Abstract

The heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) makes her first appearance in the novel ‘dressed like Domenichino’s Sibyl’, wearing an Indian shawl wound into a turban. The aim of this essay is to highlight the contribution that the tradition of Sibylline iconography made to the characterization of the heroine of Corinne by locating Staël in a long line of artists, writers, and patrons, particularly female ones, who adapted and appropriated this iconography for their own purposes over the previous two centuries. A crucial breakthrough was made in the early seventeenth century by Domenichino, who provided the prototype for later generations of artists by painting a freestanding picture of a generic (not, as often said, the Cumaean) Sibyl wearing a turban. Domenichino’s composition nevertheless remained exceptional in its insistence on the primacy of Sibylline inspiration, which helps to account for its role in Corinne as well as for its appeal to other early nineteenth-century writers. Staël’s direct predecessors included the artists Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, both of whom portrayed female sitters in more or less Sibylline guise, but the most important was Emma Hamilton, from whose famous Attitudes Staël almost certainly derived the motif of the turban fashioned out of an Indian shawl. Staël herself adopted the turban as her characteristic headdress, as did other literary and artistic women after her; its great advantage lay in the way it enabled them to lay claim to Sibylline authority whilst also disavowing any such intent.

摘要

杰曼·德·斯塔尔的《科琳娜，或意大利》（Corinne, or Italy，1807）中的女主人公在小说中首次亮相，“打扮得像多梅尼基诺的女预言家”，披着一条缠在头巾里的印度披肩。本文的目的是强调西比拉图像传统对科琳娜女主人公的塑造所做出的贡献通过将斯塔尔定位在众多艺术家、作家和赞助人中，尤其是女性艺术家、作家和赞助人中，她们在过去的两个世纪中为了自己的目的而改编和挪用了这种图像。十七世纪初期，多梅尼基诺取得了重大突破，他画了一幅戴头巾的普通（不是通常说的库迈式）西比尔的独立画，为后世艺术家提供了原型。尽管如此，多梅尼基诺的作品仍然与众不同，因为它坚持女巫灵感的首要地位，这有助于解释它在科琳娜中的作用以及它对其他十九世纪早期作家的吸引力。斯塔尔的直接前辈包括艺术家安吉丽卡·考夫曼 (Angelica Kauffman) 和伊丽莎白-路易丝·维吉·勒·布伦 (Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun)，她们都以或多或少的女巫形象描绘女性模特，但最重要的是艾玛·汉密尔顿 (Emma Hamilton)，斯塔尔几乎可以肯定从她著名的《态度》中衍生出了头巾的主题。用印度披肩制成。斯塔尔本人也采用头巾作为她特有的头饰，她之后的其他文学和艺术女性也是如此。它的巨大优势在于它使他们能够宣称西比拉的权威，同时又否认任何此类意图。