La sibilla Agrippina

In Antwerp around 1630, in the circle around Rubens, Jan van den Hoecke painted a series of sibyls, the prophetic women of the ancient world that Christian tradition had recast as foretellers of Christ. For the sibyl Agrippina he painted a Black woman, holding a whip and a crown of thorns, both instruments of Christ's scourging, with a Latin line meaning roughly that he will wither like a leaf. For a long time the picture was taken for something else entirely, an early portrait of an African woman by another Antwerp painter, Abraham Janssens. Only in 2008 was it re-identified as van den Hoecke's sibyl, in an exhibition on Black figures in Rubens-era art.