Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia

Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia is a 1788 oil on canvas painting by Angelica Kauffman, now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which it entered in 1902.^[1] A preparatory study is in the Royal Collection.^[2]

Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia (1788) by Angelica Kauffman

It was commissioned by Stanisław August Poniatowski, who kept it in the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw.^[3] It depicts a legend in Macrobius that Octavia the Younger fainted whilst Virgil was reading to her and Augustus a passage about her son Marcellus in Book VI of his Aeneid.