Statue of a Striding Male

Polished red granite statue of a striding male, the statue is a compromise between Egyptian ideals of statuary and Roman portraiture for the head. Technical and postural details betray the Roman origin of the statue: the highly polished gloss for an affect similar to that of the Egyptianising statues of the Hadrian period, the thin pillar that runs at the back from the plinth to the shoulders and a less strict frontality than the one found in Egyptian sculpture. There is slight movement of the upper torso and head which is slightly turned to the left. The bald head has a huge indentation at the top of the crown and the face is heavily modelled with two deep horizontal creases on the forehead, and pronounced cartilage at the bridge of the nose. The ears are flat and the mouth is extremely small, the tip of the nose is restored as is one ear and several other patches. The figure is a composite made of three parts, the head however most definitely belonged to the torso. The granite of the legs is of different colour than the rest of the statue and this indicates that they did not originally belong to the same body. The man may have been representing a priest but he does not have any other royal insignia other than the kilt. Elizabeth Bartman viewed the statue as veristic and typical of the Roman Republican portraiture but she noted that its crudeness was less common in hyper veristic portraits. She also commented about the exaggerated characteristics which make the statue more of a caricature of late Egyptian heads. Bartman proposed that a Ptolemaic similar male from the Albani collection may have been the inspiration for the Roman sculptor.