Sibyl

By the 1640s, painters in Rome and Bologna had made the sibyl into a familiar kind of picture, a single young woman seen half-length, often in a turban. Sibyls were the prophetesses of the ancient world, and Christian writers held that some of them had foretold the coming of Christ. The Galleria Borghese links this canvas by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli to the well-known sibyls of Guido Reni and the Bolognese school. She wears a heavy grey-blue headdress wound like a turban, lifts her eyes, and writes with a quill, taking down a prophecy as it comes to her. Nothing she holds says which prophetess she is. In the same room hangs Domenichino's version of the subject, acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1617, and his figure comes with a viola da gamba, a sheet of music and a sprig of laurel.