Fitzwilliam work list 1877 ... finished Sibyl - in dark purple blue. Agnew etching of this work made in 1892 by Charles Albert Waltner (1846-1925) The design originated as a cartoon for the St Luke window, Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge,1873, where it was named Sibylla Delphica, hence the confusion over the naming of the painting in Manchester city art gallery. Exhibited in 1877 at the Grosvenor Gallery as unfinished and titled "A Sibyl"
Burne-Jones was a man of great erudition and culture, and one who was extraordinarily well read and familiar with he legends of ancient and modern literature. For him the complexities of meaning and subtleties of story-telling which might be brought into play in a subject such as the Cumaean Sibyl were fascinating and vital. The painting has been justly described by the Burne-Jones scholar John Christian as "a picture of the highest quality, (and) a grand intellectual design carried out with exceptional sensitivity and vigour" (The Reproductive Engravings after Sir Edward Burne-Jones p.20). The Cumaean Sibyl shows the stupendous figure of one of the semi-mythical virgins who in the ancient world were believed to be able to foretell the future, and who were the guardians of historical lore. The Cumaean Sibyl had in her possession nine books, vitally important to the Romans because of the accounts they gave of the city's foundation. these she offered to sell to King Tarquinius Superbus, but he refused them because the price she demanded was so great. the Sibyl then burnt three of the books , and offered six remaining at the price she had previously asked for the nine. Still Tarquinius refused, so the Sibyl burnt three more. Tarquinius, realizing that even those remaining would be destroyed if he did not agree to the original price, bought them. Thus the three surviving books were placed in the care of priests at the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome, where they were consulted by the Senate at times of crisis. The "Sibylline books" were destroyed when the Capitol was burned in 83 BC. Early Christians in Rome invoked the Sibyls, because it was said they had foretold the birth of Christ. Burne-Jones shows the Sibyl holding a scroll, in allusion to the books and documents of which she was the possessor. on her head is a Crown of Thorns, to remind the spectator of the profound significance of the figure as one in whom classical mythology and Christian faith were interrelated. The adoption of the Sibyl theme by Burne-Jones was the result of long meditation, and tells much about the artist's own alternation between between the classical and Christian iconographic and literary traditions. It seems that originally there had been just one mythic figure with powers of prophecy, known as Sibylla, but that later the name became a generic for female oracles and soothsayers dispersed throughout the ancient world. Varro, in his Res Divinae, attempted to list them, arriving at a total of ten. The fame of the Cumaean Sibyl owes much to Virgil's account of her giving ecstatic utterance to her prophecies under the inspiration of the god Apollo. It was even said that Virgil's Fourth Ecologue had been inspired by words from the Cumaean Sibyl, and was written in imitation of her. The Cumaean Sibyl lived, it was said , in a chamber excavated in the tufa stone close to the acropolis of the Greek city of Cumae which had been the first settlement of Greek colonists on the mainland, in the eighth century BC), in Campania to the west of the modern city of Naples. The cave known as the "Grotto of the Sibyl" exists still, although the roof of one of the tunnels has collapsed. Apollo had said that she might live for as many years as she could hold grains of sand in her hand. She accepted this offer of long life - equivalent it was said to the lifespans of nine men - but omitted to ask for prolonged youth. Apollo offered to make her young, but demanded in exchanged her virginity which she refused. Her fate therefore was to live out an almost eternal old age, eventually becoming so wizened that she was placed in a birdcage in the temple of Apollo at Cumae. The Cumaean Sibyl represents Burne-Jones's devoted allegiance to the art of the Reanaissance, specifically his study of teh heroic Sibyl figures in the spandrels of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (figs. 3 & 4). Burne-Jones had made his third visit to Italy in September 1871, in the course of whi9ch he stayed in Rome to make intensive study of the Sistine ceiling. His wife Georgiana recorded that "he brought the best opera-glass he could find, folded his railway rug thickly, and, lying on his back, read the ceiling from the beginning to end, peering into every corner and revelling in its execution" (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, II, p.26). The previous year a rift had occurred between Burne-Jones and his friend and mentor John Ruskin because of the latter's disparaging remarks about the art of Michelangelo in his Oxford lecture "The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret". Georgiana recalled that for her husband "it didn't seem worth while to strive any more if (Ruskin) could thin it and write" (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, II, p.18) such things about the painter who he had come to admire above all others. Burne-Jones began designs for figures of Sibyls in September 1872, while the memory of the Sistine ceiling was fresh in his thoughts. Shortly afterwards he received the commission to design stained glass for two windows in the south transept of the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, in which scheme it was intended to incorporate images of the Cumaean Sibyl in the St Matthew window, and the Delphic Sibyl in the St Luke window. Entries in Burne-Jones's account books for 2 September 1872 relate to the Sibyl figures for this project. (See A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle - A Catalogue, two volumes, New Haven, 1974, I, p.43; II, pl.424 (for St Luke window), and I, p.43; II, pl,432 (for St Matthew window). The composition of the painting The Cumaean Sibyl originated in the design for the stained glass of the Delphic Sibyl, which appear as in the left light of the St Luke window. The original cartoon for the figure appears not to have survived, but a large preparatory sketch of the same figure. in