Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Sibyl of Cumae.
The gallery
The Cumaean Sibyl (Sistine Chapel)
Michelangelo, c. 1508–1512
Michelangelo's monumental prophetess on the Sistine vault — massive limbs and an open book, the Cumaean Sibyl as Renaissance theology's pagan witness to the Word.
Cumaean Sibyl
Domenichino, c. 1610
Domenichino's Capitoline canvas: the Sibyl as a young woman with scroll and laurel — Bolognese clarity for Virgil's guide through the underworld.
Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld
Jan Brueghel the Younger, c. 1630
Brueghel's Met panel crowds Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl through a hellscape of monsters and fire — Aeneid VI as Flemish cabinet drama.
The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl
J. M. W. Turner, 1823
Turner's Tate canvas: Apollo offers the Sibyl as many years as the sand in her hand — the Bay of Baiae dissolving into light while her bargain with immortality fails.
Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld
Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1870s
Burne-Jones' Fitzwilliam design: the Sibyl leads Aeneas among the shades — Pre-Raphaelite stillness for Virgil's most famous katabasis.
In play
Aeneid
Virgil
Book VI — the golden bough, the gates of sleep, and the Cumaean Sibyl as Aeneas' guide through the underworld.
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
Eliot's epigraph quotes Petronius' Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar, wishing only to die — the atlas's most famous modern echo of her failed immortality.
Cumaean Sibyl
Apollo's prophetess at Cumae — Virgil's guide, Michelangelo's giantess, Eliot's hanging Sibyl.