This bust originates from a larger figurative piece titled The Athena Lemnia (also available to download on Scan the World). The Athena Lemnia, was a classical Greek statue of the goddess Athena. According to Pausanias (1.28.2), the original bronze was created by Phidias circa 450-440 BCE, for Athenians living on Lemnos to dedicate on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

It is unclear whether any copies remain. In 1891 Adolf Furtwängler reconstructed two virtually identical, Roman marble statues which he claimed as copies of the original, and identified two Roman marble copies of the head alone. These completed statues were recreated by joining a poorly preserved marble head (Dresden) and a plaster cast of a similar Roman marble head, from the collection of Pelagio Palagi (Bologna), to a pair of identical bodies in Dresden.