Adele d'Affry, Duchess Castiglione-Colonna studied drawing with Fricero and sculpture with Imhof prior to marrying the Duke Carlo Colonna. She became a widow eight months after her marriage and retired to a monastary for some time. She then resumed her sculpting career, established a studio in Rome and developed close ties with Jean Baptiste Carpeaux with whom she shared an overwhelming enthusiasm for Michelangelo. Upon moving to Paris, she worked in the atelier of Madame Lefevre-Deumier. Marcello first began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1863, choosing her pseudonym as a precaution against the male chauvanism of the Salon jury.

The bust of Bianca Capello established Marcello's reputation when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1863 (no. 2471). Originally begun as a portrait from memory of a woman the artist had observed at an Italian wedding, Marcello developed the work into a more academically acceptable piece by infusing it with a known personality. The accompanying note in the Salon catalogue explained the history of the subject: "Bianca Capello, daughter of a great Venetian family, eloped when she was eighteen with a young Florentine, taking with her the family jewels. Having found refuge in Florence, she became the mistress of Francesco de' Medici, falsely claimed to be pregnant, got rid of her accomplices, and persuaded her lover to marry her. Having become Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Bianca Capello tried to poison her brother-in-law, Cardinal de' Medici, but when her husband mistakenly partook of the readied dish, she too swallowed some of it and died." (Jean-Pierre Samoyault, Philadelphia Museum of Art, p. 234)

The artist established the Museo Marcello in Fribourg which contains the major part of her work. The Salon marble of Bianca Capello (also 95cm. high) is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles.