Vittorio Caradossi was born in Florence and was active during the late 19th and early 20th century. He studied under Rivalta at the Beaux-Arts Academy in Florence, his fame was established at the Florence Exhibition of 1896 with a series of female busts; and further augmented by his celebrated monumental Desiderio da Settignano exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.
The present bronze reclining nude is closely related to two earlier French sculptures: Pradier's 1847 Dolce far Niente and Clésinger's 1846 Woman Bitten by a Snake. Both Pradier and Clésinger had caused a sensation with the exhibition of their respective nymphs in attitudes of abandoned sensuality. Caradossi's example, some decades later, reveals a greater humour and modernity which partly dispells the heady voluptuousness of the French predecessors. Nevertheless, the bronze remains a hedonistic image and a plastically modelled Bacchic nude, which Caradossi has successfully combined and elevated on a marble support.