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!
