CAPPELLA SANSEVERO

The former funeral chapel of the Sangro family was erected at the end of the 16th century in front of their palace to which it was connected by a passage (destroyed in 1889). It was remodelled and embellished in the 17th and especially in the 18th century when Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, devised a vast artistic programme to the glory of his family. He was a colourful intellectual, a freemason and an alchemist in his own time, and was the source of many legends in the town. In a sumptuous setting topped by a vault with Baroque frescoes by the Neapolitan painter Francesco Maria Russo (second half of the 18th century), the chapel houses the graves of members of the Sangro family and allegorical sculptures. Among the tombs, above the entrance, is the tomb of Cecco di Sangro, which illustrates an episode in the life of the condottiere: pretending to be dead on the battlefield, he allowed himself to be placed in a coffin before raising his sword in his fist and terrorising his enemies! On either side of the apse, two magnificent carved allegories: on the left, Antonio Corradini's The Pudor , a feminine figure covered with a stone veil of extreme lightness; on the right, Francesco Queirolo's Disillusionment , a male figure trying to free himself from a tightly knit net. One work alone would be worth a visit to the chapel: Giuseppe Sanmartino's Christ veiled. All the artist's virtuosity is spectacularly embodied in the fine marble veil that reveals the body of Christ through its transparency. One can admire the meticulousness of every detail, a protruding vein blocking the forehead, limbs with perfectly executed musculature, the wounds left by the nails. In Naples, it was rumoured that the veil of Christ was not made of marble, but of a real fabric petrified by the prince following an alchemical process! In the room leading to the crypt, the tomb of Raimondo di Sangro, in front of a pavement decorated with a labyrinth motif, drawn by the prince himself. Inside the crypt, one will be astonished by the two "anatomical machines" which, according to legend, were the fruit of Raimondo di Sangro's experiments: he would have succeeded in petrifying the blood network of the corpses of two servants sacrificed for the cause! In fact, it was a doctor from Palermo in the service of Raimondo who, with wax and dyes, reconstructed the blood network of the human body with a precision that still amazes scientists today.