(Antwerp 1611–1651)
The Delphic Sibyl,
oil on canvas, 105 x 78 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Berlin

Literature:
J. Sanzsalazar, Jan van den Hoecke (1611–1651) the painter of Sibyls: the success, inspiration and dispersal of a very personal iconography in: Philostrato. Revista de Historia y Arte, January 2019, pp. 5-32

The present picture of The Delphic Sibyl by Jan van den Hoecke may be compared to his series of sibyls conserved in the Musée de Tessé in Les Mans. Those eleven canvases, which alone of all the sibyls attributed to painters in Rubens’s circle, are undispersed, were published by Hans Vlieghe, and most recently, Jahel Sanzsalazar.

The Latin inscription in the top left identifies the present Sibyl as that of Delphi. Sanzsalazar writes that with the Le Mans series van den Hoecke ‘created an original iconography with no formal precedents’. The many extant versions of the paintings in the series suggest that they were well appreciated by learned circles in Antwerp and beyond. Van den Hoecke, a pupil of Rubens, would have heard his master’s maxim to learn from antiquity. Van den Hoecke later travelled to Italy and at some point must have read Filippo Barbieri’s 1481 work Discordantiae nonnullae inter sanctum Hieronymum et Augustinum as Barbieri’s descriptions of the sibyls appear to form the basis of these compositions.

Hans Vlieghe published another version of this composition (see H. Vlieghe, Nicht Jan Boeckhorst, sondern Jan van den Hoecke, in: Westfalen, vol. 68, 1990, pp. 166–68).