The Lion of St Mark: Venice
The ancient pagan symbols of the bull, the lion and the eagle make their way back into
Christian iconography by a curiously roundabout route. The first vision of the Prophet
Ezekiel describes an image in terms which are almost incomprehensible, both visually
and philologically, but which mention four faces, those of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a
man. About six hundred years later the author of the Apocalypse, who was so frequently
indebted to Ezekiel, speaks of the four beasts that are before the Throne of God.
'The first beast was like a lion, and the second beast was like a calf, and the third beast had the
face of a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle.'
These ancient symbolic animals, in a sacred book believed to have been written by one
of the Evangelists, had an overwhelming influence in the early Middle Ages. The
question, like so many in early Christian doctrine, was solved by St Jerome. In his
famous commentary on Ezekiel he lays it down that these animals are the proper
symbols of the four Evangelists, the eagle for St John, the ; lion for St Mark, the bull for
St Luke and the man for St Matthew.
For over seven hundred years almost the only animals in Christian art were
representations of the Evangelists. They pass from the extreme stylization of the
Echternach Gospels and the Books of Kells to the magnificent realism of the bull on the
facade of Siena Cathedral, and on Donatello's altar of the Santo in Padua to the lion of St
Mark on the Piazzetta, or Donatello's
Marzocco in Florence.
