Marchesa di Montagliari

In 1883 Franz von Lenbach rented a floor of the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and made it his home and studio, with costly carpets, statues and two servants. On 1 May that year the German embassy held an official reception in his rooms, to mark a staging of Wagner's Ring cycle in the city. Until 1887 he spent every winter and spring in Rome, and in 1885 he painted Pope Leo XIII, a portrait that caused a stir when it was put on show in Munich and Berlin. This picture of an Italian noblewoman belongs to the same decade. The museum gives her only by her title, the Marchesa di Montagliari, and dates the canvas no more closely than the middle of the 1880s. It is unsigned and stands well over a metre tall. It came to the city from Lenbach's own estate and hangs among the portraits in the historic rooms of his Munich villa.