Lion Attacking a Horse Statue (325–300 BCE)

In a glass hall on the Capitoline Hill, a marble lion locks its jaws into a collapsing horse. The stallion twists away; the feline’s claws are already in its flank. The group is only about the height of a seated adult, yet the scene feels larger than its size: fear, weight, and violence caught in a single instant. This is Leone che azzanna il cavallo or Lion Attacking a Horse, now in the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Museums. It is one of the oldest works of ancient art continuously documented on the hill that gave Rome its name. Long before the bronze she-wolf became the city’s trademark, this lion stood for communal power and justice.

From Alexander’s world to the steps of the Senate palace

The sculpture belongs to the early Hellenistic period, about 325–300 BCE. The unknown carver almost certainly worked in northern Greece or Asia Minor, in the generation after Alexander the Great. Lion hunts and beasts bringing down noble prey were familiar images in that world: they spoke of royal courage, conquest, and the right to rule. Rome later took the group as war booty, most likely in the second or first century BC, when victorious generals filled the city with Greek art. 

One tradition places it near the Circus Maximus, where mock hunts and chariot races were staged, before the monument was abandoned after about AD 550. Another museum record ties the findspot to the Capitoline itself, around Santa Maria in Aracoeli. The exact excavation story is disputed; the later civic life of the statue is not.

By around 1300 CE the group was recorded on the Piazza del Campidoglio. In the fourteenth century it stood on the staircase of the Palazzo Senatorio. Chronicles of Cola di Rienzo in 1347 mention the spot. On medieval coins the lion could stand for the majesty of the “Populus Romanus”. For two centuries it was the commune’s emblem of good government. In 1471 CE Pope Sixtus IV moved the Capitoline Wolf onto the hill. The she-wolf, bound to the city’s foundation myth, replaced the lion as Rome’s public face. The older group did not leave the hill, but it lost the centre of the square.

The “most marvelous” fragment 

Michelangelo knew the sculpture well and called it “statua mirabilissima”, “most marvelous.” When he redesigned the Campidoglio for Pope Paul III in the mid-sixteenth century, the bronze Marcus Aurelius took the ceremonial axis of the piazza. The lion was pushed aside. 

Before 1594 CE visitors saw only a battered core: the horse’s torso and the lion’s foreparts. That year Ruggero Bascapè, a Milanese sculptor and pupil of Michelangelo, added the horse’s head, legs and tail, and the lion’s hind legs. From then on the group looked “complete,” and artists copied it as a finished combat rather than as a ruin. 

Drawings by Maarten van Heemskerck still show the earlier, broken state; Stefano della Bella later drew the restored group in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Before the she-wolf

In Greek art of Alexander’s age, animal combat became a way to show “pathos”, an intense feeling made visible in muscle and twist. The Capitoline group belongs to that shift from calm classical balance toward drama and strain. Romans reused the same language as an allegory of political force: the stronger animal prevails.

On the medieval Capitoline the meaning narrowed and hardened. The lion was no longer only a Hellenistic hunt. It stood for the commune, for the people’s majesty, and for the place where law was spoken. That is why its later “demotion” matters. The Wolf and then Marcus Aurelius expressed papal and imperial claims over the same hill. The lion remained, but as a memory of municipal Rome rather than as the city’s main sign.

Artistically the group became a school piece. Renaissance and later sculptors — including the circle of Giambologna, whose bronze reductions of lion-and-horse combats circulated widely — used it to study how to invent the missing parts. Painters put it into ruin-scapes. In that sense the object has two lives: one as a Roman civic relic, one as a model of violent naturalism.

Marble, pathos, and a body built in two ages

The ancient core is marble; sources disagree whether that original stone is Pentelic (from Attica) or Lunense/Carrara (from Luni). The 1594 additions are generally identified as Lunense marble. The official museum card simply says rough marble. 

The surviving ancient portions are carved in the round with deep undercutting in the lion’s mane and the horse’s straining barrel. Joints between original blocks and Renaissance patches were the weak points after centuries outdoors. Look for changes in surface, tool marks, and the slightly different “hand” in the horse’s head and legs — those are Bascapè’s.

From booty to glass hall

After antiquity the fragment survived on the Capitoline. Documented in the piazza by 1300, it stood at the senatorial staircase in the 1300s, then moved with Michelangelo’s redesign of the square. After the 1594 restoration it entered the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (listed on a travertine pedestal in a 1692 inventory). In the early twentieth century — from 1925 — it decorated a fountain in the Caffarelli Garden, still in the open air.

In 2012 it was taken down for full conservation. From 10 August 2012 to 6 May 2013 it was shown at the Getty Villa in Malibu, the first time in more than two millennia that the sculpture had left Rome. The loan was part of Rome’s “Dream of Rome” project. In May 2013 it returned and was installed, this time permanently indoors, in the “Exedra of Marcus Aurelius”, the glass hall Carlo Aymonino built in the 1990s over the former Giardino Romano.

Rain, broken joints, and a nine-month stay in California

Outdoor display was costly. Rain washed the surfaces; pollution attacked the joins between the Hellenistic marble and Bascapè’s additions. A limited intervention by Ignazio Di Bella around 1978 was not enough. In 2012 the Capitoline Museums analysed ancient manufacture and later repairs, consolidated fractures, and cleaned the stone. Restorer Carlo Usai led the work; funding included about 40,000 euros from the Knights of Columbus.

The Getty exhibition then presented the newly treated group to an American public and documented the treatment on film. When the sculpture came home in May 2013, the mayor and the museum director received it in the Exedra — not as garden ornament, but as a conserved masterpiece. Its condition today is stable and indoor. The visible “seams” of history remain on purpose: they tell the visitor where antiquity ends and 1594 begins.