Cumaean Sibyl

Up on the Sistine ceiling, among the Hebrew prophets, Michelangelo painted five pagan prophetesses, the sibyls of the ancient world. The idea was that even outside Israel, in Greek and Roman legend, voices had foretold the coming of Christ. The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous of them, the old seer said to have guided Aeneas into the underworld. Michelangelo gives her a massive, muscled body and thick arms, an aged woman with the frame of a laborer, hunched over an enormous book. He uncovered the first half of the ceiling in 1511, and Rome had seen nothing like these figures before. He had taken the fresco on reluctantly, thinking of himself as a sculptor first, and it shows in the way these bodies seem carved out of the plaster in deep light and shadow.