Von der Höl Sibylle Cumane. / Hic est Introitus Antri Sibylle Gumane / Lacus Agnianus piscibus

Title

Von der Höl Sibylle Cumane. / Hic est Introitus Antri Sibylle Gumane / Lacus Agnianus piscibus

Description

Two views from a bird's-eye view on one sheet, with titles, index and a decorative frame. The upper view shows the Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl with the cartographer Abraham Ortelius the engraver George Hoefnagel talking about the scene. According to the inscription, they doubt that Lake Averno was the alleged entrance to Hades in Virgil's Aeneid. The lower view shows the Cave of the Dogs, so called because of the poisonous sulphur fumes that emanated from it. Reverse with German text.

ca. 1545

Artist

Hoefnagel (1542-1600)

Georg Hoefnagel,(1542-1600) was a Flemish miniature painter and illuminator or book painter. He is known for his illustrations of natural history subjects, topographical views, illuminations, and mythological works. He was one of the last manuscript illuminators and made an important contribution to the development of topographical drawing. During his travels in Europe, Hoefnagels made many landscape drawings. These later served as models for engravings for Ortelius' Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) and Braun's Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572-1618). The Civitates orbis terrarum, with its six volumes, was the most comprehensive atlas of its time. Hoefnagel worked on the Civitates intermittently throughout his life, possibly acting as an agent for the project by commissioning views from other artists. He also produced more than 60 illustrations himself, including various views in Bavaria, Italy, and Bohemia. He enlivened the finished engravings with a mannerist sense of fantasy and wit, using dramatic perspectives and ornamental cartouches. Through topographical accuracy, he heralded the realistic trend in 17th-century Dutch landscape art. In 1617, his son Jacob revised designs by his father for the sixth volume of the Civitates, published in Cologne in 1618. Volume 6 contains a homogeneous series of images of cities in Central Europe (in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Transylvania) that are very uniform in their graphics. The views are perspective and only in a few cases isometric, and are characterized by the accuracy of the indications, the particular attention to the faithful representation of the territory, the landscape, the road conditions, and the observational skill and refinement of interpretation. A topographical masterpiece is also the miniature of a "View of Seville" with rich framing in the Royal Library in Brussels. Hoefnagel was also instrumental as an illustrator for Georg Braun's views of cities and Abraham Ortelius' World Theater.

Historical Description

According to myth, a sibyl is a prophetess who, unlike other divinely inspired seers, originally prophesies the future without being asked. As with many other oracles, the prediction is usually ambiguous, sometimes probably in the form of a riddle. The Grotto of the Sibyl is an underground tunnel system in the mountain of Cumae: Roman crypta and is called the "Grotto of the Sibyl". In ancient mythology exists a series of sibyls, but the importance that the Sibyl of Cumae plays in Roman legends made it the most famous. The Sibyl of Cumae or Cumaean Sibyl is one of the ten sibyls mentioned by Varro. According to tradition, she was a priestess from Babylon who presided over the oracle of Cumae, near Naples, in the 6th century BC. Her name was Amaltheia. Among others, the Sibyl of Cumae is mentioned in the works of Virgil and Petron and by Maurus Servius Honoratius as a deiphobe. The priestess possessed nine books with prophecies, the so-called Sibylline Books, which she offered for sale to the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus. When the king refused because of the horrendous price, she burned three of the books and offered the rest again for the same price. Tarquinius again refused, she burned three more books and repeated her offer. Now Tarquinius relented, purchased the last three books at full price, and then placed them in a vault of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The story is mentioned in Varro's lost books. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, also transmits a transformation myth about the Sibyl of Cumae. When Aeneas once visited her in her cave, she told him that she had refused the god Apollo, but that he had granted her a wish. She wished for as many years of life as there were grains of dust in a heap of sand, but forgot to wish for youthfulness that would last just as long. However, the God had probably reckoned with it because he offered to provide also for it if she was to him to will. But she refused again, became older and older and complained, marked by age, that she had already lived seven hundred years, still had three hundred years to go and would, unrecognizable to all, only be present as a voice. In art, the Sibyl of Cumae appears on the ceiling painting of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, in the choir stalls of the Ulm Cathedral, in the Capella Nuova in the Orvieto Cathedral, on the Ghent altar and in a mosaic of the Siena Cathedral.