The bronze Winged Lion in the Piazzetta di San Marco, Venice, is more than a simple statue. It is the soul of a city, the enduring emblem of a once-mighty maritime republic. For centuries, it has stared out over the lagoon and guided Venice through its glorious times.
Turns out, the lion is kind of a fraud.
This ultimate symbol of Venetian power and identity wasn’t forged in Venice, nor is it a spoil of war from Ancient Greece or Rome. According to a stunning new scientific investigation, the St. Mark’s Lion began its life on the other side of the world. It was cast in China during the Tang Dynasty as a zhènmùshòu — a horned, winged, lion-like monster designed to guard the tomb of a Chinese noble.
“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.
Archaeological Detective Work
The Republic of Venice was formed in the late 7th century CE and over the course of a millennium, established itself as one of the major European commercial and naval powers. Venice’s patron was Mark the Evangelist, and the symbolism was so deep that Venice was sometimes referred to as the “Republic of St. Mark”
The winged lion was the symbol of Mark the Evangelist. It appeared on the Republic’s flags, coats of arms, and seals. The rulers of Venice were depicted alongside it. But the mystery of the lion’s origin is almost as old as Venice itself. There are no known records detailing its creation or arrival in the city and for centuries, people assumed that it was Hellenistic or Roman bronze; but no one really knew.
It’s also a rather odd piece of art. Art historians noted that its style didn’t match any known local artistic conventions. It didn’t look like the Romanesque or Gothic lions being carved elsewhere in Europe and its face is particularly strange. With its bulbous nose, gnashing teeth, oddly human-like ears, and strange wrinkles on its forehead, it looks more like a mythical beast than a real lion.
So, where did it come from?
Vidale and colleagues looked east, far beyond the Mediterranean, and found striking parallels in Tang Dynasty China (AD 618–907). The lion’s strange features, they argued, look just like fantastical hybrid creatures known as zhènmùshòu, or “tomb guardians”. These zhènmùshòu were ceramic or metal beasts, often placed in pairs at the entrance to tombs to ward off evil. They had the features of lions, but also wings and horns. They were meant to be ferocious beasts that could deter evil spirits from coming nearby.
The researchers also found circumstantial evidence. At some point, the lion received a “wig” of bronze curls, underneath which were scars and flat surfaces that seemed to suggest the lion had horns at some point. Obviously, a Christian republic wouldn’t accept a horned creature as its symbol, so they sawed the horns off.
But a smoking gun was missing, until they looked for isotopes.
A Trail of Chemistry
Stylistic comparisons are suggestive, but they can be subjective. To build an airtight case, the research team needed hard evidence. For that, they turned to metallurgy. They obtained three tiny metal samples from the statue and analyzed the lead isotopes within the bronze. They took one from the mane, one from a repair dowel, and one from a wing.
An isotope is an atom of a chemical element that has the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. These isotopes are like geological “fingerprints.” Ores from different mining regions around the world have distinct, measurable ratios of lead isotopes. When that ore is smelted to make metal, its unique isotopic signature is locked into the final product. By matching the signature in an artifact to databases of ore deposits, scientists can pinpoint where its raw materials came from.
Luckily, previous research had established a database of ore signatures from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Nothing seemed to fit, until they looked at China.
The lead isotope signature from the St. Mark’s Lion was a perfect match for copper and polymetallic ore deposits from one specific region: the Lower Yangtze River basin, particularly mines in the Anhui and Zhejiang provinces. There was no ambiguity. This was the hard evidence they were looking for: the metal in Venice’s most sacred symbol came from China. But this opened up an even more puzzling question:
How in the world did a massive, monstrous Tang Dynasty tomb guardian end up in Venice to become the symbol of the Republic?
A Stunning Journey
This is where the hard evidence ends and the researchers propose their own, plausible-but-unproven theory.
Around the 1260s, Venice was facing a lot of pressure. On July 25, 1261, its forces were driven from Constantinople, dealing a devastating blow to the Venetian-dominated Latin Empire. The Republic needed a new, powerful symbol to project strength and divine authority. That’s when it pivoted from its traditional patron, the Byzantine St. Theodoros, to a more potent and personal emblem: the Winged Lion, the symbol of the evangelist St. Mark, whose supposed relics had been brought to the city centuries earlier.
Suddenly, the lion was everywhere. It appeared on the Doge’s seal in 1261, on banners, and on official bronze grain measures in 1262 and 1263. The Republic was undergoing a massive, state-sponsored rebranding. And at the heart of it was the great bronze statue, which first appears in records needing repairs in 1293, already installed on its column.
That’s also the time when two legendary merchants were making their first epic journey east. Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, the father and uncle of Marco Polo, were trading in the Mongol empire and eventually reached the court of the great Kublai Khan in Beijing. The researchers suspect that the Polos, being the savvy entrepreneurs that they were, somehow came across this lion and brought it back to Europe.
Historical Context and Hypothesis
The zhènmùshòus were already ancient by then and very rare. Buddhist China had destroyed such artifacts and even persecuted their owners, wiping out thousands of monasteries and their relics. The Polos would have brought the lion to Venice, in a daring and spectacular feat. Then, the lion underwent some changes to fit the Winged Lion of St. Mark.
The authors themselves admit this is just one possible scenario, but it elegantly connects the chemical data, the artistic analysis, and the historical timeline. Yet, no matter how the lion came to Venice, the new research forces us to look at it in a completely new light — not as a symbol of Venice alone, but as an emblem of a deeply interconnected medieval world, where political ambition in Italy could be realized with a repurposed sacred monster from China.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity.
