Nanna

Nanna of 1861, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is one of the earliest formal portraits Feuerbach made of his Roman model Anna Risi. Having met her in Rome not long before, Feuerbach was struck by what he saw as her embodiment of classical beauty: the broad forehead, dark eyes, and composed expression that appeared to him to incarnate the ideal he had studied in ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting. The 1861 canvas shows Nanna in simple Roman dress, her pose reserved and self-contained, with none of the mythological freight that Feuerbach would attach to her image in later works like Iphigenie or Medea. The Bavarian State Painting Collections hold the largest concentration of Feuerbach's work, a reflection of the Munich patronage — particularly Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack — that sustained him through his Roman years.

The handling is confident and economical, shaped by Feuerbach's French training under Couture and his study of Venetian Renaissance color. The figure is built around a warm, unified tonal scheme — dark hair, olive skin, and shadowed drapery against a relatively neutral ground — that gives the composition a compact, sculptural coherence.