Author of the entry: Gianluca Forgione

On 1 July 1769, Giovanni Lofaro, one of the procurators most regularly engaged by Raimondo di Sangro, paid the sculptor Paolo Persico an advance, through the Neapolitan Banco del Salvatore, on the one hundred and twenty ducats agreed ‘for the entire stucco gloria above the high altar of the family church of the Prince of San Severo’ (Nappi 2010, pp. 140–141, doc. 451). By that date, Persico had already earned the patron’s trust after carving the two groups of angels on either side of the high altar (1766–1767) and the Soavità del giogo coniugale (1768), the allegorical tomb intended for Gaetana Mirelli, wife of Vincenzo di Sangro (cf. entries 3 and 8). The inventory of assets remaining in Raimondo’s estate, drawn up in June 1771, records that the ‘crown of nineteen angels, including the cherubs, all in stucco’ supports the ‘oval’ with ‘the image of the Sorrowful Virgin, which had previously served as the altarpiece of the high altar’ (Inventario 1771, fol. 68v; cf. Attanasio 2011, pp. 76, 131).

According to Engenio Caracciolo (1623, pp. 262–263), the late sixteenth-century mural depicting the Pietà, formerly displayed (it would appear) as the altarpiece of the high altar of the original Di Sangro Chapel and later replaced by the relief sculpted by Francesco Celebrano between 1766 and 1767, is – by virtue of its miraculous nature – in fact connected with the circumstances surrounding the foundation of the Chapel. In the late sixteenth century, according to the account of the author of Napoli sacra, the ‘image of the Madonna della Pietà’, modelled on the ancient northern iconography of the Vesperbild, was painted on a wall in the garden belonging to Giovan Francesco di Sangro, Duke of Torremaggiore, where it began to ‘shine with the greatest miracles and graces’. The Duke himself drew personal benefit from this, being spared from a ‘grave illness’ (ibid., p. 263). For this reason, he resolved to consecrate a small votive chapel to the Pietà, which was enlarged in 1608 by the Patriarch of Alexandria, Alessandro di Sangro, as the earlier structure ‘was unable to accommodate the many who frequented it on account of the infinite miracles and graces that the Lord God continuously performs through the intercession of the Most Holy Virgin’ (ibid.).

In his Chapel renovation project, Raimondo sought to heighten the painting’s evocation of the Divine: a gift from Heaven descending to Earth, escorted by an angelic gloria. The design does not appear to fully belong to the Neapolitan tradition, since, here too, the models the Prince had created must have been of Roman origin (Forgione 2022, pp. 25–27). Raimondo had ample opportunity to deeply absorb the culture of the Baroque in its Berninian form during his many years studying with the Jesuits at the Seminario Romano (1720–1730). Beyond the figurative evidence of the works themselves, it should be recalled that among the volumes of his library the Prince possessed the Vita di Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) published by Filippo Baldinucci in 1682, and that he had given Francesco Maria Queirolo (1704–1762) a ‘folio volume of the statues in Rome’ for the sculptor’s evident use as a working tool and primary figurative source for the decoration of the Chapel (ibid., pp. 22–23).

Persico’s Gloria angelica may therefore be associated, first of all, with the solutions adopted in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century for two of the most famous miraculous icons, similarly linked to the foundation of the shrines that still house them today: the Salus Populi Romani on the altar of the Pauline Chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, an image to which the Jesuits themselves were greatly devoted, and the Madonna della Vallicella on Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577–1640) altarpiece for the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova. Above all, it was Bernini who gave this iconography a Baroque idiom in the seventeenth century. In the Chigi Chapel in Siena Cathedral, whose patronage had been assumed in 1660 by Pope Alexander VII, Gian Lorenzo devised, for the prodigious and most venerated medieval panel of the Madonna delle Grazie or del Voto, a gilded bronze frame with angels and putti in flight, subsequently cast in gilded bronze by Giovanni Artusi under the supervision of Ercole Ferrata (1610–1686; cf. Bernardini 2021, pp. 386–392, nos. 118a–118c, esp. pp. 387–388, no. 118a). In the same period, Bernini experimented with a similar solution for the high altar of the collegiate church of San Tommaso da Villanova at Castel Gandolfo, where the magnificent stucco angels modelled by Antonio Raggi (1624–1686) support the Crocifissione by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1596–1669; cf. Curzietti 2020, pp. 204–207, no. 22; and Bernardini 2021, pp. 395–398, no. 120). The Chigi style also inspired the designs for the altars in the Fonseca Chapel in San Lorenzo in Lucina, with Raggi’s gilded bronze angels supporting the Annunciazione by Giacinto Gimignani (1606–1681; cf. Curzietti 2020, pp. 227–229, no. 29), and the De Sylva Chapel at Sant’Isidoro a Capo le Case, where the frame of the Madonna col Bambino painted by Carlo Maratti (1625–1713) is held by two angels set against slabs of alabastro fiorito, whose veining evokes cloudlike forms (Bernardini 2021, pp. 408–410, no. 123).

Essential bibliography on the work

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, fol. 68v.

Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 91–92.

Fittipaldi Teodoro, Scultura napoletana del Settecento, Naples 1980, p. 221.

de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 154–155.

Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 140–141, doc. 451.

Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 76, 131.

Napoli, la Cappella Sansevero e il Cristo velato. Naples, Sansevero Chapel and the Veiled Christ, texts by Marco Bussagli, photographs by Carlo Vannini, Bologna 2019, pp. 210–213.

Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, p. 278.

Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 25–27.

Comparative bibliography

d’Engenio Caracciolo Cesare, Napoli sacra…, Naples, Ottavio Beltrano, 1623, pp. 262–263.

Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, pp. 46–48.

Curzietti Jacopo, Antonio Raggi scultore ticinese nella Roma barocca, Rome 2020, pp. 204–207, no. 22, pp. 227–229, no. 29.

Bernardini Maria Grazia, Bernini. Catalogo delle sculture, I–II, Turin 2021, II, pp. 386–392, nos. 118a–118c, pp. 395–398, no. 120, pp. 408–410, no. 123.

Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 22–23.

DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO02