Anselm Feuerbach

Anselm Feuerbach spent his best years in Rome, homesick for a Greece he had never seen. A German painter of the mid-1800s, he belonged to a group of northern artists nicknamed the German-Romans, who moved to Italy to soak in classical antiquity and paint calm, noble, timeless subjects while the modern world sped up around them.

In Rome he found his ideal face in a local woman named Nanna Risi, a shoemaker's wife who modelled for him for years and appears again and again, grave and statuesque, as goddesses and heroines. When she left him for another man, his painting cooled.

His great theme was longing, best seen in his versions of Iphigenia, the Greek princess stranded on a foreign shore gazing out to sea toward a home she cannot reach. Feuerbach never won the acclaim he felt he deserved and died worn down in Venice in 1880, at 50.