Die Statuette eines ›Denkers‹ in Sydney

In this article a statuette in the collection of Charles Nicholson in the University Museum in Sydney is published, a sculpture purchased in the mid-19th century in Smyrna. It depicts the emaciated upper body and the head of an old man with a bald forehead and a scanty beard. The small sculpture, chiselled from Göktepe marble, is attributed to a late antique workshop in Aphrodisias on the basis of characteristic features of style; as other sculptures it may have been brought from Aphrodisias to Smyrna. The phenotype of the ›intellectual‹ (›pepaideumenos‹), to be reconstructed as a seated old man with a himation around his lower body, is related to genre figures like the socalled Old Fisherman, known from several late antique copies of various formats, among them statuettes, produced in workshops of Aphrodisias.