black, red and white chalks was given by Burne-Jones to Charles Elliot Norton in 1873, and is now in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A beautiful and highly worked drawing in bodycolour and gold and silver paint, showing the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl as she first appears in the Jesus College stained glass (i.e. in the St Matthew window), dated 1873, is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The process of transposition of the two subjects was completed when Burne-Jones later also made an easel painting of the Delphic Sibyl (fig. 5), based on the image of the Cumaean Sibyl at Jesus . This second Sibyl painting appeared at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886. Shortly after he had finished work on Jesus College glass, probably in 1874 (as stated by Malcolm Bell and confirmed by Fortunee de lisle), adapting the figure previously treated in stained glass of the Delphic Sibyl in the present composition in oil. The painting is a work of enormous power, in which the statuesque and heavily draped figure occupies a loosely defined architectural space which seems hardly to constrain her physical strength. The figure is seen standing with her back against a fluted column, which her shoulder overlaps. Likewise, the outer edge of the raised scroll breaks the line of the wall that closes the composition to the right. As martin Harrison and Bill Waters have written of the stained glass versions of the Sibyl subjects - "They are massively conceived, occupying the whole area of their compartments and such is their strength that they appears to bulge out of their frame" (Burne-Jones, London, 1973, p.1116). Penelope Fitzgerald identifies the model for the painting The Cumaean Sibyl as maria Zambaco (fig. 6), and notes also that a copy was made for her mother, Euphrosyne Cassavetti. Maria, who was born in 1843 a member of the wealthy Greek merchant community based in London, had married a Greek doctor in Paris in 1861. Five years later she returned to London, and in the late 1860s, met and became involved with Burne-Jones - firstly as a pupil and model, and then as his lover. A woman of extraordinary physical beauty, with pale skin and red hair, he was to draw and paint her obsessively and even when the affair was over and Burne-Jones had to some degree recovered his emotional equilibrium, her memory haunted him. in the 1870s her face and figure continued to appear, in his works such as The Beguiling of Merlin (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, fig. 1.), of 1874-7, and once again in the Cumaean Sibyl. The Cumaean Sibyl was one of eight paintings that Burne-Jones sent to the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, in may 1877, showing it under the title A Sibyl. It was displayed together with The Mirror of Venus (Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), The Days of Creation (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusettes), and The Beguiling of Merlin, in the gallery's principal and most prestigious space, the west gallery. Burne-Jones had previously withdrawn from artistic life in 1870, as a consequence of the scandal that had attached to the mythological subject Phyllis and Dermophoon (Birmingham City Art Gallery fig.7) when it appeared at the summer exhibition of the Old WaterColour Society. During the intervening period, which he was to describe as the "seven blissfullest years", he had been immensely productive on behalf of his two particular patrons, William Grahm and Frederick Leyland. Only on one occasion did he exhibit in public, sending two works in 1873 to the Dudley Gallery. By 1877 when the Grosvenor Gallery opened, Burne-Jones's art was virtually unknown to a wider audience, and when the new direction that his art had taken was revealed it made a sensation. Ruskin, with whom friendly relations had been resumed, ad who was still in the late 1870s an influential critic, wrote in Fors Clavigera: "his work... is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as "classic" in its kind" (Works of Ruskin, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, London, 1903-12, vol, XXIX, p. 159). Sidney Colvin regarded the works n display by Burne-Jones as "an exhibition in themselves ... we have among us a genius, a poet in design and colour, whose like has never been seen before" (Fortnightly Review, June 1877, pp. 825-6). More considered, but equally emphatic in its claim for Burne-Jones to be regarded as the emergent genius of British painting, was the piece written by Henry James: "It is the art of culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of aesthetic refinement, of people who look at the world and at life not directly, as it were, and in all its accidental reality, but in the reflection and ornamental portrait of it furnished by art itself in other manifestations; furnished by literature, by poetry, by history, by eruditon." The eight works on display at the 1877 Grosvenor "plac(d) their author quite at the head of the English painters of our day" (Henry James, The Painter's Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, London, 1956, pp. 144-7) The Cumaean Sibyl was the first of all Burne-Jones's paintings to be translated into a reproductive engraving. the subject was etched by Charles Albert Walter (1846-1925), and published by Agnew's in 1882 (fig.8). A copy of the print was included in the New Galley Memorial exhibition of 1898-9. During the years that Sir William Agnew was running the distinguished firm of dealers and publishers a number of Burne-Jones's finest works passed through their hands, while in 1890 Agnews staged the first exhibition of the Briar Rose series, an event which caused a sensation almost equal to that of the 1877 Grosvenor. The Cumaean Sibyl belonged to William Agnew, and his death in 1910 was passed down in the Agnew family, remaining their possession until 1957. Since then the painting has been in a private collection in the United States, little known to scholars and never in that time exhibited. A crucial element within Burne-Jones's development as a painter who responded to the great tradition of the Italian Renaissance, and as a powerful and deeply moving figurative work of a progressive and sophisticated type, this particular painting may be regarded as a remarkable and most welcome. rediscovery. Sotheby's London 28 November 2002