CAPPELLA SANSEVERO, Veiled Christ

Raimondo of Sangro wanted two statues of truly spectacular virtuosity for his parents' tombs at the back of the chapel. He sought artists all over Italy who could accomplish what he had in mind.

To the left you can see his mother's grave, who died when the prince was just an infant. She is symbolized by the statue of Modesty, which depicts a woman wrapped in a subtle, semi-transparent veil: its Venetian creator Francesco Corradini, a veil-carving specialist, made his absolute masterpiece here.

The Prince's father, Antonio, led a wild life after the death of his young wife, and later repented it. For this reason, his grave has the statue of a man breaking free from a net, which symbolizes his father waking up and liberating himself from his sins. The spectacular statue is titled Disillusion and is the work of the Genoese sculptor Francesco Queirolo.

But the most famous statue of the chapel is the Veiled Christ, which you can see in the center. The Prince of Sangro first asked the same creator of the Modesty sculpture, but the Venetian sculptor was over eighty years old and could no longer accomplish such a demanding project. So the assignment passed to the young Neapolitan Giuseppe Sammartino, who had worked at all the main construction sites of eighteenth-century Naples, expressing an extraordinary inventive talent in the most diverse genres, from the largest statues to the tiny ones in nativity scenes....