Author of the entry: Gianluca Forgione
The Cristo velato, signed and dated ‘IOSEPH NEAP[OLITANUS] / SANMARTINO FECIT 1753’, is among the most celebrated masterpieces of European Baroque sculpture. Its author, who was thirty-three years old at the time of delivery, was paid 500 ducats by Raimondo di Sangro, which, as clarified by the balance of thirty ducats that Sanmartino drew at the Neapolitan Banco della Pietà on 13 February 1754, constituted the ‘full agreed price of the marble statue of Our Lord Jesus Christ, deceased and shrouded in a transparent veil of the same marble […] executed to complete satisfaction’ (Nappi 2010, p. 128, doc. 400). A credit note for fifty ducats issued by the Banco del Salvatore on 16 December 1752 and countersigned by the Prince of Sansevero shows that by that date the sculptor was already at work on the marble (cf. Chartulae desangriane 2006, pp. 22–23). Sanmartino collected the sum at the same bank on 28 March 1753 (cf. Nappi 2010, p. 128, doc. 399).
In a letter sent in 1753 to the Accademico della Crusca Giovanni Giraldi (1712–1753), and subsequently also dispatched in French to physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770), Raimondo himself refers to the Cristo velato and to the setting planned to receive it (di Sangro 2018, pp. 32–33, 72–73). In the cavea ipogea that now houses the macchine anatomiche (cf. entry 29) executed by the Palermitan Domenico Giuseppe Salerno (1728–1792), Sansevero wished to set up an oval tempietto divided into eight arcades and surmounted by an openwork dome. This space, intended to contain the tombs of the Prince’s descendants, was designed to give the impression of ‘being hewn out of rock’; and at its ‘centre’ Raimondo intended to place ‘the life-size marble statue of Our Lord Jesus Christ dead, enveloped in a transparent veil, also in marble’, flanked at both ends by two ‘eternal lamps’ fuelled by an exceptional inflammable substance he claimed to have rediscovered.
Sansevero did not live to complete the project. The Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, written under the Prince’s direct supervision and reissued for the third time in 1769, describes the statue in the nave of the church (pp. 10–11; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 59). In his will of August 1770, Raimondo enjoined his eldest son Vincenzo to ‘complete the underground sepulchral tempietto, to which one descends from the sacristy, according to the very same idea and design conceived by me, and sufficiently indicated by what has already been done’ (Testamento 1770, fol. 47v; cf. Chartulae desangriane 2006, p. 108). In the inventory of the church and the Di Sangro palace drawn up on the Prince’s death in 1771, the document repeats that Sanmartino’s already celebrated sculpture ‘is to be placed at the centre of an oval underground tempietto, located on the side of the sacristy from which it is to be reached, but at present there is scarcely more than a rough structure’ (Inventario 1771, fols. 126r–v; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 152).
Literary and visual evidence confirms that the Cristo velato remained on display in the nave throughout the closing decades of the eighteenth and almost the entire nineteenth century. Donato Andrea Fantoni (1746–1817), who visited the Cappella Sansevero in 1769, is the first to record in his diary that Sanmartino’s marble stood ‘to the right upon entering’ (1977, p. 50), and the same location is indicated both in the Guida napoletana of Pompeo Sarnelli (1772, p. 128) and in the Voyage d’Italie of the Marquis de Sade, who saw it in 1776 (Cioffi 2015, p. 334). The Aggiunzioni alle Notitie of Giovan Battista Chiarini (1858, p. 453) similarly reiterates that the ‘statue was to be placed at the centre of the underground burial chamber, constructed by Prince Raimondo as a common repository for the ashes of his descendants, but this intention was not fulfilled, due to the Prince’s death’. Beyond these periegetic accounts, a substantial number of nineteenth-century visual sources document the Cristo velato as being located within the church (Attanasio 2011, figs. 41–43; Fabrizio Masucci, in Parole Maestre 2016, pp. 114–117): in particular, in a sepia drawing by Achille Vianelli (1803–1894) the statue occupies the centre of the nave, whereas in an 1881 watercolour by Consalvo Carelli (1818–1900), and in a contemporary photograph by Sommer, it appears near the Pudicizia (1752) by Antonio Corradini (1688–1752).
Nonetheless, in 1872 Gennaro Aspreno Galante records the sculpture in the ‘hypogeum’ (pp. 162–163). This report, long regarded with some scepticism, is now corroborated by the travel account of Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893). Visiting the Cappella Sansevero in February 1864, he notes that au fond d’une crypte est un Christ mort enveloppé dans son linceul; le gardien allume une bougie, et dans cette teinte blafarde, dans l’air humide et froid, les yeux, les sens, tout l’être nerveux se trouble comme au contact d’un cadavre (Taine 1866, p. 46; tr. ‘to the rear of a crypt lies a dead Christ wrapped in his shroud; the guardian lights a candle, and in that pallid light, in the damp and cold air, the eyes, the senses, the whole nervous being is disturbed as if in contact with a corpse’; cf. idem 1956, p. 33). It may therefore be inferred that during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, more precisely, after Chiarini’s account of 1858 and before Vianelli’s drawing of 1881, the Cristo velato was indeed displayed in the cavea, in accordance with the Prince’s original wishes.
It appears evident that the rocky character of the cavea was intended to allude to the ‘new tomb’ that Joseph of Arimathea had hewn out of the rock for himself and then made available for the burial of Christ. Raimondo would seem then to have wished that, in keeping with its function, the entire crypt should be identified with the tomb of Christ. The other features of the space he envisaged, the oval plan, the perforated dome, and the eight arcades, also suggest that he sought to draw, albeit in more scenographic than philological terms, on the model of the rotunda of the Anastasis in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Forgione 2022, pp. 43–46; a Masonic reading of the cavea is instead proposed by Cioffi 1994, pp. 111–113).
Sanmartino’s masterpiece has often been associated with two significant precedents: the marble Cristo morto that Matteo Bottigliero (1680–1757) executed in 1722 after a design by Francesco Solimena (1654–1747) for the crypt of Capua Cathedral (D’Angelo 2018, pp. 186–191, no. B2), and the wooden sculpture on the same subject produced in 1728 by Carmine Lantriceni for the confraternity of the Turchini in Procida (De Mieri 2017). Scholars have extensively examined the stylistic and iconographic features that both connect and differentiate these three key works of southern Baroque sculpture (Alparone 1957). Special attention should be paid to the original setting of Bottigliero’s Deposto. According to the account by historian Francesco Granata (1766, pp. 53–54), between 1719 and 1724 Archbishop Nicola Caracciolo (1658–1728) undertook extensive alterations to Capua Cathedral, in the course of which he installed in the crypt ‘a representation of the Holy Sepulchre of the same proportions and dimensions as that seen in Jerusalem, within which the marble statue representing the dead Christ is placed, this being a highly esteemed work by the Neapolitan sculptor Bottigliero’. Unlike Raimondo, Caracciolo commissioned a faithful replica (now dismantled) of the Aedicule of Jerusalem. Bottigliero’s Cristo morto may therefore have served as a precedent for Sanmartino, and not only in terms of style and typology: both sculptures were conceived for a setting intended to reproduce the model of the Holy Sepulchre, albeit in different terms and in line with a tradition that had by then become relatively rare in southern Italy (Forgione 2022, pp. 43–46).
The cavea of the Cappella Sansevero, with its exposed artificial rock and the tombs of the descendants that were to be arranged within the arcades ‘with a certain studied disorder’ (di Sangro 2018, p. 32), was ultimately to have recalled the Holy Sepulchre represented on the altar together with Celebrano’s Compianto (cf. entry 1). It is probable that Raimondo conceived the relationship between these two spaces also in semantic terms: the sarcophagus opened by the angel, soon to receive the Redeemer, could be thought of as communicating notionally with the underground cavea, where the visitor would find himself inside the tomb and in the presence of the body laid within it.
The scenographic nature of the cavea raises the question whether this design may also have been inspired by the culture of the temporary Baroque installations in Rome, which Raimondo had the opportunity to absorb during his studies at the Seminario Romano between 1720 and 1730 (Forgione 2022, p. 45). Confirmation may be found in a design included by Andrea Pozzo in the section of his treatise devoted to centrally planned buildings: a ‘theatre-temple’ recalling the rotunda of the Anastasis in Jerusalem, which was very probably intended for the installation of a Holy Sepulchre for the Quarantore (Richard Bösel, in Mirabili disinganni 2010, pp. 271–283).
As has been shown (Deckers 2010, pp. 285–292), Sanmartino’s marble engages not only with the southern precedents mentioned above but also with some of the most celebrated conceits of Roman Baroque sculpture. In addition to the now canonical models of Stefano Maderno’s Santa Cecilia in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Beata Ludovica Albertoni in San Francesco a Ripa, Sanmartino’s Cristo also appears indebted to the work of Pierre Le Gros the Younger (1666–1719), whose Stanislaus Kostka shows the Polish saint lying with his head resting on embroidered cushions above a mattress supported by a fringed bedframe. It is worth noting that Le Gros’s marble, intended for the rooms of the novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, would have occupied a special location for a Jesuit pupil such as Raimondo, and that, at the close of the seventeenth century, the French sculptor also carved the marble altarpiece of Saint Louis Gonzaga in the church of Sant’Ignazio, a work that Raimondo and Francesco Celebrano may well have studied closely when devising the Compianto for the Cappella Sansevero, as demonstrated also by the affinities between the curvilinear frames of the two works (cf. entry 1).
