The work displayed here is the best known of the versions taken from the original sculpture, a large marble bust with severed arms and legs and a gilded bronze sword fixed in the base. The original sculpture, in the possession of the client and collector Franz Rose, was donated in 1912 to the Neue Museum in Königsberg, but was destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War. The dating of the Vir Temporis Actis has been indicated by scholars, on the basis of documentary information, between 1910 and 1911, when Wildt seems to achieve new results in his sculptures: the twisted delirium of anatomy, the Hellenistic and Baroque triumph, the realistic virtuosity and decorative manage to express the sculptor's will to investigate the collective depths and the irrational. This figure of a scourged warrior draws from the most distant areas of the unconscious and myth, where Wildt develops the theme, already exposed in the Self-Portrait, of self-sacrifice; but more broadly, with the double reference to the hermaphroditism of Christ in the flower-shaped nipples and to his vivifying reality in the symbology of the sword. The title itself, Man of old/of past times , underlines its allegorical value: it is a question of the slave or warrior of an ancient era, a man who painfully becomes aware of his end.