Augustus Listening to the Reading of the Aeneid

Augustus Listening to the Reading of the Aeneid from 1812 at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium depicts the legendary occasion when Virgil read his epic to the Emperor Augustus, and Octavia — Augustus's sister and the mother of the young Marcellus whom Virgil had mourned — fainted at the lines honoring her dead son. The subject combined classical archaeology with emotional drama in the way Ingres most relished, requiring both learned reconstruction of the ancient setting and sympathetic depiction of overwhelming grief. Ingres built his oil surfaces through meticulous underdrawing in graphite, then applied smooth controlled layers that created a classical archaeological accuracy in the Roman interior, the costumes, and the furnishings, while the human drama is concentrated in Octavia's collapse. The painting is now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, an appropriate home given that this was the city where David had spent his exile and where the finest French Neoclassical painting was often collected.

The carefully researched classical interior provides the setting for the dramatic fainting scene. Ingres's precise rendering of Roman costume and architecture creates an image of archaeological accuracy animated by human emotion.