BIJLERT, Jan van

St Mark the Evangelist

With a piercing gaze and an emphatic pointing finger, St Mark – identifiable by his fixed attribute, the lion – draws our attention to an open book: the gospel written by him. Clearly the artist had never seen a lion and must have based his ‘lion’ (looking more like a big dog which was overpainted when we acquired this work and subsequently appeared again during restoration) on works by other artists – who similarly may never have seen a living lion.