Author of the entry: Gianluca Forgione

The Disinganno is the most celebrated work Francesco Maria Queirolo produced during his many years serving as superintendent of the Sansevero Chapel under Raimondo di Sangro. The Genoese sculptor took up the post in 1752, following the death of his predecessor Antonio Corradini, and held it until his turbulent dismissal at the end of 1759 (cf. Chartulae desangriane 2006, pp. 67–97). The Prince dedicated the allegorical tomb to his father, Antonio (1683–1757), whose life had been marked by crime and dissipation until his religious conversion, culminating in the priestly vows pronounced by the Duke of Torremaggiore in 1725 (Fabrizio Masucci, Leen Spruit, in Raimondo di Sangro 2020, p. 22). The group still occupies, as the patron intended, its key position beside the high altar, mirroring the Pudicizia (1752), the monument Raimondo entrusted to Corradini and dedicated to his mother Cecilia Gaetani, who died prematurely in 1710 (cf. entry 6).

The contract concluded between Di Sangro and Queirolo in November 1752 envisaged a monthly payment of one hundred ducats for the sculptor’s entire production. Consequently, no specific payment records survive for the Disinganno that would allow its execution to be precisely dated. The commission must nevertheless have been among Raimondo’s earliest concerns once Queirolo had been engaged, as, by 1754, Origlia Paolino was already able to furnish a detailed description (pp. 366–367). He describes the sculpture as ‘entirely to the Prince’s design, and wholly new of its kind’ and identifies the protagonist as a self-portrait of Queirolo. He dwells on the ‘stupendous delicacy’ of the ‘sack’ that ensnares him, finely ‘woven of knotted cords’ and recognises in the ‘most agile youth’, with a crown and small flame upon his head, the ‘Human Intellect, which with one hand helps him to free himself, and with the other, holding a sceptre, indicates to him this lower world, which had previously deceived him’. Lastly, he notes among the ‘closed books’ at the feet of the two figures, ‘the Holy Bible left open, where certain passages alluding to the subject may be read’.

The Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, reissued for the third time in 1769 (pp. 8–9; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 58), also identifies the sculpture as ‘Queirolo’s masterpiece’, particularly on account of the ‘extreme refinement’ of the net, ‘worked almost entirely in the air, that is, without touching the figure within’. The inventory of the Prince’s estate drawn up in 1771, while confirming the iconographic reading proposed by Origlia Paolino, also refers to the portrait of Antonio di Sangro, which, consistently with the type adopted in the other allegorical tombs, appears in the oval of the ‘obelisk’ surmounting the marble ‘pedestal’ (Inventario 1771, fols. 74v–76v; cf. Attanasio 2011, pp. 133–134). In these same years, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, in his biography of Queirolo (1769, pp. 308–309), also praised the ‘subtlety and diligence’ with which the net imprisoning the man had been carved, which is evidence that the fame of the Disinganno had by then spread beyond Naples to reach the sculptor’s homeland.

To allude to the moral and religious conversion of his unfortunate father Antonio, the Prince drew on two distinct iconographies illustrated in the first edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593, pp. 134, 141–142): the Inganno provided the motif of the figure caught in the fisherman’s ingeniously constructed net, while the Intelletto lives again in the winged youth who assists him and indicates the ‘deceptive’ world. In the eighteenth-century edition of Ripa’s repertory (1764–1767, I–V) dedicated to Raimondo di Sangro, who financed the publication, prefaced by a long encomiastic epistle (I, 1764, pp. III–VIII), Cesare Orlandi included for the first time a description of the Disinganno (II, 1765, pp. 234–240). According to the Perugian priest, the disabused man has torn the veil from his eyes and, through the intellect, recognised that ‘all the appearances of the world are deceptive’, and that the world itself is for us only ‘a place of pilgrimage, in which, amid toil and suffering, we must purify our works, so as to render ourselves pleasing to Him who alone is the giver of every good’ (ibid., p. 234; cf. Forgione 2022, pp. 47–54).

For the base of the allegorical group, Sansevero ordered a representation of Christ healing the man born blind, a relief Rosanna Cioffi (1994, pp. 48–54) attributes to Giuseppe Sanmartino (1720–1793). The inventory of Raimondo’s library and his own writings reveal that he had a particular interest in scriptural exegesis. In the Lettera apologetica, which bears the date 1750 on its title page but was in fact published the following year, the Prince drew on the foremost biblical exegete in the history of the Society of Jesus, the Fleming Cornelius a Lapide (Cornelis Cornelissen van den Steen, 1567–1637), whose Commentarii had undoubtedly underpinned the historical and religious knowledge Raimondo had acquired at the Seminario Romano during his studies with the Jesuits (1720–1730). Continuing in the patristic tradition, Cornelius reads in the episode narrated in the Gospel of St John (9:1–41) an allegory of the pride of original sin, represented by humanity’s congenital blindness and redeemed through the humility of the spittle and clay with which Christ restores sight to the man born blind (Lapide 1639, pp. 389–398). The reference to baptism, which washes away original guilt, becomes still more explicit in the Saviour’s command to the man: ‘go, wash in the pool of Siloam’. In selecting this iconography for the relief, Raimondo thus intended to evoke his father Antonio’s life, spent in worldly passions and providentially illuminated by his encounter with the Lord: ut qui non vident videant (Forgione 2022, pp. 47–54).

Essential bibliography on the work

Origlia Paolino Giangiuseppe, Istoria dello Studio di Napoli…, II, Naples, Giovanni di Simone, 1754, pp. 366–367.

Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, [Naples] 1769, pp. 8–9.

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. 73r–74v.

Ratti Carlo Giuseppe, Delle vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi. Tomo secondo… in continuazione dell’opera di Raffaello Soprani, Genoa, in the printing house Casamara dalle cinque lampade, 1769, pp. 308–309.

Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 92–95.

de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 165–170, no. 7.

Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, pp. 37–39, 48–54, 110–111.

Deckers Regina, Die Testa velata in der Barockplastik. Zur Bedeutung von Schleier und Verhüllung zwischen Trauer, Allegorie und Sinnlichkeit, Munich 2010, pp. 257–313, esp. pp. 282–284.

Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 101–102.

Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 58, 77, 80–81, 133–134.

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. 16–17, 110–113, 216–217, 224–225.

Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, pp. 22, 218–219.

Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 47–54.

Comparative bibliography

Lapide Cornelius a, Commentarius in Evangelium S. Lucae et S. Ioannis…, Antwerp, apud Heredes Martini Nutii, 1639, pp. 389–398.

Ripa Cesare, Iconologia overo descrittione dell’imagini universali cavate dall’antichità et da altri luoghi…, Rome, per gli heredi di Giovanni Gigliotti, 1593, pp. 134, 141–142.

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, I, 1764, pp. III–VIII; and II, 1765, pp. 234–240.

Chartulae desangriane. Il Principe committente, exhibition catalogue, Bruno Crimaldi (ed.) (Naples, Museo Cappella Sansevero, 28 March 2006), Naples 2006, pp. 67–97.

DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO26