Professor Roger Rearick points out, loc. cit., that the present picture 'gives every indication' of having originally formed part of the same series as the two large canvasses of bearded men with a flat astrolabe and with a linear astrolabe, tentatively identified by Rearick as the ancient astronomers Ptolemy and Averroës, which were rediscovered in 1973 and acquired in the following year by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (T. Pignatti, Veronese, Venice, 1976, I, pp.127-8, nos.136-7, and p.50, colour pl.XIII, and II, figs.387-92; Rearick, op. cit., nos.22-23, both illustrated in colour; Conisbee, op. cit., nos.6-7, both illustrated in colour). Even larger copies of all three pictures are in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, along with a copy of a fourth, still untraced, representing a turbaned man with a globe astrolabe tentatively identified by Rearick as Zoroaster (Conisbee, op. cit., fig.6-7b). While closely related in composition and sharing the same low viewpoint, the pictures' disparate subject matter suggests that they formed part of a larger scheme. Nicola Ivanoff (La Libreria Marciana. Arte e Iconologia, in Saggi e memorie di storia dell'arte, 6, Florence, 1968, p.46), on the suggestion of Sylvie Béguin, had already tentatively associated the Chartres copies with four works by Veronese mentioned by Boschini (M. Boschini, Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana, Venice, 1674, p.69) as hanging in the antechamber of the Libreria in Venice. A similar conclusion was reached independently (for the present painting and its companions) by Rearick, who suggests that, having been awarded by Titian in February 1557 a gold chain as the best of the seven contributors to the decoration of the ceiling of the main hall of the Libreria, Veronese executed later in the same year the originals of the three Astronomers and the present Personification of Sculpture as part of the decoration of the walls below. Giuseppe Porta Salviati's Prometheus may well have been intended to form part of the same scheme. Rearick proposes that this projected series was abandoned c.1559 when it was found that the executed canvasses were too small for the bays of the hall and did not harmonise with Sansovino's architecture. A more suitable series was painted in the following decade by Battista Franco, Schiavone and Tintoretto, with Veronese and his brother Benedetto each contributing one painting. The present picture and its companions may then have been hung in the antechamber. The Chartres copies, traditionally said to have come from the Libreria, may have been commissioned to replace the originals, which were presumably sold off, possibly in 1597 when the vestibule was remodelled.

Another full size copy of the present painting was sold at Sotheby's, New York, 20 May 1993, lot 336