Offered by Barozzi Art
Sculptor of the 'Piacenza School' (a western Emilian craft active in the second half of the 12th century), circa 1170s, pair of lions bearing columns for a porch. Verona marble (believed by one expert to be from the quarries of San Giorgio di Valpollicella), lead-filled pupils. Measurements: 64 cm (height) x 116 cm (base length) each.
Condition: Good, but with widespread traces of prolonged outdoor exposure.
Numerous holes for metal pins, now empty, and the trace of a clamp connecting two holes testify to one or more previous consolidation interventions, deemed necessary to strengthen the sculptures under stress from the weight of the porch above.
Provenance: Agriturismo Podere San Giorgio (Santa Giuletta, PV), formerly owned by the Marchesi Sauli of Genoa and since 1978 by the Perdomini of Milan; In 2012, Pandolfini Auction House, Florence (on the occasion of the auction, the author was commissioned to prepare a report for the Export Office of the Superintendency of Florence, represented by Dr.
Angelo Tartuferi). The current owner states that he spoke personally
with the owner of Podere San Giorgio, who, when asked specifically whether he had purchased the lions elsewhere and brought them to the estate, replied that when he finalized the purchase of the estate in 1978, directly from the Sauli family, the two lions had already been there for some time. The estate corresponds to the ancient Castle of San Giorgio, which, among other things, preserves a 15th-century crenellated tower
and which must have had a church, now destroyed, dedicated to the saint. Although theoretically, the lions' origins cannot be ruled out from this church, which was probably small, I favor the origin of a larger church or even a cathedral, where monumental porches are generally located. In the absence of documentation,
a study of the possessions of the Sauli family, a family divided into various branches with ancient headquarters scattered between Genoa and Bergamo, could shed some light. However, it seems unprofitable to speculate, given that the Sauli family could have purchased the lions and drawn on materials discarded from churches suppressed or altered by restoration. In this regard, it is perhaps interesting to note that during
remodeling and restoration work on the Piacenza Cathedral,1 the column-bearing lions on both the central portal of the façade and the portal of the north transept were replaced, although neither of the two discarded pairs can be identified with the one examined here. The dynamics of these
replacements can, however, help us reconstruct, by analogy, what might have happened in our case. The central porch of the façade, which judging by the few surviving original sculptures,
dated 1122 or shortly thereafter, when construction of the current Piacenza Cathedral began, was repaired in 1553, including the replacement of the column-bearing lions on the lower level, and restored at the end of the 19th century. 2 The porch of the north transept, the lower part of which was walled up in 1720, was supported on both the lower and upper levels by pairs of column-bearing lions,
like ours from the Piacenza School, dating to shortly after the mid-12th century (figs. 12-13). The lower pair of these lions then moved to the Villa Belvedere in Torrano near Ponte dell’Olio and is now in Palazzo Borromeo in Piacenza. 3 During the restoration of the porch in 1902, the pair of two lions on the lower level was replaced by another pair of column-bearing lions, also dating to the
second half of the 12th century (figs. 20-21), purchased from the Rambaldi antiques dealer in Bologna. These lions were later identified as those that supported the lower supports of the destroyed aedicule of the Porta Ravegnana crossroads in Bologna (the upper supports of which were instead supported by a pair of column-bearing griffins that ended up in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio). Since the School of
Piacenza, to which the two lions examined here can be attributed, worked not only in that city but also in a vast surrounding area, including Cremona, Lodi, Fidenza..., a provenance from a church in today's Oltrepò Pavese, where Santa Giuletta is located, is entirely plausible, as is one from nearby locations, either towards Piacenza or Tortona (Alessandria), or even beyond the Po. It may be interesting to remember that Santa Giuletta, a fiefdom of the Abbey of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, was detached from the territory of Piacenza and assigned to that of Pavia in 1164 by order of Barbarossa.
Attribution: As Mr. Prasedi pointed out, the lions (figs. 1-9) closely resemble, although not entirely identical to, a smaller column-bearing lion known only from the cast preserved in the Mondazzi Plaster Cast Gallery in Turin (fig. 10), taken from a marble original in a private collection. Both in the Turin cast and in the two marble lions discussed here, the stylistic Monstrous reproduction of the head, reminiscent of lions from ancient Eastern civilizations, in which the beast was given unnatural yet effectively terrifying characteristics. Particularly in our case, where the details appear more refined and detailed than in the Turin cast and all the other lions cited as comparisons, the muzzle is striking, with its snarling jaws and clenched jaws,
as if the lion were irritably biting its lower lip. The lips and nose are furrowed with parallel, wrinkled incisions. At the base of the mane, the hair is combed in a twisted rope-like pattern, with oblique parallel furrows, while the rest of the fur is divided into three bands of vertical locks ending in calligraphic curls.
Equally artificial are the hair that grows like a plant on the knees and the tuft at the end of the tail. Comparable column-bearing lions include the two at the bases of the columns of the apse window of Piacenza Cathedral (figs. 14-15); 5 the one killing dragons and a man from the Civic Museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza, originally from the porch of San Pietro a Cadeo, later in Palazzo Alberoni in Piacenza, measuring 60 cm (height) x 120 cm (base length), thus very similar in size to ours (fig. 16); 6 the lions killing quadrupeds from the porch of Lodi Cathedral, rebuilt in 1284 (as attested by the late fifteenth-century Cronichetta) but evidently reusing a pair of twelfth-century lions (figs. 17-18). 7 Critics have already recognized the similarity between the lions of Cadeo and Lodi, the latter dating back to after 1158, when Lodi Vecchio and its cathedral of San Bassiano were destroyed by the Milanese, but also after 1163, when the relics of
Bassiano were transferred in the presence of Barbarossa to the new Cathedral of Lodi Nuovo, a church not yet completed in 1183. The lions of the Lodi porch probably date back to the 1270s.........continued....
Study by Prof. G. Tigler
