Lions of Florence

One of the most excellent parts of visiting Italy was seeing all the great lion statues that are distributed around the sites at Rome, Florence and Venice. Of course, the art is generally amazing, and may even be enough to renew one's faith in the capacity of humans to be great. But that's for another post - what I've been thinking about this morning is the lions, specifically. For example, this is a picture of a lion at the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. He was created by an artist who's not really paid that much attention to - Flaminio Vaca, and he's a copy of a Roman lion (perhaps the one who sits on the other site of the little loggia). But he's stunning!

And he's sitting across the square from a copy of Donatello's Marzocco, the heraldic lion of Florence. Also beautiful, but in a sadder, sweeter, way. The original Marzocco is in the Barghello museum nearby. Wikipedia has a description of these in which the Vaca lion is mistakenly labeled as Donatello's. Clearly, it is not.