II. LATRATOR ANUBIS 225

piece of eleventh or twelfth century bronze. I know that by the style of him; but have never found out where he came from.* I may now chance on it, however, at any moment in other quests. Eleventh or twelfth century, the Lion-fifteenth, or later, his wings; very delicate in feather-workmanship, but with little lift or strike in them: decorative mainly. Without doubt his first wings were thin sheets of beaten bronze, shred into plumage; far wider in their sweep than these.†

23. The statue of St. Theodore, whatever its age, is wholly without merit. I can’t make it out myself, nor find record of it; in a stonemason’s yard, I should have passed

* “He”-the actual piece of forged metal, I mean. (See Appendix II. for account of its recent botchings.¹) Your modern English explainers of him have never heard, I observe, of any such person as an “Evangelist,” or of any Christian symbol of such a being! See page 42 of Mr. Adams’ Venice Past and Present (Edinburgh and New York, 1852).²

† I am a little proud of this guess, for before correcting this sentence in type, I found the sharp old wings represented faithfully in the woodcut of Venice in 1480, in the Correr Museum. Dürer, in 1500, draws the present wings; so that we get their date fixed within twenty years.³

¹ [This second Appendix, however, was never printed, nor have any materials for it been found among Ruskin’s manuscripts. For an earlier notice of the lion and the capitals (then both ascribed to the thirteenth century), see Appendix 10 in vol. iii. of Stones of Venice (Vol. XI. p. 275). Ruskin, it should be noted, there states that he “had not been up to the lion.” In 1891 the lion was taken down for repairs, and the column, which was seriously off plumb, was rectified. The work, and the discoveries made in the course of it, were described (and illustrated) by Mr. H. F. Brown in the Pall Mall Gazette of March 23 and November 6, 1891 (reprinted in his In and Around Venice, 1905, pp. 74-83). “It is clear,” says Mr. Brown, “that the whole creature, as it now stands, belongs to many different epochs, varying from some date previous to our era down to this century. The head except the crown, the mane, the larger part of the body, and the legs except the paws, are evidently much older than any other part of the figure. It is conjectured that the lion may have formed a part of the decoration of some Assyrian palace before it became the symbol of the Venetian patron saint. St. Mark’s lion it certainly was not originally, for it was made to stand level upon the ground, and had to be raised up in front to allow the Evangel to be slipped under its fore-paws. The wings, of poor workmanship, and the paws, very well modelled, are of much later date; while the rump and part of the tail are restorations executed after the lion had been sent back from Paris early in last century.”]

² [There is something wrong with the reference here. The Queen of the Adriatic; or, Venice Past and Present, by W. H. D. Adams (Nelson & Sons: Edinburgh and New York), was published in 1869; on p. 43 the Lion of St. Mark is explained as having a book in its paws to intimate the devotion of the Venetians to commerce.]

³ [See Museo Civico e Raccolta Correr: Elencho di oggetti esposti, 1899, p. 268, Nos. 16 and 20. The woodcuts are in Case 19 in Room XX.]

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