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Updated: June 8, 2025
As we sat in the chapel there were clouds flitting across the sky; when the clouds came the pictures vanished; when the sunshine broke forth the figures sadly glimmered into something like visibility, the Almighty moving in chaos, the noble shape of Adam, the beautiful Eve; and, beneath where the roof curves, the mighty figures of sibyls and prophets, looking as if they were necessarily so gigantic because the thought within them was so massive.
Savages have no art at all, even when they live amid grand mountains and beside the ever-changing sea. When Phidias was asked how he conceived his Olympian Jove, he referred to Homer's poems. Michael Angelo was enabled to paint the saints and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel from familiarity with the writings of the Jewish prophets. Isaiah inspired him as truly as Homer inspired Phidias.
Big-voiced lassies made their banjos bang, Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang.... Bull-necked convicts with that land make free... The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world.... Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl! Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean, Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
On the strength of his decoration and color alone he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even his design would have had only an academic interest; but as a painter of prophets and sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his craft, because we aspire to a world of prophets and sibyls.
Apparently a process of local differentiation went on; when the idea of the revealer was once established and the historical beginnings of the figure were unknown, many a place would be ambitious to have so noble a figure domiciled in its midst. Whatever the original home of the figure, one of the most famous of the Sibyls was she of Cumæ.
Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life.
Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the "Violin-player" of the Sciarra palace to the "Transfiguration" in the Vatican: wherever we go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so equal in performance.
Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash; but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and sibyls, as large as life.
They were kept in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, preserved in a stone chest, and allowed to be inspected only by especial officers appointed for that duty, who, on great occasions, consulted them and interpreted their oracles to the people. There were various Sibyls; but the Cumaean Sibyl, of whom Ovid and Virgil write, is the most celebrated of them.
Under each of the Prophets and Sibyls, upon the side walls, is a decorative putto supporting the name plate, standing at the springing of the arches, as in Donatello’s bas-relief representing Christ before Pilate, in the pulpit of San Lorenzo.
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