Artistically, indeed, the piece is open to criticism.

The lion is not the ordinary beast of nature.

His face, the pose of his feet, the curl of his tail round his hind leg, are all untrue to life.

The man who carved him knew perhaps more of dogs than lions.

But he fashioned a living animal.
Fantastic and even grotesque as it is, his work possesses a wholly unclassical fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked when seeing it that it recalls not the Roman world but the Middle Ages.[1] [Footnote 1: _Arch.