Statuette, Moretto - Nodder - 17 cm - Porcelain

It is a nodding-head Blackamoor, known in English as a “Blackamoor Nodder.”

A very fashionable object from the late 19th century through the 1930s, with its peak in the 1920s, in the Art Deco style.
What exactly it is
• Material: cold-painted porcelain bisque, the typical German kind. The paint wearing off around the neck, as on yours, is typical because it was applied after firing.
• Production: factories such as Schäfer & Vater, founded in 1890 and specializing in comic figurines. They were later copied in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and, later still, Japan.
• Mechanism: it is a nodder / swinger—the head and hands are mounted on an internal metal pin and rock back and forth. The historical description is exactly this: “a nodder or swinger figure—as when moved her head shoogles back and forward.” It represents the Orientalist exoticism that was hugely popular at the time.
It is not a saint or a religious figure.
The character seated cross-legged, wearing a turban and pointed slippers, is the “Turkish Moor” / fakir, a caricature of the Orient—
at the time, people displayed these “exotic servant” figures in their living rooms to impress. In Italy, we simply called them “moretti,” the inexpensive, tabletop version of the large Venetian torch-bearing Moors.