Giangiuseppe Origlia Paolino (1754, p. 367) reports that, upon Corradini’s death in the summer of 1752, ‘a certain Neapolitan named Giuseppe Sammartino’ offered ‘to carve a dead Christ in marble based on a clay model left’ by the Venetian sculptor, ‘to be entirely covered by a veil of transparent marble’. The inventory of 1771 confirms that the ‘life-size entirely veiled deceased Christ’ was executed from a ‘small model’ made by Corradini (fol. 126v). Among the ‘thirty-six original models in fired clay’ that Corradini produced to give form to Raimondo’s design was also that of the Cristo velato, now identified with reasonable confidence in the terracotta preserved at the Certosa di San Martino in Naples (inv. 13524: cf. Fittipaldi 1980, pp. 110–112; Cogo 1996, pp. 331–335, no. 53; Naldi forthcoming).
Scholars have repeatedly sought to identify the terracotta model that Sanmartino himself must have produced in preparation for the marble in order to present his own proposal to the patron. In addition to the work at San Martino, this model has been identified first with a piece in a private collection (Borrelli 1974) and subsequently with one in the Bode Museum in Berlin (made known by Schlegel 1978 and attributed to Sanmartino by Deckers 2010), though both attributions have been contested. A very recent suggestion by Riccardo Naldi (oral communication, 2025, and forthcoming) identifies Sanmartino’s initial conception of the Cristo velato in a newly recognised terracotta in a private collection, which also sheds light on the sculptor’s original contribution in relation to Corradini’s model. Naldi further suggests that this work corresponds to the ‘model of the dead Christ in clay covered by a marble veil’, recorded without attribution in the 1771 inventory (fol. 61v) as being in the suppegno (attic) of the Prince’s palace.
In the marble itself, Sanmartino succeeded, with great originality, in reworking the virtuoso effect of the veil adhering to the lifeless body. The terracotta bier that Corradini had adorned with cherub heads at the four corners became, in Sanmartino’s hands, an austere catafalque carved in bardiglio stone, only slightly enlivened by the fringes of the funerary drapery, while the mattress and cushions with their dishevelled tassels are compressed under the weight of the figure. In the monumental sculpture, the instruments of the Passion stand out with the plastic force of a Baroque still life, and, in contrast to the decorative pictorialism of Corradini’s model, Sanmartino probes the depths of the material to reproduce the dramatic anatomy of a deceased Christ who, in his restless pose, seems already to suggest the first stirrings of awakening.
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] 1769, pp. 10–11.
Testamento di Raimondo di Sangro, Naples, notary Francesco de Maggio, 1770, copy of the document held at the Archivio Storico del Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli, d’Aquino di Caramanico collection, provisional shelfmark A.160, fol. 47v.
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 Archivio Storico del Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli, d’Aquino di Caramanico collection, provisional shelfmark A.162, fols. 61v, 126r–v.
Origlia Paolino Giangiuseppe, Istoria dello Studio di Napoli…, II, Naples, Giovanni di Simone, 1754, p. 367.
Sarnelli Pompeo, Nuova guida de’ forestieri…, Naples, Saverio Rossi, 1772, p. 128.
Sigismondo Giuseppe, Descrizione della città di Napoli e suoi borghi, II, [Naples,] presso i fratelli Terres, 1788, p. 37.
Celano Carlo, Delle notizie del bello, dell’antico e del curioso della città di Napoli per gli signori forastieri… Quarta edizione, in cui si è aggiunto tutto ciò che si è di nuovo fatto in Napoli ne’ nostri tempi…, Giornata Terza, Naples, Salvatore Palermo, 1792, p. 90.
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, per cura del cavalier Giovanni Battista Chiarini, III, Naples 1858, p. 453.
Taine Hippolyte, Voyage en Italie, I, Naples et Rome, Paris 1866, p. 46.
Galante Gennaro Aspreno, Guida sacra della città di Napoli, Naples 1872, pp. 162–163.
Taine Hippolyte, Viaggio in Italia, A. Roggero (ed.), Turin 1956, p. 33.
