of Lucern. I don't know if you have seen this but it is quite possibly the saddest thing I have ever seen. I have never been moved almost to tears by stone before but this lion, in his dying moments, did.



It commemorates the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution, when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, France. Mark Twain praised the sculpture of the mortally-wounded lion as "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

Mark Twain on the Lion Monument

"The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion — and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is."

– Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880

wow! fantastic art. very moving.


dale

Looks, from the bent shield, and broken speer, he didn't die without taking a couple tormentors with him!

.....................Good show LEO!