“Especially notable, among the testimonies of the superhuman, are the figurines of soldiers, with four eyes and four arms, two rhythmic sticks with daggers in two pairs; they all come solely from the mountainous recesses of Abini-Teti (Nuoro). Considered deities of war, or demonic beings, or mortals whose vision and arm strength may have been heightened by the ordal judgment of waters, as referred by the ancients for Sardinia, the statuettes could also be, and more likely, of military heroes whose valor, present and future (there is no dimension of time for the primitive), translates into the plastic interaction of physical organs of greater expressive prominence, to make the psychological note obvious and direct. In the bipartite arrangement of the face, rhythmically marked by the reliefs of the nose and the large, still eyes on the flat frontal plane of the hallucinatory and barbaric mask, in the symmetrical and balanced display of the multiplied weapons, in the central part of the body, giving sense and visual weight of exaltation to the idea of the superman, there is not so much the instinctive taste of a figured geometry at the ornamental level, as the geometric value conceived on the iteration of the simple number, corresponding to the common faculty: in this particular case on the double and its multiples, translated in terms of figurative magical operation…” (Giovanni Lilliu: “Sculptures of the Nuragic Sardinia” – Ilisso publisher 2008)
The images of the sanctuary of Abini and the statuette reproduction of the bronzetto mentioned, erected in the town of Teti, are by Bruno Sini and Piera Farina Sechi and Andrea Mura-Nuragando Sardegna.
