say that - like Charlemagne’s elephant - its distant origins and unusual stylistic elements would have enhanced Venetian claims to status, to empire, to power.

Locating your city as a hub in a transcontinental nexus connoted greatness. That’s a pattern of storytelling that started in Venice at least by the 800s and continued in the centuries that followed. Venice was unusual in its intensify of mythmaking around knowingly foreign objects, but not unique. Because, yes, the history of medieval Europe is a history of exchange, of movement, of permeability.

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