Biscione

The biscione[a] (English: "big grass snake"), less commonly known also as the vipera,[b] is in heraldry a charge consisting of a divine serpent in the act of giving birth to a child.

Etymologically, word biscione is a masculine augmentative of Italian feminine biscia "grass snake" (corrupted from bistia, ultimately from Latin bestia "beast").

The hall was painted at the end of the 13th century with frescoes celebrating Archbishop Ottone Visconti's victory against the rival family of the Della Torre.

A Renaissance Milanese writer described the insignia of the Duke of Milan in 1531: Exiliens infans sinuosi e faucibus anguis, Est gentilitiis nobile stemma tuis.

We have observed that the Pellaean king had coinage with such a device and by it celebrated his own descent, proclaiming that he was begotten of Ammon, that his mother was beguiled by the form of a snake and the child was the offspring of divine seed.

In early Christian art of the catacombs, the Old Testament prophet Jonah is depicted as a man being swallowed by a serpent-like Leviathan, a sea creature of Hebrew myth.