Consider the Sibyls
Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it…. Painting was called ‘silent poetry,’ and poetry ‘speaking painting.’ The laws of each art are controvertible into the laws of every other.
Herein we have an explanation of the necessity that reigns in all the kingdom of Art. Arising out of eternal Reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Art,” in Society and Solitude
Ralph Waldo Emerson was well-versed in classic poetry and philosophy, a literature rich with heroic, mythic, and sacred figures. And he admired Renaissance art, particularly works by Michelangelo and Raphael inspired by the vast iconography of the ancient world. Among the images of heroes, angels, and gods at the Emerson House are prints of five famous portraits of sibyls by Italian painters.
Wise, clairvoyant, and powerful, the sibyls were legendary female prophets named after places in the Old World—for example, the renowned “Oracle of Delphi.” Sibyls are typically pictured with an open book, in the act of reading or writing, and thus associated with both received wisdom as well as intuitive, even divine, knowledge. In art and literature, sibyls are often physically powerful as well: muscular, Amazonian, colossal. (In a modern context, the Statue of Liberty may be aptly described as a sibyl.)
The Libyan Sibyl, print of a detail from Michelangelo’s fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Sibyllae Quatuor (“The Four Sibyls") print of engraving after Raphael’s decorative fresco The Sibyls.
Michelangelo’s epic fresco on the ceiling of Rome’s Sistine Chapel is the original source of three prints of sibyls at the Emerson House today: The Libyan Sibyl is prominently displayed in the study; the Cumaean and Eritrean are placed one above the other in a corner of the parlor. Students of the classics may recognize the fearsome Cumaean sibyl, made famous in the Aeneid when she encourages the young hero to persevere in the face of enormous difficulties. Each of these sibyls appear among Old Testament prophets in the early 16th-century masterpiece.
A later work, Raphael’s famous group portrait The Sibyls, arranges the Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian, and Tibertine sibyls within a graceful half-moon arch, or “lunette.” A print after this work is also in the parlor, over the mantle. Originally commissioned for the chapel of Santa Maria Della Pace in Rome, the fresco is also known as Sibyls Receiving Instruction From Angels.
Like Michelangelo’s program of sibyls and biblical prophets, Raphael’s tableau of earthbound sibyls alongside ethereal angels conflates older, pagan myths with Christian Rome.
Sibyls occasionally appear in Emerson’s writing, notably in his important poem, “The Problem,” where their words persist in Nature itself:
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind
Still whispers to the willing mind.
In his book Emerson: The Mind on Fire, the Emerson biographer Robert D. Richardson traced Emerson’s interest in the sibyls to his immersion in Persian poetry and Eastern texts, around the time he purchased these prints from the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Company in 1846. Richardson concluded that “Emerson hung the pictures partly out of interest in the Old Masters and partly from interest in the sibyls themselves, corresponding as they did, perhaps, with some of the strongest influences in his own life.” This suggests the sibyls may have reminded Emerson of the strong, intelligent women who contributed to his own intellectual development, including his widowed mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson; his father’s sister, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson; his aunt by marriage, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley; and of course his wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson.
Sibylla Persica, print of engraving by Pietro Bettelini after Guercino’s painting The Persian Sibyl.
La Vierge au Livre, print of Joseph Théodore Richomme’s engraving after Raphael’s Conestabile Madonna.
The placement of the sibyls prints seems to confirm a connection between education and female influence. For example, consider the fifth sibyl: an engraving after the painting The Persian Sibyl by Guercino, a third Renaissance painter. Hung over the mantle in daughter Edith’s bedroom, this classically beautiful, turbaned sibyl leans gently on her hand at a writing desk—and appears more of a thoughtful matriarch than a high priestess. She looks directly across the room to a print of an engraving after Raphael’s Madonna with the Book (Conestabile Madonna); this maternal image subtly echoes the theme of female wisdom, depicting as it does a young mother holding in her arms a child, and an open book.
— R. Davis, Emerson House guide
