Michelangelo's Sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
Why five pagan Sibyls sit beside the prophets on the Sistine ceiling: Michelangelo and the Delphic, Erythraean, Cumaean, Persian and Libyan Sibyls.
Between 1508 and 1512 Michelangelo Buonarroti painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on commission from Pope Julius II. Along the edges of the great composition, seated on monumental thrones, twelve seers alternate: seven prophets of the Old Testament and five Sibyls of the pagan world. This juxtaposition, which may surprise us today, was the outcome of a long Christian tradition that credited the ancient prophetesses with announcing, unknowingly but truly, the coming of Christ.
Why Sibyls in a papal chapel
Ancient authors spoke of several Sibyls, inspired women linked to places such as Delphi, Erythrae and Cumae. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods collections of verses attributed to them circulated, and in Jewish and Christian circles the Sibylline Oracles were composed, texts in Greek hexameters that placed in the Sibyl's mouth announcements of the judgement and the Messiah. Writers such as Lactantius quoted them as proof that even pagans had glimpsed the truth.
Saint Augustine, in the eighteenth book of the City of God, reports a poem attributed to the Erythraean Sibyl whose initial letters form, in Greek, the phrase “Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour”. Virgil's fourth Eclogue, with its announcement of a child and a new golden age tied to the Cumaean song, was read as a Christian prophecy. The medieval hymn Dies irae also recalls the day of judgement foretold by David together with the Sibyl.
The five figures of the ceiling
Michelangelo chose five Sibyls: the Delphic, the Erythraean, the Cumaean, the Persian and the Libyan. They alternate with the prophets Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah and Jonah, forming a crown of voices announcing salvation around the stories of Genesis. The Delphic Sibyl, young and wide-eyed, is among the most famous images of the cycle; the Persian, old and bent, holds her book close to her eyes like someone who struggles to read.
The Cumaean Sibyl is striking for the powerful mass of her arms and her age-worn face, which recalls the tradition of her centuries-long life. The Libyan, finally, is caught in the act of lifting or setting down a large open book, in a complex twisting pose that a preparatory red chalk study, now in New York, shows was worked out on a male model. Each figure is accompanied by putti who hold the books or watch the reading.
A wider iconographic tradition
Michelangelo was not the first to depict the Sibyls in a sacred setting. In the floor of Siena Cathedral, in the 1480s, ten Sibyls were created in marble inlay. A few years before the Sistine ceiling, Pinturicchio had painted them in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican, paired with the prophets. In 1481 the Dominican Filippo Barbieri had circulated a treatise that raised their number to twelve, like the apostles.
After the Sistine Chapel the theme flourished further. Raphael painted four Sibyls in the Chigi Chapel of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, and the subject's popularity continued into the seventeenth century with canvases by Domenichino and Guercino. The Sibyl became a symbol of ancient wisdom which, in the humanist view, had unknowingly prepared the way for Christian revelation.
To look at the Sistine ceiling in this light is to read in it a precise theological programme: the history of salvation announced not only by the people of Israel but by all humanity. Michelangelo's Sibyls, caught in the moment of reading, listening or insight, remain the highest image of a Renaissance idea of prophecy as a bridge between classical culture and Christian faith.