Man Thinking, Cycladic Art

The seated thinker is one of the rarest and most studied forms of Cycladic art — a male figure caught in an attitude of quiet contemplation more than four and a half thousand years ago. He preceded Rodin's "Thinker" by nearly fifty centuries, and in his pure, abstract geometry he asks the same eternal question: what is the human mind doing when it pauses to think? These figures were funerary offerings — companions for the next world — and they remain a touchstone of pre-Greek Aegean spirituality.