Bust of a Woman is a beautifully carved white marble portrait by the nineteenth-century Italian sculptor Gaspare Galeazzi, signed at the back with the artist's name followed by "F" for fecit, the traditional Latin abbreviation meaning "made it." The bust shows a young woman with her hair parted at the center and swept into soft, wavy lengths that fall along the sides of her face and behind her shoulders. Her gaze is directed slightly downward, giving her a quiet, inward expression that recalls the contemplative sitters of nineteenth-century Italian portrait sculpture. She wears a softly draped classical-style garment that crosses at the chest, fastened with a small detail at the center, leaving the neck and one shoulder bare. The bust rests on a turned, fluted marble socle that completes the presentation in the academic manner of its time.

The carving is remarkably refined throughout. Galeazzi handles the hair with great delicacy, allowing each strand to register as a soft, flowing element rather than as a fixed mass, and the face is modeled with the kind of restraint that gives nineteenth-century Italian portrait busts their particular emotional reserve. The slightly downcast eyes, the soft set of the mouth, and the gentle inclination of the head all contribute to a mood of quiet introspection that was much admired in this period. The drapery is treated with the lightness of real cloth, falling and folding naturally across the bust, and the contrast between the smooth polished planes of the face and the more textured passages of hair gives the work its characteristic neoclassical vocabulary.

Galeazzi was an Italian sculptor active in the nineteenth century, working in the classical and religious traditions that dominated Italian academic sculpture during the period. He produced portrait busts, religious figures, and decorative works in white marble, often for private patrons and church commissions. Within his larger body of work, Bust of a Woman is a particularly accomplished example of his portrait practice, a finely carved marble in which Galeazzi's commitments to refined carving, classical proportion, and the quiet inward life of his sitter arrive at a beautifully sustained whole.