Virgil Reading the “Aeneid” to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia

Virgil reads from his epic to the emperor Augustus and his family, Augustus leaning forward with hand raised over his heart and Octavia swooning in her sister-in-law Livia’s arms — the passage on the scroll, inscribed “Tu Marcellus eris,” the prophecy of the emperor’s dead nephew that tradition says made Octavia faint. Jean Baptiste Joseph Wicar, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, painted the scene between 1790 and 1793 in the severely Classical manner the French Academy promoted as a moral regeneration of art, the antique figures arranged like a bas-relief against a sunlit colonnade. The canvas probably remained with the artist until his death in 1834, then passed to his pupil Giuseppe Carattoli in Perugia, and later belonged to Marcello and Carlo Sestieri of Rome, who sold it to the Art Institute in 1963 through the Wirt D. Walker Fund. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.