Alparone Giuseppe, Note sul Cristo velato nella Cappella Sansevero a Napoli, in ‘Bollettino d’Arte’, s. IV, XLII, 1957, pp. 179–185.
Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 32, 54, 108–114.
Fittipaldi Teodoro, Scultura napoletana del Settecento, Naples 1980, pp. 110–113, 140–142.
Borrelli Gennaro, Il bozzetto del Sanmartino per il Cristo velato della Cappella Sansevero, in ‘Napoli nobilissima’, s. III, XIII, 1974, pp. 185–189.
Fantoni Donato Andrea, Diario di viaggio e lettere. 1766–1770, Anna Maria Pedrocchi (ed.), Bergamo 1977, p. 50.
Schlegel Ursula, Die italienischen Bildwerke des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in Stein, Holz, Ton, Wachs und Bronze mit Ausnahme der Plaketten und Medaillen, Berlin 1978, pp. 119–122.
Nava Cellini Antonia, La scultura del Settecento, Turin 1982, pp. 97–98, 100.
de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 226–233, no. 28.
Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, pp. 54–63, 111–113.
Cogo Bruno, Antonio Corradini scultore veneziano, 1688–1752, Este 1996, pp. 331–336, nos. 53–54.
Catello Elio, Giuseppe Sanmartino (1720–1793), Naples 2004, pp. 15–21.
Chartulae desangriane. Il Principe committente, exhibition catalogue, Bruno Crimaldi (ed.) (Naples, Museo Cappella Sansevero, 28 March 2006), Naples 2006, pp. 22–23, 108.
Deckers Regina, Die Testa velata in der Barockplastik…, Munich 2010, pp. 257–313, esp. pp. 285–292.
I nostri omaggi, Principe!, exhibition catalogue Fabrizio Masucci (ed.) (Naples, Museo Cappella Sansevero, 23 April – 18 July 2010), Naples 2010, pp. 29–33.
Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, p. 128, docs. 399–400.
Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 59, 128, 152, 165–166, figs. 41–43.
Cioffi Rosanna, Due francesi in viaggio a Napoli. L’Abbé Jérôme Richard e il Marquis de Sade nella Cappella Sansevero, in La Campania e il Grand Tour. Immagini, luoghi e racconti di viaggio tra Settecento e Ottocento, Rosanna Cioffi, Sebastiano Martelli, Imma Cecere, Giulio Brevetti (eds), Rome 2015, pp. 329–340.
Masucci Fabrizio, Parole Maestre. Libri antichi e rari per il principe di Sansevero, Napoli 2016, pp. 114–117.
di Sangro Raimondo, La materia del fuoco. Lettere a Giraldi e Nollet, Leen Spruit (ed.), Naples 2018, pp. 32–33, 72–73.
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. 164–197.
Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, pp. 154, 164, 179.
Cioffi Rosanna, La Reggia di Caserta e il Cristo velato dalle pagine del Viaje a Italia di Leandro Fernández Moratín e una nota su Canova e Sanmartino, in ‘Il Piccolo Principe. Giuseppe Sanmartino alla Reggia di Caserta’, exhibition catalogue, Valeria Di Fratta (Reggia di Caserta, Cappella Palatina, 27 May – 11 September 2022), Naples 2022, pp. 50–56.
Forgione Gianluca, I simulacri delle cose. La Cappella Sansevero e il barocco romano, Turin 2022, pp. 39–46.
Naldi Riccardo, ‘Le origini di Giuseppe Sanmartino scultore’. A Terracotta Model of the ‘Cristo velato’, in Nuovi Studi, forthcoming.
Comparative bibliography
Pozzo Andrea, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum…, Rome, Typis Joannis Jacobi Komarek, Pars Secunda, 1700, fig. 43.
Granata Francesco, Storia sacra della chiesa metropolitana di Capua, I, Naples, Simoniana Press, 1766, pp. 53–54.
Bösel Richard, in Mirabili disinganni. Andrea Pozzo (Trento 1642 – Vienna 1709) pittore e architetto gesuita, exhibition catalogue, Richard Bösel and Livia Salviucci Insolera (eds) (Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, 5 March – 2 May 2010), Rome 2010, pp. 271–283, esp. pp. 273, 282–283, no. 14.12.
De Mieri Stefano, ‘I disegni preparatori per il Cristo morto di Carmine Lantriceni’, in Napoli nobilissima, vol. VII, no. III, 2017, 1, pp. 39–51.
D’Angelo Manuela, Matteo Bottigliero. Produzione scultorea tra fonti e documenti (1680–1757), Rome 2018, pp. 186–191, no. B2.
DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO05