Nanna Risi of Rome served as a model more than twenty times for the painter Anselm Feuerbach, who was predominantly active in Italy. The German artist saw embodied in her the classical ideal of beauty that he sought to revive in his paintings, with their idealizing flavour and echoes of antiquity. Sometimes he staged her in heroic settings. Often, however, as here, he sought to produce a cool, monumental, and colouristically delicate image of a timeless woman, despite the fact that, as his lover, she was actually quite palpably present in his life. This painting was purchased from the artist himself by Eduard Souchay of Frankfurt and donated to the Städel Museum by his heirs.