Phaedra (Alexandre Cabanel) the result of Cabanel's time spent painting in Italy, influencing his decorative works commissions. Cabanel received the Prix de Rome award for his accomplishments in history painting in 1845. He spent the next five years in Rome, absorbing the dramatic Renaissance and Baroque works that permeate the city. Upon his return to Paris, Cabanel was commissioned to help decorate the Salon des Cariatides in the Hôtel de Ville. The final work was destroyed, but his cartoons show influences of Michelangelo's heroic and thoughtful figures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael's introspective philosophers and mathematicians of the "School of Athens", and
Sistine Chapel ceiling to a strongly projecting painted cornice that runs right around the ceiling, separating the pictorial areas of the biblical scenes from the figures of Prophets, Sibyls, and Ancestors, who literally and figuratively support the narratives. Ten broad painted crossribs of travertine cross the ceiling and divide it into alternately wide and narrow pictorial spaces, a grid that gives all the figures their defined place. A great number of small figures are integrated with the painted architecture, their purpose apparently purely decorative. These include two faux marble "putti" below the cornice on each rib, each one a male and female pair;