The Lion of St Mark is the bronze winged lion standing on the eastern of the two granite columns in the Piazzetta, between the Doge's Palace and the waterfront. It is about 4 m long from muzzle to tail and 2.2 m high at the head, and it has been the emblem of the Venetian state since the 1260s. Where the bronze was cast has never been settled (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1373).
Venice kept no record of the statue arriving. The only medieval documents naming the lion on its column are dated 14 May 1293, and by then the sculpture was already damaged and in need of restoration (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1373). Earlier scholarship placed its origin in a twelfth-century Venetian foundry, or in Anatolia or northern Syria during the Hellenistic period from 323 to 30 BC, with Romanesque, Gothic, Assyrian, Etruscan, Sassanian and Chinese influences all proposed at one time or another (Artioli et al., 2025, pp. 1372-1373).
A 2025 study in the journal Antiquity argues for something else. On this reading the bronze began as a monumental Chinese sculpture, most plausibly a Tang Dynasty tomb guardian, later cut down and refitted into the winged emblem of the Republic. Nine lead isotope measurements taken across six documented casting phases are consistent with each other and match copper ores of the Lower Yangzi region of eastern China (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1382).
Why is the winged lion the symbol of Venice?
The winged lion came to the fore as an official symbol of Venice in the early 1260s. Holding a book in its paws as a mark of identity, it supplanted the older veneration of the Byzantine St Theodore and condensed the celestial authority and the earthly power of the Republic into one image (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374). That is why St Theodore still stands on the second column of the Piazzetta while the lion took the leading role on state seals, banners and buildings.
The timing was political. On 25 July 1261 the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus retook Constantinople, a heavy blow to the Latin Empire in which Venice had held a privileged position. A seal of 1261 shows Doge Ranieri Zeno receiving a banner bearing the lion from St Mark. The Venetian commander at Acre had a winged lion seal struck in 1263 or 1264, a poem by Martino da Canal written in 1274 describes the winged lion on the city's banner, and both Acre and Negroponte became border strongholds where the new emblem appeared quickly (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374).
The adoption of the emblem, in other words, tracks a loss of ground in the eastern Mediterranean rather than a moment of triumph.
Where to see the lion of St Mark in the Piazzetta
The two large columns of the Piazzetta arrived in Venice not much earlier than AD 1261 and were erected a few years later, with their bases and capitals sculpted on site (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1373). They frame the open end of the Piazzetta where it meets the Bacino di San Marco, so that arrivals by water passed between them. The lion stands on the eastern column, the one closer to the Doge's Palace; St Theodore stands on the western one.
The column carrying the lion is cut from a violet granitoid rock quarried in north-western Anatolia, the stone Roman quarry lists call marmor troadensium (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1373). It is worth looking at the shaft as well as the statue: the colour and the coarse crystals are quite unlike the Istrian limestone used across the rest of the square.
There is no ticket and no opening time. The columns stand in open public space and can be seen at any hour. The upper loggia of the Doge's Palace, which is part of the museum route, runs along the eastern, southern and western wings and gives views over the Piazzetta from above (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026a), which is the closest a visitor gets to the lion's own level.
Is the lion of St Mark really Chinese?
The 2025 argument runs on two tracks, style and metal. On style, the authors compare the muzzle, the bulbous nose, the lateral ears and the exposed canines with Tang Dynasty tomb guardians, the zhenmushou, including an earthenware example from the early eighth-century Tomb M2 at Fujiagou Village in Gansu (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1375).
On metal, three new samples were taken, from the front of the curly mane, from a frontal repair dowel and from the right wing, bringing the total to nine lead isotope measurements across six documented casting phases (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1380). The ratios are particularly compatible with the ores of the Guishan and Yaojialing deposits in Anhui province and the Anji deposits in Zhejiang province, all within the Lower Yangzi tectonic unit (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1382). The readings stay homogeneous despite seven centuries of recasting and repair (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1384).
The paper also states the case against itself. The streaming waves that make up the mane have no parallel in ancient Chinese art, where leonine sculptures after the second century AD carry either a solid mane or dense curls (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1376). A further difficulty is that almost no large pre-Ming bronzes survive anywhere: in 845 some 4,600 temples and monasteries were stripped under Emperor Wuzong and their bronzes melted for coin, and a later purge under Emperor Shizong erased 3,336 more and melted every statue over 2.5 kg (Artioli et al., 2025, pp. 1376-1377).
