She no longer remembers, W. said, which depiction of Sabina von Steinbach first caught her eye at the Alte Nationalgalerie. However, from her entries in the red notebook at the time, it was clear that, although she must have initially walked past the frieze of figures in the stairwell to reach the picture gallery on the third floor, nevertheless she had first noticed the painting by Moritz von Schwind. The depiction of a sculptress at work in a 19th-century painting had seemed highly unusual to her, and she had also never heard of the artist’s name before, which was given as the work’s title.

Probably she would not have been further interested in Sabina von Steinbach if she had not finally turned her gaze upward to the frieze of figures in the stairwell while leaving the museum, if she had not read that name again, there, in golden letters, under a figure of a woman holding sculptor’s tools. At that point in time and at that place, there had been nothing to suggest that Sabina von Steinbach could be a fabrication.

The individuals on the frieze had been selected from politics and the arts and sciences, reaching as far as the then-present times of 1870-75, when sculptor Otto Geyer was commissioned to create the frieze for the Nationalgalerie. Among those depicted are only four women. The medieval sculptress Sabina von Steinbach is the first and only one of them who was not of noble descent. She is also the only woman on the frieze, according to W., who pursued a vocation and who, as W. had at least initially assumed, found her way into this canon thanks to her merits as a sculptress. It was only much later that she realized that Sabina must have been chosen for the frieze for different reasons, and that these reasons had far more to do with politics than art.