French sculptor Charles Henri Joseph Cordier was fascinated with combining ethnography and art to create harmonious examples of beauty. As chief sculptor of the Natural History Museum in Paris, Cordier went to Italy and Greece in 1858 to inspect marble for export and to portray the people he encountered. This statue is the result of Cordier’s time in Trastevere (“across the Tiber”), one of Rome’s old and diverse neighborhoods. The fashionable young woman gazes over her shoulder, revealing intricately plaited hair adorned with a single comb.