Auguste écoutant la lecture de l'Énéide

The scene is a private one from ancient Rome. The poet Virgil is reading aloud from the Aeneid to the emperor Augustus, and he has just reached the lines foretelling a young man named Marcellus who will die before his time. Marcellus was the emperor's nephew, recently dead, and at the sound of his name his mother Octavia has fainted away in her red robe. Ingres painted this in 1812, working in Rome under Napoleon, when a French artist was expected to make antiquity feel like the natural home of imperial power. He kept returning to the composition for years, and the version here is one he reworked long afterward. The detail he holds sharpest is the collapse, the whole room bending toward the woman who could not bear to hear her son's fate spoken as poetry.