Cappella Sansevero, Naples

Cappella Sansevero is a chapel devoted more formally to Santa Maria della Pietà, and it holds an extraordinary collection of eighteenth-century sculpture and painting. Its best-known work is Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, where marble appears to fall across the dead figure as a delicate shroud. Nearby, Antonio Corradini’s Veiled Truth and Francesco Queirolo’s Release from Deception complete a remarkable group of monuments commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro, whose reconstruction also filled the chapel with Masonic symbolism.

The building began in 1593 as a family chapel and became a burial chapel in 1613. Look toward the ceiling for Francesco Maria Russo’s Glory of Paradise, painted in 1749. Below the chapel, two anatomical exhibits present human skeletons enclosed by painstakingly formed networks of vessels.

They were once attributed to an injection process, but later analysis found beeswax, iron wire, and silk instead. This is a place where devotional art, dynastic memory, experiment, and mystery occupy the same small interior.