Iberian Peninsula to the indus

part of this myth, there appears a man, 
often attacked or partially devoured, 
carrying a vessel with the plant or 
waters of life. Furthermore, a dream 
is described in which snakes wrap 
around a man whose body “vanishes”, 
making it impossible to bury him. 
More recently, the statuette of 
a man devoured by snakes from 
the Monastery of San Lazzaro has 
been associated with a group of 
sculptures known as 
balafrés
in 
French, 
Narbenmänner 
in German, 
and 
sfregiati
in Italian, which translates 
as, “the scarred” (Vidale 2017, p. 
198). There are sixteen of these 
statuettes, made of a composite of 
chlorite and limestone/marble of 
unknown provenance, representing 
free-standing men with scarred faces, 
a single eye (the second eye being 
an empty orbit), a beard similar to 
that of our figurine, the body covered 
with snake scales, and an object 
interpreted as a jug under one arm.
2
Vidale’s interpretation is that the 
balafrés 
figurines represent an 
ancient Indo-Iranian ancestor of Indra, 
the hero of the Rig-Veda, slayer of 
Vrtra, the celestial dragon that had 
stopped the rains and devoured him 
(represented by the skin covered with 
scales that envelops the 
balafrés
). 
After slaying Vrtra, Indra pours the 
redemptive waters from his jug onto 
the surface of the land, restoring its 
fertility. As for the provenance of the 
balafrés
statuettes, Vidale theorizes 
that these figurines have a funerary 
function and were deposited between 
2300 and 1800 BC in burials of the 
Oxus culture (present-day Amu-
darya River) between Afghanistan, 
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He also 
proposes that the representations of 
the man imprisoned and devoured 
by snakes of the Venetian statuette 
should be associated with the 
figurines of the 
balafrés
, given the 
similarity of their beards and the fact 
that they are both holding vessels 
and being devoured by snake/
dragons. Furthermore, he claims that 
scars like those marking their faces 
also are visible on the left cheek of 
the man imprisoned by snakes, who 
would thus belong to the category 
of “the scarred” and could thus be 
interpreted as a product of the Oxus 
culture and dated to the same period 
as the 
balafrés
figurines.
In fact, what Vidale erroneously 
interprets as three wavy scars on 
the left cheek of the San Lazzaro 
statuette also appear on the right 
cheek. Rather than representing scars, 
however, they clearly indicate the 
man’s beard, who therefore cannot 
be classified as one of “the scarred”. 
Overall, the iconographic evidence 
of a link between the 
balafrés
figures 
and our statuette seems too generic 
and inconsistent to establish a solid 
connection and place the San Lazzaro 
figure in the context of the artistic 
culture of the Oxus Valley.
On the contrary, the iconographic 
motif – a bald, nude, kneeling man 
with a vessel on his upper back whose 
weight pushes his torso forward, 
with his arms immobilized behind 
his back devoured by two powerful 
snakes – leads more convincingly to 
attribute our sculpture to the broader 
context of the small-sized statuary of 
the Late Uruk – Jemdet-Nasr epoch. 
As mentioned, iconographic parallels 
with analogous representations of 
nude, kneeling prisoners with their 
arms tied behind their backs and 
attacked by birds of prey or snakes 
have been noted in a
series of relief 
and freestanding figures as well as 
in seal impressions from this period. 
The attribution is also indicated by 
the stylistic rendering of the figure 
with its markedly plastic naturalism in 
combination with the heavy rigidity of 
the volumes of the body. 
It is clearly possible and plausible 
that this representation of a vessel 
carrier imprisoned and devoured by 
snakes should be associated with the 
mythic narratives of Mesopotamia, 
either known narratives, such as the 
myth of Etana, or unknown ones. 
Alternatively, it could be associated 
with the broader mythological roots 
spread through the vast regions 
of Mesopotamia and central Asia. 
Regardless, there are no specific 
findings to date in this regard. Finally, 
the high probability that chloritized 
high-potassium trachyandesite 
originated from the Zagros Mountains 
of Iran suggests that the figurine from 
the San Lazzaro collection belonged 
to a Late Uruk or Proto-Elamite/
Susa III site in the Iranian highlands 
or the Susiana plain, or perhaps 
from a Sumerian centre in southern 
Mesopotamia, where it could have 
arrived along the long-distance 
trade routes that connected Sumer 
and Iran beginning in the late fourth 
millennium BC.
M.B.D.
1
For a more in-depth discussion of the 
statuette and its iconographic and stylistic 
parallels, see Morandi Bonacossi 1996 and 
2003.
2
For a synthesis of the interpretations 
proposed to date to explain the meaning of 
these statuettes, as heroes, mythic beings or 
demons, see Vidale 2017, p
.
173.