Sibyl - Later Sibyls

Later Sibyls

The medieval, Christianized role for these augmented Sibyls was as precursors, prophets of the New Dispensation, Christian allies in a Hellenistic world:

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla

Teste David cum Sibylla.

("Day of wrath, that day / will loose the age in ash / by the witness David with the Sibyl.")

In the Middle Ages the number of Sibyls was canonized as twelve, a symbolic number. See, for example, the Apennine Sibyl, though sometimes, e.g. for François Rabelais, ten was still the proverbial number: “How know we but that she may be an eleventh Sibyl or a second Cassandra?” Gargantua and Pantagruel, iii. 16, noted in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1897. Late Gothic Sibyls, each with her emblem and a single line of prophecy, lettered on a fluttering banderole, were fixtures of Late Gothic illuminations, in 14th and 15th-century France and Germany.

From the early Renaissance, the Sibyls were also represented in publicly available art. Michelangelo fixed our image of the sibyls forever, in his powerful representations of them, seated, both aged and ageless, beyond mere femininity, in the frescos of the Sistine Chapel. Five sibyls were painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo; the Delphic Sibyl, Libyan Sibyl, Persian Sibyl, Cumaean Sibyl and the Erythraean Sibyl. The library of Pope Julius II in the Vatican has images of sibyls and they are in the pavement of the Siena Cathedral. The Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli crowning the Campidoglio, Rome, is particularly associated with the Sibyl, because a medieval tradition referred the origin of its name to an otherwise unattested altar, said to have been raised to the "firstborn of God" by the emperor Augustus, who had been warned of his advent by the sibylline books: in the church the figures of Augustus and of the Tiburtine sibyl are painted on either side of the arch above the high altar. In the 19th century Rodolfo Lanciani recalled that at Christmas time the presepio included a carved and painted figure of the sibyl pointing out to Augustus the Virgin and Child, who appeared in the sky in a halo of light. "The two figures, carved in wood, have now disappeared; they were given away or sold thirty years ago, when a new set of images was offered to the Presepio by prince Alexander Torlonia." (Lanciani, 1896 ch 1) Like prophets, Renaissance sibyls forecasting the advent of Christ appear in monuments: modelled by Giacomo della Porta in the Santa Casa at Loreto, painted by Raphael in Santa Maria della Pace, by Pinturicchio in the Borgia apartments of the Vatican, engraved by Baccio Baldini, a contemporary of Botticelli, and graffites by Matteo di Giovanni in the pavement of the Duomo of Siena.

The 19th century French historian Jules Michelet attributed the origins of European witchcraft to the religion of the sibyls. In his introduction to La Sorcière (1862), Michelet wrote:

A powerful, tenacious religion, as Greek paganism was, begins with the sibyl, ends with the witch. The former, a beautiful virgin, in the full light of day, rocked its cradle, gave it its charm and glory. Later, fallen, ill, in the darkness of the Middle Ages, on heaths and in forests, it was hidden by the witch...