Monumental lion, the Mari-Cha Lion
About 1000 to 1200
A bronze lion about a metre long stands stiffly on four straight legs, its mouth open in a tube-like roar, its wide eyes staring ahead. Its body is covered with engraved patterns, and across the chest and flanks run bands of Arabic inscription wishing blessings and good fortune to the owner. Nobody knows exactly where it was made; the best guesses are Muslim Spain, Sicily or southern Italy in the eleventh or twelfth century, when the arts of Islam flourished across the western Mediterranean. It is one of the largest surviving animal sculptures in bronze from the medieval Islamic world, comparable only to the famous griffin in Pisa.
Look closely at the face. The nose is naturalistic but everything else is stylised: the eyes were once inlaid with contrasting material, the mane is a pattern of scrolls, and the mouth opens into a hollow tube. The body is hollow too, with an opening in the belly. Older theories made it a fountain spout or a giant incense burner, but study of the inside suggests something more surprising: a pipe connected to the mouth allowed air to be blown through the resonant body, so that the lion roared. It was probably an acoustic automaton, one of the mechanical marvels that Arab engineers built for palaces and that medieval travellers described with wonder.
The lion is known as the Mari-Cha Lion after the yacht of the collector who owned it before the museum acquired it. It sits in the galleries devoted to the medieval world, where the museum's cross-cultural hanging places it near Christian and Asian objects of the same centuries. Notice the engraved patterns on the haunches, which recall textiles, and imagine the sound: a metal beast in a courtyard, roaring on command.
Did You Know? The lion's hollow body and the pipe behind its mouth suggest it was built to roar when air was blown through it, an early example of a sound-making automaton.
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