Empress Elisabeth of Austria bust (Sissi)

Elisabeth of Austria, known to her age and afterwards as Sissi, married the young Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 at the age of sixteen and became one of the most photographed and least conventional empresses in European history. She loathed the rigid etiquette of the Habsburg court, travelled relentlessly, learned classical Greek for the love of Homer, and corresponded with the poet Christomanos. Her assassination in 1898 in Geneva by an Italian anarchist transformed her into a legend, and the painted likenesses of Franz Xaver Winterhalter established the bust portrait that has been reproduced ever since.