Author of the entry: Sabrina Iorio
Alessandro di Sangro († 1633), son of Giovan Francesco, Duke of Torremaggiore and first Prince of Sansevero, was Patriarch of Alexandria from 1604 and Archbishop of Benevento from 1616. An inscription placed outside the main doorway of the church of Santa Maria della Pietà, better known as the Cappella Sansevero, identifies him as the founder of the church: ‘ALEXANDER DE SANGRO PATRIARCHA ALEXANDRIAE / TEMPLUM HOC A FUNDAMENTIS EXTRUCTUM BEATAE VIRGINI / SIBI AC SUIS SEPOLCRUM AN. DOM. MDCXIII’ (cf. de Sangro 1991, p. 141). The early sources too, largely periegetic in nature, acknowledge the Patriarch’s leading role in the erection of what would become the mausoleum of the Di Sangro family, that is, the place in which the remains of all its members, in the line of the Princes of Sansevero, were to be gathered together, both on account of the commitment he devoted to its embellishment and, above all, for the establishment of its jus patronatus (Saggiomo 2021–2022, p. 504).
Accordingly, Alessandro’s funerary monument occupies a prominent position within the Pietatella, that is, to the right of the high altar, a prestigious location maintained even after Raimondo di Sangro’s reordering in the eighteenth century, which altered the original arrangement to such an extent as to entail, among other things, the relocation of another early tomb formerly situated there, that of Paolo di Sangro (second Prince of Sansevero and brother of the prelate) from the left of the high altar to the first arch on the right of the nave from the main entrance (cf. entry 19). The tombs of the two brothers, who played such a fundamental role in the construction of the original nucleus of the family church, are in fact described as standing to the right and left of the high altar, in cornu Evangelii and in cornu Epistulae, as early as 1634, on the occasion of the first pastoral visitation carried out in Santa Maria della Pietà by Archbishop Francesco Boncompagni (Saggiomo 2021–2022, pp. 505–506). This evidence takes us beyond the hypothesis that Alessandro’s mausoleum was originally erected in the nave to form a square with the other three seventeenth-century monuments, being moved to the side of the altar in order to conform to the new iconographic programme devised by Raimondo only after 1742 (cf. Picone 1959, p. 86; de Sangro 1991, p. 159).
The monument to the Patriarch of Alexandria is distinguished from the other Di Sangro tombs not only, as noted, on account of its prominent location, but also its typology, consisting of a half-length figure rather than a standing statue. Alessandro is depicted in ecclesiastical garb, his hands joined in prayer, turning towards the miraculous icon of the Madonna della Pietà, to whom the church was dedicated and which, at the time of the monument’s erection, served as the reredos of the high altar. The founder’s effigy appears within a niche framed by a pair of columns in the Composite order and is surmounted by a pediment upon which, flanking a large cross, stand a pair of winged angels in the round. The decorative scheme is exceptionally rich, with curvilinear marble panels bordered by a white moulding and fine ornamental elements of a markedly plastic character, including small heads, bosses, foliate volutes, and garlands (cf. Inventario 1771, fols. 69v–71r; Attanasio 2011, pp. 131–132). Beneath the elegant monument is the inscription by the prelate’s great-nephew, Giovan Francesco di Sangro, fifth Prince of Sansevero, who in 1652 transferred his ancestor’s remains from Rome in accordance with his last will and testament (de Sangro 1991, pp. 159–160).
Concerning the monument’s authorship, the periegetic sources offer no unequivocal attribution, variously assigning the tomb either to an unknown hand (described by Pompeo Sarnelli (1772, p. 131) as an ‘eccellente scarpello’, and by Gennaro Aspreno Galante (1872, p. 160) as ‘ottimo’) or, in others, to Cosimo Fanzago (D’Ambra, De Lauzières 1855, p. 222). According to Marina Picone (1959, pp. 13–14, 86–87), the mausoleum’s stretta orbita fanzaghiana is discernible more in the decorative language of the ensemble than in the bust of Alessandro, which, while compositionally close to works by Fanzago such as the Geronimo Flerio in Santa Maria di Costantinopoli (cf. D’Agostino 2011, pp. 345–346, no. A.6), seems to lack the vivid characterisation that distinguishes the Bergamasque sculptor’s autograph works. When, in 1975, Eduardo Nappi published the results of his research on the Sansevero family, documenting the payments for the artists working in the family chapel between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the name of Giovan Domenico Monterosso emerged in connection with the execution, in 1625, on behalf of the ‘Patriarch Archbishop of Benevento’, of ‘two marble angels and a portrait made in the tomb in the Cappella della Pietà’, for which the Vicentine sculptor received the agreed sum of ninety-two ducats (cf. now Nappi 2010, p. 113, doc. 342). On the basis of this documentation, Oderisio de Sangro (1991, p. 159) subsequently advanced the plausible attribution of the work to Monterosso.
