Author of the entry: Gianluca Forgione
On 28 July 1766, Paolo Persico received, ‘in the name and on behalf of’ Raimondo di Sangro, 50 ducats as an advance on the 180 agreed upon for the execution of the Angelo con putto to the left of the high altar (ibid., pp. 137–138, doc. 447). The group, to be fashioned ‘following Persico’s model’, was to be delivered within the following six months and was paid in full by means of a bank draft drawn by the artist on 13 April 1767 (Nappi 2010, pp. 137–138, doc. 447).
On that same 28 July 1766, the Prince and Persico drew up the contract for the commission of the work before notary Francesco de Maggio (cf. Forgione 2022, pp. 28–30, 64–66, doc. 5). The Sorrentine sculptor declared that he was financially satisfied both with the stucco model of the Amore della Virtù, to be coupled with the Soavità del giogo coniugale dedicated to Gaetana Mirelli of the princes of Teora, wife of Vincenzo di Sangro (cf. entry 8) and with the Angelo con putto intended for the cornu Evangelii, which had already been executed by that date. It is significant that Persico records having received, as part of his remuneration for the two works, ‘an ancient marble statue, about seven palms high, representing a Woman resting her face on one hand in an attitude of sorrow, which formerly stood in the said church, and of which the Prince could make no use’ (ibid., pp. 28, 65).
The statue in question is, in this writer’s opinion, the female Virtù that adorned the monument to Paolo di Sangro, second Prince of Sansevero, and whose original design is preserved in a drawing held at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (cf. D’Agostino 2013). The monument, like the drawing, is attributable on documentary grounds to Michelangelo Naccherino (1550–1622), who worked on it from 1609 to 1615 (for the payments, which Sabrina Iorio has for the first time connected with Paolo’s tomb, cf. Nappi 2010, pp. 110–112, docs. 318–324; see entry 19). In addition to the agreed sum, Raimondo gave Persico eleven ducats ‘since the said works were to his taste’ (Forgione 2022, p. 65).
The inventory of the assets of the Prince of Sansevero’s estate, drawn up in 1771, attributes to the two groups of angels the symbols of the Passion of Christ, ‘partly composed of the same marble and partly to be made from gilded metal’ (Inventario 1771, fol. 66v; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 130). Despite the losses sustained by the sculptures, it is still possible to identify the Titulus Crucis unfurled by the angel in cornu Epistulae (cf. de Sangro 1991, p. 159, who, while correctly recognising the title of the Cross in the scroll held by the angel, reads on it the inscription ‘INRI’, which cannot in fact be discerned); and, behind it, the column of the Flagellation inspired by the relic in the Roman basilica of Santa Prassede (Forgione 2022, p. 29). Recognition of the iconographic function of Persico’s angelic beings brings out more clearly the thematic continuity between the earlier painted altarpiece with the Pietà, in which the arma Christi play a leading role, and the new decorative arrangement devised by Raimondo. In addition to the two groups by the Sorrentine sculptor, the symbols of the Passion also recur in Celebrano’s Pietà and particularly in the putto displaying the Veil of Veronica and in the one who, behind it, indicates with his right hand the sacred episode to be contemplated; his left hand would originally have held a Cross.
As early as 1818, Leopoldo Cicognara (pp. 96–97) suspected the Berninian derivation of the ‘figures of the high altar’ of the Cappella Sansevero. The Ferrarese conte was equally clear-sighted in identifying the qualitative gap between the model and its derivation, since he could no longer discern Bernini’s ‘mastery’ in the frozen sculptures commissioned by the Prince. In any case, the presence of Persico’s two groups at the sides of the altar would not seem to be explicable without a knowledge of the ten monumental angels bearing the symbols of the Passion that Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and his workshop had made for the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome in the late 1660s. It is widely known that in March 1729, Prospero Bernini, grandson in the male line of Gian Lorenzo, donated to the parish of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte the only two angels that Bernini had sculpted personally, and which Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi had wished to preserve from the ravages of time, giving them to his cardinal nephew Giacomo and assigning instead to il Ponte the copies that Gian Lorenzo himself subsequently undertook to execute (Wittkower 1990, pp. 287–291, no. 72; and Bernardini 2021, pp. 445–451, nos. 135a–135b). It is very probable that, at the conclusion of his ten years of studies at the Seminario Romano, begun in 1720, Raimondo did not miss the opportunity to admire the two wonderful sculptures in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Perhaps it is not without significance that he should have requested precisely the iconographic type of the messenger bearing the titulus of the Cross for one of the two large angels of the high altar. We are led to suppose that the angel on the Gospel side, now deprived of its original attribute, may similarly have recalled the Berninian prototype, displaying the crown of thorns in its right hand. Irving Lavin (2012, pp. 272–273) has shown that Bernini did not choose which angels to sculpt at random: the crown of thorns and the Titulus Crucis relate directly to the Maiestas of Christ and thus to the very reason for his condemnation for the salvation of humankind.
In Roman churches, and particularly in those administered by the Jesuits, by whom he was educated, the young Raimondo must certainly have encountered the spectacular and naturalistic temporary Calvaries erected for the Quarantore, which are in part recalled in the altarpiece of the high altar of the Cappella Sansevero (Forgione 2022, pp. 11–18). The arrangement of the angels bearing the arma Christi at the sides of the Deposto also reproduces a scheme typical of such ephemeral settings, as illustrated by the Holy Sepulchre designed by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) for the Roman church of Sant’Ignazio for Holy Week, and published in the first volume of his celebrated treatise (Pozzo 1693, fig. 66).
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. 66v.
Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, p. 91.
Fittipaldi Teodoro, Scultura napoletana del Settecento, Naples 1980, pp. 220–221.
de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, p. 159.
Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, pp. 47–48.
Chartulae desangriane. Il Principe committente, exhibition catalogue, Bruno Crimaldi (ed.) (Naples, Museo Cappella Sansevero, 28 March 2006), Naples 2006, pp. 26, 29.
Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 137–138, docs. 444–447.
Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, p. 130.
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. 103, 124–131.
Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, pp. 263–264.
Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 28–30, 64–66, no. 5.
Comparative bibliography
Pozzo Andrea, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum…, Romae, Typis Joannis Jacobi Komarek, Pars Prima, 1693, fig. 66.
Cicognara Leopoldo, Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia sino al secolo XIX…, III, Venezia 1818, pp. 96–97.
Wittkower Rudolf, Bernini. Lo scultore del Barocco romano, Milano 1990, pp. 287–291, no. 72.
Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 137–138, docs. 444–447.
Lavin Irving, Visible Spirit. The Art of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, I–III, London 2007–2012, III, Bernini at Saint Peter’s. The Pilgrimage, 2012, pp. 272–273.
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.
Bernardini Maria Grazia, Bernini. Catalogo delle sculture, I–II, Turin 2021, II, pp. 445–451, nos. 135a–135b.
Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 11–18.
DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO03