(He shall accomplish the fate of death, having undergone a sleep of three days. Then being returned from the dead, he shall come into the light, showing the first beginning of the resurrection).
This design is said to be the work of Luigi di Ruggiero, called _l’Armellino_, and Vito di Marco;[42] but, except a notice dated 1482[43] of payments to the first-named worker for marble cut by him for work on “_li spazi di Duomo e per le Sibille_,” we have no further record as to the author of this particular design, or its cost. We find, however, that in the restoration above referred to, it cost 2,581 lire 80 c.
This Sibyl is famed in poetic story as having been visited by Æneas: an interview described with much graphic minuteness by Virgil, in Book VI. of the Æneid. Endless legends have accumulated in connection with her, and her presence is associated with many spots in and around Naples. Ferdinand Piper states that the names of Amalthea, Demophile, and Herophile have been given to her by different writers,[44] and that Justin Martyr asserts that she was daughter of Berosus, and came from Babylon to Campania. She is said to have lived for a thousand years; and to have been the ancient prophetess, who offered the Sibylline Books to Tarquin. These books, the oldest collection of which was, according to tradition, made about the time of Solon and Cyrus, by the Sibyl of Marpessus (the Erythraean Sibyl), at Gergis, on Mount Ida, found their way thence to Erythrae; from there to Cumae; and so to Rome. In 83 B.C. they were burned; but fragments of their contents continued to exist orally until A.D. 12, when they were collected and revised by the Emperor Augustus, and were surviving in 363. In the year 400 they were again destroyed by Stilicho; and the present so-called Sibylline books are a spurious invention of Jewish and Christian writers.
Here she appears as a somewhat severe old woman, with a veil wound round her head. In her right hand she carries the mistletoe bough of the Virgilian story; and with her left she clasps to her three books. Piled on the ground to her right, and burning, are six more, representing those destroyed by her in the Tarquinian legend; and above her left shoulder two flying cherubs bear a tablet, with the following inscription: