Burne-Jones’s beloved daughter, Margaret, who embodied the artist’s ideal of beauty, was the model for this painting. The Latin title refers to the Vestal Virgins of Rome, who tended the perpetual fire on the altar of the goddess Vesta. Begun before her marriage in 1888 to John William Mackail, the painting aligns Margaret with these chaste women, suggesting her innocence and purity. The painting is reminiscent of a Renaissance portrait; the sitter’s pose may have been inspired by a celebrated stone relief of Saint Cecilia attributed in the nineteenth century to the sculptor Donatello.