A male figure stands by a column and leans his head on his right hand. His chin sits on the closed fist and his elbow rests on the left hand. He holds a small flower garland in his left hand. He wears a belted, short-sleeved, knee-length tunic with round neck, and a tightly folded fringed cloth is thrown over the left shoulder.
The statuette was made at a time when all expression of a sculpture in the round was concentrated on its frontal view. The lack of movement in depth and the frontality of the composition reflect more general political, social and intellectual processes unfolding in the Roman world in the late third century.
The stauette represents a mortuary cult attendant. This interpretation is reinforced by the flower garland in the left hand of the figure, an attribute of funerary ceremonies depicted in mummy portraits of the time and on Ptolemaic and Roman mortuary stelae.
