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 completed by four large corner "pendentives", each illustrating a dramatic Biblical story. The narrative elements of the ceiling illustrate that God made the World as a perfect creation and put humanity into it, that humanity fell into disgrace and was punished by death and by separation from God. Humanity then sank further into sin and disgrace, and was punished by the Great Flood. Through a lineage of Ancestors – from Abraham to Joseph – God sent the saviour of humanity, Christ Jesus. The coming of the Saviour was prophesied by Prophets of Israel and Sibyls of the Classical world. The