In 1910 Gemito ended his long years of voluntary seclusion, and returned with renewed vigor to sculpture. It was during this period that he explored the Ancient world with an almost obsessive will. Without abandoning the psychological realism of his earlier work, Gemito drew his subjects almost exclusively from Hellenistic works which he would have seen in Naples. A bronze cast of this rare late work is in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan, where it is dated between the years 1915-20. Gemito exhibited a silver version of the model in 1926 at the Promotrice in Naples.
The subject derives from Late Hellenistic figures belonging to genre of grotesque realism and illustrating old fisherman and peasants, such as the marble Old Shepherdess in Rome (cf. Stewart, op. cit.), as does Gemito's torso of Winter (Marchiori, op. cit.). Both show a poetic study of age, captured with an unerring eye, but nevertheless galvanised by nervous movement and a linear detailing. The Sibyl reveals Gemito's most personal concerns at the end of his life, and his preoccupation to reveal hidden beauty.