Virgil Reading the Aeneid to the Family of Augustus

Camuccini was the leading Neoclassical history painter in Rome in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The present panel painting can be associated with one of the major works from the height of his career, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to the Family of Augustus, commissioned in 1819 by Elisabeth Hervey, Duchess of Devonshire. The Devonshire painting was engraved by Pietro Bettelini and used as the first plate illustration in Volume I of Annibale Caro’s translation of the Aeneid, a deluxe edition published in Rome in 1819 under the benefaction of the duchess.

The subject of Camuccini’s painting was a favorite of Neoclassical painters, undertaken by Angelika Kauffmann (1788; Hermitage, St. Petersburg), Jean-Joseph Taillasson (1787; National Gallery, London), Jean-Baptiste Wicar (c.1790/93; Art Institute of Chicago) and, most famously, Ingres (1812; Musée des Augustins, Toulouse; and other versions). The story appears in the fourth-century ‘Life of Virgil’ given by Aelius Donatus, who recounted that the Roman emperor Augustus implored the poet to send him verses from the Aeneid, which was not yet complete. Virgil refused to send unfinished work but, once it had been completed, instead offered to recite three of the books – the second, fourth and sixth – to Augustus himself. Upon the reading of the sixth book, which mentions the untimely death of Marcellus, son of Augustus’s sister Octavia, so moved was the grieving mother that she collapsed in a faint into her brother’s arms. Livia, the emperor’s wife – suspected of having a hand in Marcellus’s death – gazes impassively into the distance.

The present painting might be a sketch for the Devonshire painting but could also be a reduced-scale replica. Several versions of the composition are known (one in Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; another sold Christie’s Rome, 1 December 1998, lot 110, bearing an inscription on the reverse of the panel reading ‘Cavalieri Camuccini Roma 1836’), and several related drawings by Camuccini (including a beautiful compositional study in pen, ink and wash recently on the art market). As has been noted, in the final two decades of his career Camuccini "was constantly at work on new commissions and in supplying the demand for painted replicas and finished drawings of his most popular compositions." (U. Hiesinger, "The Paintings of Vincenzo Camuccini, 1771-1844," The Art Bulletin, LX, no. 2, 1978, p. 303.)