Author of the entry: Gianluca Forgione

The monument that Raimondo di Sangro commissioned for his mother, Cecilia Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona (1691–1710), who died a few months after the birth of the future prince, is undoubtedly the most celebrated of all the works Antonio Corradini produced throughout his long and distinguished career, much of it spent in the service of the most influential European sovereigns. The inscription on the broken tablet in the statue’s left hand records that the deceased shone ‘MORIBUS ELEGANTIA INGENIO / PIETATE RELIGIONE AC FIDE’, and that Raimondo, wishing to render her memory imperishable, resolved in 1752 to dedicate to her ‘MATRI INCOMPARABILI / TUMULUM EXCITANDUM’. At the base of the monument, the Prince of Sansevero placed a further tablet commemorating the artist Corradini as ‘APPOSITI / SIMULACRI VEL IPSIS GRAECIS INVIDENDI’, who died on 12 August 1752 ‘DUM RELIQUA HUJUS TEMPLI / ORNAMENTA MEDITABATUR’ (cf. de Sangro 1991, p. 164, no. 6). Corradini had arrived in Naples in the late 1740s, and his friendship with Raimondo, perhaps facilitated by their shared membership of Neapolitan Freemasonry (D’Ayala 1897, p. 461), secured him the commission for the entire refurbishment of the Cappella Sansevero, for which he produced ‘thirty-six original models in fired clay’ (Origlia Paolino 1754, p. 367), only some of which he succeeded in translating into marble before his death (Cioffi 1994, pp. 13–32; Cogo 1996, pp. 122–132, 308–337).

The fame of Cecilia Gaetani’s tomb soon extended beyond Naples. Yet it elicited considerable reservations among travellers and connoisseurs who viewed it between the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although Fr. Jérôme Richard reacted favourably in 1769, the adverse impression formed by the Marquis de Sade during his Neapolitan stay in the winter of 1776 is well known: he was sharply critical of the Chapel’s sculptural decoration as a whole, with the sole exception of the Cristo velato (Cioffi 2015). Equally categorical was Leopoldo Cicognara’s scathing dismissal of the Velata in the third volume of his Storia della scultura (1818, p. 96). However, scant attention has been paid to the detailed account of the Chapel and the rooms of the Di Sangro palace by Donato Andrea Fantoni (1746–1817) of Bergamo, who visited Naples in 1769: in his diary, published only in 1977 (p. 51), Corradini’s masterpiece (reproduced in a drawing) is particularly commended for the illusionistic handling of the veil.

Giangiuseppe Origlia Paolino was the first, in 1754, to specify (p. 365) that the already ‘celebrated statue’ represents the allegorical figure of Pudicizia, ‘covered from head to foot in a veil of the same marble (something never achieved by ancient sculptors, neither Greek nor Roman) and a constant object of admiration to both citizens and foreigners’. Shortly thereafter, the Breve nota issued under Raimondo’s direct supervision, for the third time, in 1769 (p. 7; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 58), reiterates that ‘the most celebrated work by Corradini in this church is the statue of Pudicizia, which adorns the mausoleum of the present Prince’s mother, entirely covered by a veil of the same marble, beneath which the nude forms of the figure may almost be seen to show through’. The 1771 inventory of the church and palace of the Di Sangro family describes the monument in detail (_Inventario _1771, fols. 73r, 74v; cf. Attanasio 2011, p. 133), noting in particular the portrait carved within the oval of the obelisk rising behind the figure and specifying its iconographic and material features.

Among the sources that almost certainly inspired the conception of the Velata, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593) merits particular consideration; its last and most ambitious eighteenth-century edition in Italian, printed in five volumes, was edited by Perugian scholar Cesare Orlandi and significantly dedicated to Raimondo di Sangro, its patron, with a lengthy encomiastic epistle (Ripa 1764, I, pp. III–VIII). In the fourth volume (1766), Pudicizia is described as veiled, since a modest woman must conceal her bodily beauty and remove occasions for the eyes, which is often the source of moral corruption. Moreover, in his library, Sansevero, whose interest in emblematic culture in all probability derived from his Roman education under the Jesuits (1720–1730), conserved another fundamental iconographic repertory of the early modern period, namely the 1647 Venetian edition of Vincenzo Cartari’s Immagini delli dèi degl’antichi (1556) (see Raimondo di Sangro 2020, p. 380). In the section devoted to Diana, Cartari (1647, pp. 55–59) presents the ‘image’ of Lucina, associated with the Moon and invoked as protectress of women in childbirth. The Ancient Greeks frequently depicted her fully veiled, and this is how she appears in Cartari’s volume.

Such sources may well have informed the complex iconographic programme of the Neapolitan Velata, in whose ample figure the anatomical parts connected with maternity appear, not by chance, to be emphasised. The patron and the sculptor also assigned symbolic value to the other decorative elements of the monument: the broken tablet, the garland of roses, the censer, and the oak branches that put forth new growth allude variously to the brevity of life and worldly pleasures, and to the endurance of fame and the promise of eternal life. This latter theme is explicitly recalled in the relief of the Noli me tangere carved at the base of the monument, where the risen Christ appears to Mary Magdalene in the guise of the gardener (John 20:11–18).