Sawn horns, cut ears and a set of older wings
The most striking claims in the paper concern marks on the statue itself. A wig was added to the top of the head, covering the scars left by the removal of one or two horns (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1376). A photograph taken with the wig removed shows a linear and angular contour to the ears and signs that something, probably horns, was cut off, with the fur flocks ending abruptly where the ears appear to have been sawn as well (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1378).
The ears support the same reading. Rather than tapering to a point, the upper edge of the auricles is thick, blunt and rounded, which suggests an upper portion was sawn away (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1376). Horned, winged leonine hybrids are a standing type in Chinese funerary art, which is what makes the missing horns significant.
One common assumption turns out to be wrong. Venice did not add wings to a wingless beast: traces of plumage survive below the attachment of the present wings, just behind the shoulders, showing that the original bronze was already winged before the later pair was fitted (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1376).
Napoleon, the 1815 rebuild and the 1892 restoration
After 1293 the next precise record of the lion concerns its removal to Paris in 1797 by Napoleon, as a symbol of the defeat and humiliation of Venice, and its return in pieces from France in 1815 (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374).
The rebuild that followed determines much of what a visitor sees today. Restoration was carried out in 1815, and the replaced parts, the wings among them, were obtained by remelting fragments of the original pieces with added brass. The brass is still detectable as a high zinc content in the wing sample, 2.5 per cent by weight in the sample taken from the right wing. The lead signal of that same sample still matches the rest of the statue, which is possible only if the added metal was pure zinc or a brass with a very low lead content (Artioli et al., 2025, pp. 1382-1383). The wings on the column are therefore nineteenth-century work cast from the melted remains of the originals.
The column and its statue were worked on again in 1892. A set of materials from that campaign, including signed drawings, photographs, a bronze fragment of the lion and a letter of 1917, was donated to an American painter in 1900 and has since entered the drawings archive of the Venice heritage superintendency (Baldescu, 2025). The lion has been repaired in every century since it first appears in the record.
How could a Tang bronze have reached Venice?
This is where the paper is at its most careful, and any honest account of it has to be equally careful. Around 1262 to 1264 the father and uncle of Marco Polo were trading in Bukhara before joining a diplomatic mission to Khanbaliq, modern Beijing, and the court of Kublai Khan (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374). The authors raise the possibility that in 1264 to 1268, exactly when the political winged lion was being established at home, the two encountered a dismantled Tang funerary bronze in a foundry or imperial storeroom and sent the pieces back to Venice to be refitted as the emblem of St Mark (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1385).
The authors then flag this as one possible scenario built on the intersection of historical and archaeometallurgical data, and hand the question back to historians (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1385). It is a hypothesis, and the isotope result does not prove it. What the metal shows is that the copper came from China, not that any particular person carried it.
One related object is on public display. A celadon jar in the Treasury of St Mark's Basilica is a Qingbai porcelain made in south-eastern China during the Song or Yuan dynasties, contemporary with the Polo travels, and no systematic study of medieval Chinese ware imported to Venice has yet been attempted (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1385).
Seeing the earliest Venetian winged lions at the Museo Correr
The bronze is not the oldest winged lion in the city. The earliest Venetian representations are in moeca, with radiating wings turned in towards the head like the legs of a crab. The three oldest are sculpted reliefs made at some point between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, and two of them are now in the Museo Correr on the far side of Piazza San Marco (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374).
One of those two, which came from the church of St Aponal and dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century, may be a portrait of the bronze lion made before it was installed on the column, that is after 1172 and before 1293. The third relief is reminiscent of the bronze as well, with the same curls and the same odd human-like lateral ears, and a copy of it is still in place at Rio de San Marcuola in Cannaregio (Artioli et al., 2025, p. 1374). That makes a short and specific walk: the column, then the Correr, then the canal frontage at San Marcuola.
The Museo Correr opens from 10.00 to 18.00 between 1 April and 31 October, with last admission at 17.00, and from 10.00 to 17.00 between 1 November and 31 March, with last admission at 16.00. Admission is by the combined St Mark's Square museums ticket, which also covers the Doge's Palace, the National Archaeological Museum and the monumental rooms of the Marciana library (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2026b).
