PARIS, Sept 5 — A winged lion sculpture that symbolises the Italian city of Venice was made in China and may have once passed through the court of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, researchers suggested today.

Every year millions of people pass under the Lion of Venice, the ancient bronze statue perched atop a column in Piazza San Marco overlooking the Venetian Lagoon.

Much about the sculpture remains cloaked in mystery. Over the centuries its ears were shortened, its wings altered — and at one point it even bore horns that were later removed.

“We don’t know when the sculpture arrived in Venice, where it was reworked, who did it, or when it was erected on the column where it is still visible today,” said Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua and co-author of a new study.

The earliest known record dates back to 1293, when the statue was already damaged and in need of repair. The violet granite column on which it sits — possibly looted from Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul — likely reached Venice shortly before 1261, according to the study.

To trace the lion’s origins, Italian researchers analysed lead isotopes from samples taken during a 1990 restoration. Their findings showed the copper ore was mined in China’s Yangtze River basin, much farther east than previous theories that placed its origin in a Venetian foundry or in Anatolia or Syria.

The statue may not even depict a lion. Researchers said it more closely resembles Tang Dynasty tomb guardian sculptures called “zhenmushou”, which share features such as leonine muzzles, flaming manes, horns, wings, pointed ears and even partially humanised faces.

The study, published in the journal Antiquity, suggested the piece could have been brought back by Niccolò and Maffeo Polo — the father and uncle of explorer Marco Polo — during their visit to Kublai Khan’s court in Khanbalik, now Beijing, around 1265.

By then, Venice had already adopted the lion as its symbol, and “the Polos may have had the somewhat brazen idea of readapting the sculpture into a plausible (when viewed from afar) Winged Lion,” the study said.

The statue’s journey did not end in Venice. After Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Venetian Republic in 1797, he moved the sculpture to Paris. Broken into pieces, it was only returned to Venice in 1815. — AFP