Female head, crowned with ivy Study for the painting Plato’s Banquet (1873, Berlin Nationalgalerie)

Feuerbach used the same woman as his model for Alcibiades’ two female companions in the second version of his painting entitled Plato’s Banquet (1873, Nationalgalerie, Berlin). She was a Venetian by the name of Lucia Brunacci, who in 1866 had succeeded Anna Risi (‘Nanna’) – a native of Rome who, prior to leaving the artist, had served as his first famous model. While Feuerbach never captured Lucia Brunacci’s austere beauty in a portrait, the model was nevertheless transfigured in some of his most accomplished close-up head studies into an archetype for a new kind of classical beauty, her spirit and inner grandeur helping the artist in his quest to revive a lost tradition through his painting.