In the his­toric cen­tre of Naples lies the San­severo Chapel, a for­mer church con­vert­ed into a fam­i­ly bur­ial chapel by the noble di San­gro fam­i­ly in 1613. In the 1750s, Rai­mon­do di San­gro, the Prince of San­severo, com­mit­ted the last years of his life to dec­o­rat­ing the chapel with great works of art. He had already had a rich life of enquiry and exper­i­men­ta­tion in the sci­ences and was well-known for his inven­tions as well as a deep involve­ment with alche­my and Freema­son­ry. How­ev­er, since Rai­mon­do had had run-ins with the Inqui­si­tion and had elect­ed to destroy his sci­en­tif­ic archive before his death, it is his artis­tic lega­cy that remains.

In par­tic­u­lar, he com­mis­sioned three sculp­tors to pro­duce a mar­ble sculp­ture each, name­ly Anto­nio Corradini’s Veiled Truth, Guiseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, and Francesco Queirolo’s Escape from Decep­tion. By good judge­ment or good luck – or, some said, by the mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers of the occult – Raimondo’s choice result­ed in all three sculp­tures turn­ing out to be amaz­ing mas­ter­pieces of exquis­ite skill.

Let’s look at just one of them. The Release from Decep­tion by Genoese sculp­tor Francesco Queiro­lo shows a man’s emer­gence from a fisherman’s net, guid­ed by an angel hov­er­ing above a globe as he untan­gles the man from the net. Every piece of this incred­i­ble sculp­ture is carved out of mar­ble, includ­ing the care­ful­ly craft­ed knots in the net draped around the fig­ure of the fish­er­man. The scene depict­ed is both bib­li­cal and alle­gor­i­cal, the net sym­bol­is­ing sin, world­li­ness or wrong-think­ing, and the angel help­ing the man to see the error of his ways.

The idea of one man, with his mal­lets and chis­els and rasps and rif­flers, strug­gling with one block of mar­ble to “free the form trapped inside the block”, as Michae­lan­ge­lo used to describe it, is a com­pelling one. I myself have only fleet­ing­ly passed through Naples, but if I ever return, I shall be seek­ing out the San­severo Chapel; I’d like to see this “in the flesh”, so to speak!