Unknown marble Roman(?) sculpture from Andalusia Spain

Hello, Dundun. It does look like an architectural element, rather than something that just sat around looking pretty. I'm completely ignorant of building ornamentation from that time & place, so do not understand why the face & side of head would be flat while the top & back are curved. What is the bottom like?

This I doubt very much:

I see no evidence this ever spent time in running water.

He's not out of keeping with typical depictions of Jove:



But any other figure typically depicted as an old man, e.g., gods Neptune & Cronus, legendary kings, the personifications of major rivers.

The world is so full of fake antiquities, the approach I take is to always assume something is fake, no matter what I have been told about it, then try to prove that it is not.

 

Thanks @Bronwen !

I took a photo of the bottom today. Part of the bottom looks flat, and other half looks broken(maybe from another part). That sign of broken make me guess it may sit at top of a larger architecture part?

Any thought?

btw: i cleaned it by water today and it looks more bright/white now.

broken by Dundun posted Sep 12, 2019 at 10:25 PM

broken by Dundun posted Sep 12, 2019 at 10:25 PM

front by Dundun posted Sep 12, 2019 at 10:25 PM

side by Dundun posted Sep 12, 2019 at 10:25 PM

 

I've still been working on your guy, who I've come to think of as Blockhead. The answer could lie in the Archeological Museum in Seville which, unfortunately, seems not to have a web site.

Artistically, he looks more Roman than Visigoth or Moorish, but I couldn't turn up anything that explained him. Still, if the locals are fobbing off fakes on tourists, you would think they would replicate antiquities proper to the place.

I'm stuck thinking of him as something that would have been on the exterior of a home or public building simply because he just doesn't fit in with what we know of Roman interior decoration, while I can imagine him over a lintel or somehow fitting in with an angular setting. I still don't get why the face is flat, not the back of the head.

The underside raises alarm bells for me. If it was outside & on a building, it would have been attached with an iron rod or something that way. No sign of it. The 'damage' sort of looks like a chisel mark. Maybe it's meant to.

As I said before, if this was found in the river, someone chucked it in not 5 minutes before. They really should have told you a story about its being found in a tomb, kept in private hands ever since & now, just for you, a special price...