Virgile lisant l'Énéide devant Auguste, Livie et Octavie

Ingres painted this in Rome around 1811, a young French artist on a scholarship, steeping himself in antiquity. The scene comes from Roman history: the poet Virgil reads aloud from his Aeneid to the emperor Augustus and his family, and when he reaches the name of Marcellus, Octavia's dead son, she faints away. Augustus lifts a hand to stop the reading. The subject gripped Ingres for the rest of his life. Over more than 50 years he returned to it in some 100 drawings and three separate oil paintings, cutting figures out, moving them, starting again. This large Toulouse canvas is the version he wrestled with first.