Prickly Knowledge

During our 2015 trip to Florence, we realized that we were seeing a lot of lions with their paws on a stone sphere. With two young cats at home it was quite funny to see and we felt like it was a pretty common representation, not only in Florence but throughout our other european trips and museum visits.
On Piazza della Signoria, there are two of them, this one is the newest of the two and was sculpted by Flaminio Vacca in the late 16th century. The other one has been reworked during the same period but dates from the 2nd century BC. They were symbols of the Medici family and you can find older ones, believed to have some Greek roots, and more recent copies from Renaissance to now all around the world. So it wasn’t just our imagination or cat loving minds…
But a few months later, while visiting a temple near Hong Kong, we saw a chinese guardian lion. While it was something we’ve already seen (mainly in Chinese restaurants to be honest), seeing both in a short amount of time was uncanny and funny.

Looking back at it and doing some research today it seems that there is actually something to uncover here. As lions were found to be present in some parts of Europe including Greece until the 6th century BC and may have still walked those territories 5 centuries later, they have never been more to the East than India. So where can these representations in Chinese art and culture be traced back ?

Nowadays, you can find lions in Chinese arts, architecture, buddhist traditions, etc. where they’re a strong symbol of protection and power. From the sources I could gather, it seems that the lion entered gradually but with much impact on Chinese art and culture, starting with Buddhist missionaries coming from India in the 3rd century AD and real lions being gifted by foreigners traveling the Silk Route. From there the origin of lion representations seems to be unclear. They could simply come from Indian art where lions were endemic but, before coming to China, Buddhism was well established in Central Asia, especially Afghanistan and Iran where lions have also a great symbolic importance. There, I was hoping to find out that with Alexander the Great conquest and the Greek presence in the following centuries, I could find lions represented with their paws on a sphere. However I found research work on the influence of Gandharan on Chinese art, Gandharan culture having itself some roots in Greek mythology, especially for the lion symbol.

As a non historian I really want to make the shortcut that the statues of lions with their paws on a sphere in China are a reinterpretation of the ancient Greece ones. Even long after Alexander the Great’s brisk conquest, the Silk Route not only carried goods but also art and moreover people with their own beliefs and culture, so I would not be surprised that archaeologists will someday find this kind of motifs in ancient sites.

This blog is a hobby, so I won’t go further down that rabbit hole but I wanted to share these findings as I hadn’t thought that this picture would bring me to the long lasting interconnection between European and Asian culture.
For now as a cat owner I would just say that if you have already seen a cat playing with a ball you will know that they can be proud of their catches but they would never keep it still under their paws !

I am only taking a quick look on the subject, if you want to share your own findings and thoughts, please, comment below !