Portrait of a Roman Woman (Nanna)

Portrait of a Roman Woman (Nanna) of 1862, in the Schack Collection, Munich, introduces the most significant figure in Anselm Feuerbach's life and art: Anna Risi, known as Nanna, the Roman woman who became his model, muse, and companion for several years beginning around 1860. Feuerbach had come to Rome in 1855 seeking the classical world he had studied through German Idealist philosophy, and in Nanna he found what seemed to him the living embodiment of the antique beauty he sought. Their relationship was intense and artistically productive but ultimately ended when Nanna left him for another man — a rupture that Feuerbach processed in a series of melancholy paintings and in his posthumously published memoir A Legacy. This early portrait from 1862 shows Nanna in a relatively direct, characterful pose, before Feuerbach began to stylize her features into the more generalized ideal-type of his later large-scale works.

The handling is firm and sculptural, influenced by Feuerbach's study of Venetian painting and his admiration for the Nazarene simplicity of line. The palette is warm — golden light on the olive-toned complexion, dark hair against a neutral ground — and the surface has the smooth, considered quality of German academic Realism absorbed through French and Italian training.