Virgil reading The Aeneid before Augustus, Livia and Octavia

A poet reads aloud, speaks a dead boy's name, and his mother collapses. Ingres returned to this single moment of grief for 53 years and never quite finished it.

The story behind the painting

The scene comes from an anecdote recorded in the late fourth-century life of Virgil by Aelius Donatus. Reading the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus, his wife Livia and his sister Octavia, Virgil reached the passage in Book VI praising Octavia's late son Marcellus, and Octavia fainted with grief. In 1811 General Miollis, the French governor of Rome and a wealthy patron, commissioned Ingres to paint it for his residence, the Villa Aldobrandini, and the painting was delivered the next year. Wikipedia calls it an 1812 painting, while Wikidata dates it 1811, the year of the commission.

What to look for

The canvas is huge: Wikipedia gives 304 by 323 cm, Wikidata 307 by 326 cm. Virgil reads, Augustus listens, and Octavia slumps at the name of her son, the moment captured in the French title, Tu Marcellus Eris, you shall be Marcellus. In the background, Augustus's advisors Marcus Agrippa and Gaius Maecenas watch. Those two figures at the far right were not in the first version; Ingres added them later, along with changes to the architecture. The work is still unfinished, so look for passages where his reworking stopped.

Meaning and intent

Few subjects held Ingres so long. Over 53 years he revisited the scene in more than 100 drawings and watercolours and three oil paintings. After 1835 he bought the picture back and reworked it heavily. He even added canvas at the top to turn it into a vertical composition, was dissatisfied, and removed the addition. The story itself was a favourite: Jean-Joseph Taillasson, Antonio Zucchi, Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Jean-Bruno Gassies and Angelica Kauffman all painted it too. For Ingres it seems to have been a lifelong problem of how to show grief and power in one room.

Legacy

Ingres bequeathed the painting, unfinished at his death in 1867, to the city of Toulouse, and it hangs in the Musee des Augustins. A three-figure fragment cut from an abandoned version is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. In 1825 he made a vertical chalk drawing as the model for an engraving by Pradier, published in 1832, in which a statue of Marcellus stands above the four main figures. In 1865 he painted a third version in oil, over a copy of that print, now at La Salle University Art Museum in Philadelphia.