According to legendary accounts of the founding of Rome, the new city established by Romulus lacked women. The king invited the neighboring peoples, who were unwilling to intermarry with the Romans, to athletic games, and at a predetermined signal, each Roman youth carried off an unmarried woman from the Sabine contingent as his bride. When the Sabines later attacked Rome, the women ran onto the battlefield and secured peace between their fathers and husbands.

Andreani, who was alone in reviving the technique of the chiaroscuro print at the end of the sixteenth century, created a number of ambitious works. This spectacular woodcut reproduces, to scale but with slight adjustments, the plaque that was intended to clarify the subject of Giambologna's celebrated marble group in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

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