Between 1620 and 1621, Monterosso had already engaged with the half-length portrait type in the context of a prestigious commission: the execution of three of the eight ‘marble half-statues of the glorious patron saints of Naples’ (Sant’Aspreno, Saint Charles Borromeo, and Sant’Agrippino), commissioned by Cardinal Decio Carafa for the apse of Naples Cathedral and transferred in the mid-eighteenth century to the pillars of the nave and to the seminary chapel (Panarello 2010, pp. 58–60). These busts provide close stylistic comparisons with the effigy of Alessandro di Sangro, particularly in the physiognomy of the faces (with hard, strong features, a low, pronounced brow, and a fixed gaze) and in the handling of the material, in the barely roughed out rendering of beard and hair, as well as in the drapery, arranged in dense, parallel folds in an almost xylographic manner far removed from any painterly intention (Iorio 2015, pp. 97–98).
The hieratic character of the Patriarch’s portrait, closed and immobile in its gesture of prayer, combined with a stylised and synthetic execution consistent with Monterosso’s manner, particularly evident in the folds of the vestment, which develop as ‘cold flutings extraneous to the subject’ and as ‘decorative motifs of a strigillated sarcophagus’ (Picone 1959, p. 87), may point to a strand of Counter-Reformation art aimed at recovering the stylistic forms of the ‘early Church’. The possibility that the prelate deliberately chose to be represented as though in an ancient Orthodox icon, also in view of his important ecclesiastical titles, and that he had selected for this purpose an artist already practised in this kind of work, remains a most powerful insight. The unfinished treatment of the sculpture, only roughly sketched in the facial features and in the rendering of the beard and hair, appears fully consistent with a stylistic orientation towards a ‘symbolic’ representation of reality, at the same time functioning as a means of portraying, in the marble of his own tomb, a living individual.
The architectural and decorative structure of the funerary monument shows marked similarities to the structure framing the half-length portraits of Antonio Carafa and Beatrice Colonna, also attributed to Monterosso (Iorio 2015, p. 97) and located in the Carafa Chapel of the Santissima Annunziata in Naples (1623–1626), an enterprise for which payments (amounting to more than four thousand ducats) were received by the marble workers Giacomo Lazzari and Giovan Antonio Galluccio (ibid., pp. 97–98, 100). This continuity of language emerges in the framing devices in which the half-length figures are set, all three resting on a console in the form of an inverted cone, in the auricular style of the volutes decorating the urns, and in the characteristic columns with Ionic capitals and garlands. Given that, for the Patriarch’s tomb, the payments to Monterosso relate only to the two angels and the portrait (not to the work as a whole but only to the sculptural elements), and that, by 1627, Lazzari and Galluccio were paid by Alessandro for certain unspecified works in the Cappella Sansevero (including the supply of tre carate di marmo bianco: cf. Nappi 2010, p. 113, doc. 343), it is reasonable to assign to these two marble workers, already responsible for the Carafa Chapel, even the marble decoration of the mausoleum of the founder of the family church (if not also its design and the coordination of the works).
Essential bibliography on the work
Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, [Naples] 1766, pp. 5–6.
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. 69v–71r.
Sarnelli Pompeo, Nuova guida de’ forestieri…, Naples, Saverio Rossi, 1772, p. 131.
D’Ambra Raffaele, De Lauzières Achille, Un mese a Napoli. Descrizione della città di Napoli e delle sue vicinanze divisa in XXX giornate…, I–III, Naples 1855–1857, I, 1855, p. 222.
Galante Gennaro Aspreno, Guida sacra della città di Napoli, Naples 1872, p. 160.
Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 13–14, 86–87.
Colapietra Raffaele, Raimondo di Sangro e il Templum sepulcrale della Cappella Sansevero (I), in Napoli nobilissima, ser. III, XXV, 1986, pp. 62–79, esp. pp. 65, 67.
de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 141, 158–160.
Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 93–95, 113, docs. 342–343.
Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 57–58, 131–132.
Iorio Sabrina, Sull’arte marmorea di primo Seicento a Napoli: Iacopo Lazzari, Tommaso Montani, Francesco Cassano, Giovan Marco Vitale e Giovan Domenico Monterosso, in Ricerche sull’arte a Napoli in età moderna. Saggi e documenti 2015, Naples 2015, pp. 82–105, esp. pp. 97–98, 100.
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, XXXIV cycle from the Federico II University of Naples, under supervisors Francesco Caglioti and Bianca de Divitiis, academic year 2021–2022, esp. pp. 501–552, esp. pp. 504–506.
Comparative bibliography
Panarello Mario, Artisti della tarda maniera nel Viceregno di Napoli. Mastri scultori, marmorari e architetti, Soveria Mannelli 2010, pp. 58–60.
D’Agostino Paola, Cosimo Fanzago scultore, Naples 2011, pp. 345–346, no. A.6.
DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO04