The Cumaean Sibyl occupied a cave complex above Lake Avernus, near Naples, and was highly respected in antiquity as an oracle of Apollo. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas consults the sibyl to seek guidance on his destiny after abandoning Dido in Carthage. J. M. W. Turner shows Aeneas sacrificing to Apollo before receiving the god’s answer through the sibyl. Dissatisfied, Aeneas then asks the sibyl to let him go down to Hades to speak with his dead father. This picture was made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the antiquarian and amateur artist who owned the celebrated landscape garden at Stourhead in Wiltshire, which was designed to evoke the ideal Italianate landscapes that Turner emulated in this painting. Since Turner did not visit Italy until 1819, Hoare supplied Turner with his own sketches of the landscape at Cumae. Hoare intended to pair Turner’s painting with Lake Nemi with Diana and Callisto (1758) by Richard Wilson, which was already at Stourhead.
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The story of Aeneas and the Sibyl is in the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. After landing at Cumae, near Naples, Aeneas begs the Sibyl (a prophetess and priestess of Apollo) to take him into the underworld to meet the ghost of his dead father. She tells him he must first break off a golden bough from a tree in a neighboring grove to bring as an offering for Proserpine, queen of the underworld. The Sibyl then leads Aeneas to a cave near Lake Avernus-from the Greek for "birdless," owing to the noxious vapors rising from the underworld-and thence they descend. This ancient poem, about leaving the realm of light and entering the darkness, appealed powerfully to the Romantic imagination, and to Turner's interest in the landscape of myth, as well as the operation of natural light. The artist adopts here the luminous manner of Claude Lorrain, long before he had visited Rome.
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The story of Aeneas and the Sibyl is from the sixth book of Virgil's "Aeneid." The Trojan hero and his men land on the Italian coast at Cumae, near Naples, a famous shrine to the god Apollo. Knowing there is an entrance to the underworld near by, he begs the Sibyl (Apollo's priestess and prophetess) to take him to see the shade of his dead father. She tells him he must first break off a golden bough from a tree in a neighboring grove to take as an offering for the queen of the underworld, Proserpine. Then she leads him to a cave near Lake Avernus, named from the Greek for "birdless" since the vapors rising from the underworld killed any birds flying overhead, and here they make their descent. As the tale of a hero who braves the unknown, leaving Apollo's realm of light and sun to follow his destiny in the nether regions, this was the kind of classical legend that appealed most powerfully to the Romantic imagination.
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