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] 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.

This article about an eighteenth-century painting is a stub.