A Human-headed lion in a landscape

The V&A panels imitate the Cremonese tradition of decorating with terracotta tiles to articulate architectural membering in ceilings of private palaces. They are very similar to two surviving ceiling panels probably painted by the Bembo workshop in the Raccolta Parmiggiani, Reggio Emilia, and those from the same series now in the Museo del Seminario, Cremona attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. Despite their fragmentary state we can get a sense of the original appearance and context of the V&A panels by comparison with an intact painted ceiling decoration from the period in the former Palazzo Vimercati, now the Banca Popolare Agricola, in Crema. On this ceiling the sides of the supporting beams are decorate with a frieze of paired male and female busts alternating with coats of arms and other heraldic symbols, each painted within a fictive arch.

The human-faced lion represented in W.48-1913 recalls the emblematic fantastical animals from Cremonese ceilings and may have heraldic associations. The figure may be considered more generally within the context of contemporary drawings of domestic and exotic beasts by Antonio Pisanello, Paolo Uccello and Benozzo Gozzoli or of the fantastical human headed pig and stag in Piero di Cosimo's Forest Fire 1495-1505 (Ashmolean, Oxford). These beasts are generally described with reference to Lucretius' De rerum natura (V:821-924) in which the Roman poet describes oddities, deformities and monsters in nature but may simply be a statement of artistic fantasia, poetic licence and whimsy.