This pose of this ivory figure resembles that of Michelangelo's marble David in the Accademia in Florence. The V&A sculpture is close in style to the work of the so-called Master of the Furies (active ca. 1610-20), an anonymous artist who worked in ivory probably in Salzburg, in the early 17th century, and is almost certainly by him. The tightly-curled hair and elegant elongated figure in particular recall some of his other works, such as the Furies and the Standard Bearer in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It seems highly probable that this figure represents Adam, and that it was once paired with a figure of Eve, now lost.

Very little is known about this artist, whose distinctive works were almost certainly executed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. His name was first coined in the 1970s by Erwin Neumann, a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, who grouped together a number of ivory groups and statuettes with a particular energetic stylistic quality, notably figures of the Furies. Subsequent scholars have added further ivories to this group, and seventeen were exhibited in Frankfurt in 2006. The Salzburg provenance of some of the works has led to suggestions that the sculptor was Austrian, working for the Archbishop of Salzburg, Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, or one of his successors.