The bashful pose of this statue is known as the Pudicitia type - a Hellenistic style developed from the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE and named for the goddess of modesty and chastity, Pudicitia. It is also known as the Braccio Nuovo type, after the draped female statue located in the New Wing of the Vatican Museums under accession number MV.2284.0.0. The grandeur of this statue suggests that it may have been part of a public monument.
Marble statuary, reliefs, and cladding were ubiquitous in the Roman world, as the remains of the preserved cities at Herculaneum and Pompeii demonstrate. Their sculpture was intended to conjure human vitality, and was inspired by the works of Polykleitos, who became the model to which sculptors aspired in Greco-Roman art as well as later Western European art. Greco-Roman statuary, unlike that of the other Mediterranean civilizations like Egypt, Persia, etc., celebrated the naturalistic human form. This included representations of their gods who appear as if living people, dressed as if they are elite citizens. For example, the famous statue of Hades with Cerberus, his three-headed dog, today on display at the Archaeological Museum of Crete, has an extremely realistic quality despite its fantastical nature, down to the details on each dog head. This suggests an intriguing, more personal relationship with the gods rather than the more abstract or magical portrayals of other contemporary societies.
