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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. A preparatory study is in the Royal Collection.

It was commissioned by Stanisław August Poniatowski, who kept it in the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw. 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.

References

1. "Smartify entry".
2. "Catalogue entry".
3. (in Russian) Никулин Н. Н. Немецкая и австрийская живопись XV—XVIII веков. Эрмитаж. — СПб.: Искусство-СПБ, 1992. — С. 335—336.

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