With the Pudicizia and the Cristo velato, for which he produced only the bozzetto, identified with the terracotta in the Museo della Certosa di San Martino (inv. 13524), Corradini brought to Naples a well-established stylistic formula that had inevitably become a recognisable hallmark with profitable consequences (Grund 2009). Scholarship has often connected the Neapolitan work with earlier veiled statues that established his reputation, particularly the Vestale Tuccia in Palazzo Barberini (1743), in which, for the first time, the artist drapes the figure in a single, ample veil, gathered into dense folds (Cogo 1996, pp. 296–301, no. 40). The Pudicizia in the Cappella Sansevero does indeed appear to represent the apex of this trajectory, as demonstrated by the virtuosic quality with which its author rendered the rapt languor of the face, the bloom of the flesh, and above all the illusionistic transparencies of the veil, which belie the figure’s ostensible subject by transforming it into its opposite (Wittkower 1993, p. 395). It was above all this latter characteristic that provoked Cicognara’s moralistic indignation; the same feature that today fills the viewer with admiration when confronted with the ultimate limit to which Baroque sculpture could be driven.

Essential bibliography on the work

Origlia Paolino Giangiuseppe, Istoria dello Studio di Napoli…, II, Naples, Giovanni di Simone, 1754, pp. 365–367.

Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero don Raimondo di Sangro nella città di Napoli, [Naples] 1769, p. 7.

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.

Cicognara Leopoldo, Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia sino al secolo XIX…, III, Venice 1818, p. 96.

Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples 1959, pp. 85–86.

Fantoni Donato Andrea, Diario di viaggio e lettere. 1766–1770, Anna Maria Pedrocchi (ed.), Bergamo 1977, p. 50.

Nava Cellini Antonia, La scultura del Settecento, Turin 1982, pp. 166–167.

de Sangro Oderisio, Raimondo de Sangro e la Cappella Sansevero, Rome 1991, pp. 161–165, no. 6.

Wittkower Rudolf, Arte e architettura in Italia. 1600–1750, first edition: Turin 1958; edition cited: Turin 1993, p. 395.

Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, first edition: Salerno 1987; edition cited: Salerno 1994, esp. pp. 109–110.

Cogo Bruno, Antonio Corradini scultore veneziano. 1688–1752, Este 1996, pp. 124–126, 131, 296–301, no. 40, pp. 308–319.

Grund Sonja, ‘La Pudicizia di Antonio Corradini: la donna velata e la sua fortuna tra Venezia e Napoli’, in Napoli è tutto il mondo. Neapolitan Art and Culture from Humanism to the Enlightenment, proceedings of the conference, Livio Pestelli, Ingrid D. Rowland and Sebastian Schütze (eds) (Rome, 19–21 June 2003), Pisa–Rome 2008, pp. 309–328.

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. 279–282.

Nappi Eduardo, Dai numeri la verità. Nuovi documenti sulla famiglia, i palazzi e la Cappella dei Sansevero, Naples 2010, pp. 99–101.

Attanasio Sergio, In casa del Principe di Sansevero. Architettura, invenzioni, inventari, Naples 2011, pp. 43–44, 58, 77, 133.

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 and Giulio Brevetti (eds), Rome 2015, pp. 329–340.

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. 12–14, 98–99, 106–109, 217–218.

Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples 2020, pp. 126–127.

Comparative bibliography

Cartari, Vincenzo, Immagini delli dèi degl’antichi, Venezia, Tomasini, 1647, pp. 55–59.

Ripa Cesare, 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, vol. I, 1764, pp. III–VIII; vol. II, 1766, pp. 432–434.

D’Ayala Michelangelo, ‘I liberi muratori di Napoli nel secolo XVIII’, Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, vol. XXII, 1897, 4, pp. 404–463, esp. p. 461.

Picone Marina, La Cappella Sansevero, Naples, 1959, pp. 27–32.

Cioffi Rosanna, ‘Sulla scultura veneta del Settecento a Napoli: Antonio Corradini e la ‘Mestizia’ della Cappella Sansevero’, in Studi di storia dell’arte in memoria di Mario Rotili, Naples, 1984, pp. 555–565.

Cioffi Rosanna, La Cappella Sansevero. Arte barocca e ideologia massonica, 1st edn, Salerno, 1987; cited edn, Salerno, 1994, pp. 13–32.

Cogo Bruno, Antonio Corradini scultore veneziano. 1688–1752, Este, 1996, pp. 122–132, 308–337.

Raimondo di Sangro. Cronaca di vita e opere, Fabrizio Masucci and Leen Spruit (eds), Naples, 2020, p. 380.

DOI: 10.82049/CATALOGO06