Author of the entry: Luigi Coiro

For the most part, ‘the local guides are silent about the author of this statue’, as Marina Picone observed in 1959. She considered that the Amor divino, with its more ‘academic’ language and ‘heavier naturalistic handling’, might be one of the last works Francesco Queirolo (1704–1762) executed ‘before leaving the Prince’s service’ – ‘among those dashed off in haste, and perhaps finished by others’ (Picone 1959, pp. 107–108). Some suggested attributions were indeed advanced in the course of the nineteenth century (cf. Saggiomo 2021–2022, pp. 535–551); nevertheless, Queirolo’s name, even in more recent years, has generally been regarded as the most plausible (cf. de Sangro 1991, pp. 215–216, no. 24; Cioffi 1994, pp. 44–45, fig. 38; Attanasio 2011, p. 47). Beyond the uncertainties concerning the authorship of what Fabio Colonna di Stigliano (1895, p. 118) judged a ‘mediocre sculpture’, what stands out is the unusually favourable verdict of Leopoldo Cicognara (1818, p. 96), who, however, had not actually seen the statue. He wrote, ‘… in which something does indeed appear that is not far removed from better taste, which had by then in large part been lost’ (cf. Cioffi 1994, pp. 44–45).

Although the 1772 reissue of Sarnelli’s guide (p. 126) judged the simulacrum of Amor verso Dio to be ‘by an illustrious ancient chisel’, even the inventory of the goods remaining in the estate of Raimondo di Sangro, drawn up in 1771, records it as a work ‘of uncertain authorship’ – yet accurately describes both ‘the portrait of the Lady [Giovanna di Sangro of the Marquesses of San Lucido], adorned with gilded laurel leaves’ (no longer extant) and the iconography of the allegorical figure (‘with drapery falling from the shoulders to the ground, and partly surrounding her’, holding ‘in her right hand, chained and raised, a heart in the gesture of offering it, while with her left she holds the links of the chain’, accompanied by an inscription dated 1755 (Inventario 1771, fols. 99r–101r; cf. Attanasio 2011, pp. 142–143).

The inscription, now visible on the base, was at that time ‘located beside the statue’, thus recalling, in this respect, the Decoro of Corradini on the opposite side of the entrance (cf. entry 14), and it still appeared so around the middle of the nineteenth century in a lithograph by Franz Wenzel (cf. de Sangro 1991, pp. 215–216, no. 24). In the engraving, however, the left hand of the ‘elegant statue’ (Colapietra 1986, p. 68), whose fingers are partly missing in the marble, holds no chain, whose loss must therefore have preceded that of the inscription, the latter probably damaged beyond repair as a result of the ‘disaster’ that in 1889 affected various parts of the building, and above all the counter-façade (Colonna di Stigliano 1895, pp. 33–34; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 83). The sculpture has subsequently been convincingly attributed to Michelangelo Naccherino and dated to around 1617 by Kuhlemann (1999, p. 224 and fig. 227), who interpreted the subject as Paris. This attribution was received with some hesitation by D’Agostino (2013, p. 230, fig. 5), who linked the work to a watercolour drawing of the funerary monument to Paolo di Sangro (Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York), in which, in addition to that of the second Prince of Sansevero, two further statues are depicted, the one on the left being identifiable with certainty as the Amor divino.

Sabrina Iorio has aptly connected the Cooper-Hewitt drawing with a series of documents brought to light by Eduardo Nappi (1975, pp. 122–125, docs. 29–33, 49, 51; idem 2010, pp. 110–112, docs. 318–324; cf. entry 19). From October 1609 until 1615, Naccherino was in fact paid by Paolo di Sangro for various marble works relating to ‘a tomb … in conformity with the design made by the said Michelangelo … which serves also for his son, Don Ferdinando di Sangro, in his chapel of the Pietà de Sangro, for which tomb he is to make three marble statues, one of them seven-and-a-half palms in height, the other seven, and the third six-and-three-quarters’ (ibid., pp. 110–111, doc. 320).

Ferdinando di Sangro, who died in adolescence on 23 September 1609, ‘leaving his parents pierced through the heart by an eternal and incurable wound’, as Filiberto Campanile recounts in 1615 in L’historia dell’illustrissima famiglia Di Sangro (1615, p. 59), was, according to Raffaele Colapietra (1986, p. 64), ‘one of the great protagonists of S. Maria della Pietà, indeed the first link in a chain of human transience’, since he was ‘the first to be buried at the Pietà’, thereby inaugurating ‘its use as a burial place’. This is not entirely accurate, yet it may be consistent with the interpretation that underpinned certain of Prince Raimondo’s decisions, an interpretation probably arising from the fact that the monument to the first Prince of Sansevero, Giovan Francesco di Sangro, who died in 1604 and was almost certainly buried in the Chapel, was under construction between 1614 and 1615 (cf. entry 11).

By 1615, the monument, at least as regards its architectural elements, must already have been installed, since Campanile (1615, p. 59) records the epitaph dedicated to Ferdinando, dated 1609, as being positioned ‘above his tomb’. In addition to the inscription ‘in the tomb’, d’Engenio Caracciolo (1623, pp. 263–264) transcribes, not without some licence, another ‘in the burial place’ (‘HIC FERNANDE IACES CRUDELIA FATA PARENTI / QUAM MAGE GRATA TUO MARMORA NATE FORENT / SI ME EADEM QUAE TE ANTE DIEM TULIT HORA TULISSET / UNAQUE SI CINERES CONDERET URNA DUOS’).

It is therefore plausible that, once the three statues had been installed, this second, concise epitaph was incised on a floor slab for the tomb destined to receive Ferdinando’s mortal remains, given that both the inscription dated 1609 and the youth’s body would inevitably have been displaced by those of his father, Prince Paolo, who died in 1626 (cf. entry 19). Both inscriptions appear today, and are recorded as such in the inventory of 1771 (fols. 86v–87r; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 138) and in the following year by Sarnelli (1772, pp. 127–128), as a single (by no means uniform) wall cenotaph, alongside the ‘commemorative inscription of Raimondo di Sangro’, who may have wished in this way to bring them closer to himself and ‘to establish with the ill-fated youth a sort of quite singular spiritual bond’ (Colapietra 1986, p. 77, note 15).

The statue, whose features may well reproduce in idealised form those of Ferdinando, was thus executed by Naccherino at the beginning of the seventeenth century (on the female Virtù that flanked it, cf. entry 3). It was partially reworked in the following century by adding a new limb (not perfectly proportioned) to a section of the right forearm, carved in a marble of different grain and provenance. This addition comprised the bracelet-yoke with chain (lost in the nineteenth century) and culminated above all in the hand that displays a flaming heart. Whether the reworking should be attributed to Antonio Corradini (1688–1752) or, more probably, to Queirolo, given that the inscription is dated 1755 (cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 47), the apparently simple transformation had undoubtedly been carefully considered and perhaps already prepared by Corradini in the form of a model or drawing. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia – which in the design of the Chapel’s allegorical mausolea was ‘the principal source of Sansevero’s ideas’, and of which he financed an important reissue edited by Cesare Orlandi (Forgione 2022, pp. 47–48) – certainly offered ample support for the adoption of the new iconographic form, since the figure of Desiderio verso Iddio is characterised by a flaming heart, while the yoke may refer to the attributes associated with Matrimonio (Ripa 1764–1767, II, 1766, pp. 183–184; IV, 1767, pp. 80–81); both figures are marked by youthful features.

It is tempting to imagine that a decisive figure in this transformation of forms and meanings, in a once again distinctly ‘baroque’ manner, was Fulgenzio Arminio Monforte’s Il trionfo del dolore, the description of the solemn obsequies celebrated a year after her death, in the church of the Carmine at Torremaggiore in 1674 in honour of Giovanna di Sangro, consort of Giovan Francesco di Sangro, fifth Prince of Sansevero. This is not so much because the passing of a ‘Lady of such quality, who, just as she bound every eye to wonder by her conduct, so she loosed every tongue to applause by her merits’, left ‘the Prince her husband … so deeply immersed in grief that … he breathed flames in his sighs’, as because of the temporary structure set up on the façade of the Apulian church, where ‘one saw on the right side a painted colossus representing Conjugal Love’, which ‘youthful in appearance, bore a crown upon its temples …’, and ‘held in one hand a yoke composed entirely of feathers, and in the other a heart with two flames, thus declaring by so light a yoke the sweetness of that burden, Iugum suave, which serves more as ornament than as weight, and by the two flames born of a single heart the mutual affection that grows between spouses’ (Arminio Monforte 1674, pp. 5–6).

The memory of Ferdinando di Sangro thus survives the early death that cut short his life, ‘towards God … religious and devout, towards his kinsfolk, reverent and most obedient, and towards his neighbour, so compassionate that he was often seen in an undressed state, having given his garments to the naked poor’ (Campanile 1615, p. 59), continuing to represent, in the marble features of the Amor divino, the ‘conjunction of human things with divine things’, symbolised in the Iconologia edited by Orlandi by a ‘Man kneeling with eyes turned towards Heaven, and humbly holding in both hands a golden chain hanging down from Heaven and from a star’, thus ‘a conjunction of human things with the divine, and a certain common bond by which God, when it pleases Him, draws us to Himself and raises our minds to Heaven’ (Ripa 1766, p. 29). The internal concatenation of the individual episodes of the monumental genealogy conceived by Raimondo di Sangro (one may consider, for example, the Soavità del giogo coniugale, cf. entry 8) renders the ensemble a sort of proto-hypertext.

Essential bibliography on the work

Campanile Filiberto, L’historia dell’illustrissima famiglia Di Sangro, Naples, in the printing house of Tarquinio Longo, 1615, pp. 59–60.

d’Engenio Caracciolo Cesare, Napoli sacra…, Naples, Ottavio Beltrano, 1623, pp. 263–264.

Inventario de’ beni rimasti nell’eredità del fu eccellentissimo don Raimondo di Sangro principe di Sansevero, Naples, notary Francesco de Maggio, 1771, copy of the document held at the Archivio Storico del Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli, d’Aquino di Caramanico collection, provisional shelfmark A.162, fols. 86v–87r, 99r–101r.

Sarnelli Pompeo, Nuova guida de’ forestieri…, Naples, Saverio Rossi, 1772, pp. 126–128.

Cicognara Leopoldo, Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia sino al secolo XIX…, III, Venice 1818, p. 96.

Celano Carlo, Notizie del bello, dell’antico e del curioso della città di Napoli… Con aggiunzioni de’ più notabili miglioramenti posteriori fino al presente, estratti dalla storia de’ monumenti e dalle memorie di eruditi scrittori napolitani, Cavalier Giovanni Battista Chiarini (ed.), III, Naples, Agostino de Pascale, 1858, p. 453.

Colonna di Stigliano Fabio, ‘La cappella Sansevero e D. Raimondo di Sangro’, in Napoli nobilissima, IV, 1895, pp. 33–34, 118.

Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 107–108.

Nappi Eduardo, ‘La famiglia, il palazzo e la cappella dei principi di Sansevero. Dai documenti dell’Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli’, in Revue Internationale d’Histoire de la Banque, 1975, no. 11, pp. 122–125, docs. 29–33, 49, 51.

Colapietra Raffaele, ‘Raimondo di Sangro e il Templum sepulcrale della cappella Sansevero (I)’, in Napoli nobilissima, ser. III, 1986, pp. 62–75.

de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 215–216, no. 24.

Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, pp. 44–45 and fig. 38.

Kuhlemann Michael, Michelangelo Naccherino: Skulptur zwischen Florenz und Neapel um 1600, Munich 1999, pp. 224–225, 298–299 and fig. 227.

Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 110–112, docs. 318–324.

Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 47, 78, 138, 142–143.

D’Agostino Paola, ‘The Second Prince of Sansevero’s Tomb: Addenda to a Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Drawing in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York’, in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, XX, 2013, 2, pp. 226–232.

Saggiomo Mariano, Le chiese gentilizie napoletane di Età Moderna: per la ricostruzione storica di un fenomeno dimenticato, PhD thesis in Historical, Archaeological and Art-Historical Sciences, from the Federico II University of Naples, XXXIV cycle, under supervisors Francesco Caglioti and Bianca de Divitiis, academic year 2021–2022, pp. 535–551.

Comparative bibliography

Arminio Monforte Fulgenzio, Il trionfo del dolore. Funerali per la illustrissima ed eccellentissima signora… donna Giovanna di Sangro dei Marchesi di San Lucido, prencipessa di San Severo, celebrati in Torremaggiore nella chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine… l’anno 1674, Naples, per Girolamo Fasulo, 1674, pp. 3–6.

Ripa Cesare, Iconologia del cavaliere Cesare Ripa perugino, notabilmente accresciuta d’immagini, di annotazioni e di fatti dall’abate Cesare Orlandi, patrizio di Città della Pieve accademico augusto. A Sua Eccellenza don Raimondo di Sangro…, I–V, Perugia, Piergiovanni Costantini, 1764–1767, II, 1766, pp. 29, 183–184; and IV, 1767, pp. 80–81.

Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, p. 83.

Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 47–48.

DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO18