THE STATUE
Placed at the centre of the nave of the Sansevero Chapel, the Veiled Christ is one of the most famous and impressive works of art in the world. It was the Prince’s wish that the statue be made by Antonio Corradini, who had already done Modesty for him. However, Corradini died in 1752 and only managed to make a terracotta scale model of the Christ, which is now preserved in the Museo di San Martino.
So Raimondo di Sangro appointed a young Neapolitan artist, Giuseppe Sanmartino, to make “a life-sized marble statue, representing Our Lord Jesus Christ dead, and covered in a transparent shroud carved from the same block as the statue”.
Sanmartino paid little heed to the previous scale model made by the Venetian sculptor. Both in Modesty, and in the Veiled Christ, the original stylistic message is in the veil, but Sanmartino’s late baroque feeling and sentiment permeate the shroud with a movement and a meaning far removed from Corradini’s rules. The modern sensitivity of the artist sculpts and divests the lifeless body of its flesh, which the soft shroud mercifully covers, on which the tormented, writhing rhythms of the folds of the veil engrave deep suffering, almost as if the compassionate covering made the poor limbs still more naked and exposed, and the lines of the tortured body even more inexorable and precise.
The swollen vein still pulsating on the forehead, the wounds of the nails on the feet and on the thin hands, and the sunken side finally relaxed in the freedom of death are a sign of an intense search which has no time for preciosity or scholastic canons, even when the sculptor meticulously “embroiders” the edges of the shroud or focuses on the instruments of the Passion placed at the feet of Christ. Sanmartino’s art here becomes a dramatic evocation, that turns the suffering of Christ into the symbol of the destiny and redemption of all humanity.
THE MASTERPIECE
Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ is one of the greatest sculptures of all time. Since the eighteenth century, travellers of all levels of distinction have come to contemplate this artistic miracle, to be disconcerted and enraptured by it. One of its innumerable admirers was Antonio Canova, who tried to buy it during his stay in Naples, and legend has it that he swore he would have given ten years of his life to have been the sculptor of this incomparable marble.
Another example: in his travel memoirs the Marquis de Sade praised “the folds, the finesse of the veil […] the beauty, and the regularity of the overall proportions”. Matilde Serao wrote in great detail about the passion narrated by the features of the Christ, and Riccardo Muti chose the face of the Christ for the cover of his recording of the Mozart Requiem. The Argentine writer Hector Bianciotti spoke of his “Stendhal’s syndrome” at the sight of the marble veil, “folded, unfolded, reabsorbed into the cavities of an imprisoned voice, slight as gauze on the relief of the veins”. Recently, in an interview he gave for «Il Mattino», Adonis, one of the greatest contemporary poets, defined the Veiled Christ as “more beautiful than Michelangelo’s sculptures”.
The fame of the Veiled Christ is growing every day. A survey carried out during the seventeenth edition of the Galassia Gutenberg Book Fair (April 2006) raised it to the level of monument symbolising Naples. Lastly, in the spring of 2008, the Campania Regional Authority chose the photo of Sanmartino’s Christ for its publicity campaign aiming to give new impetus to the city’s image, severely damaged by the well-known refuse emergency.
THE LEGEND OF THE VEIL
Raimondo di Sangro’s fame as an alchemist and daring experimentalist has spawned various legends about him. One of these regards the veil of Sanmartino’s Christ. For over two-hundred-and-fifty years, in fact, travellers, tourists and even a number of academics, incredulous at the transparency of the shroud, have mistakenly thought it the result of some alchemical process of “marblisation” worked by the Prince of Sansevero.
In reality, the Veiled Christ is entirely hewn in marble from a single block of stone, as scrupulous study and documents dating from the time of the statue show. Among these, there is a document preserved in the Historical Archive of the Bank of Naples, showing a down-payment of fifty ducats to Giuseppe Sanmartino signed by Raimondo di Sangro (the overall cost of the statue would amount to the remarkable sum of five hundred ducats). In the document, dated 16th December 1752, the Prince explicitly wrote: “And on my behalf you shall pay the aforementioned fifty ducats to the Magnificent Giuseppe Sanmartino against the Statue of Our Dead Lord still covered with a veil of marble…”. Also in the letters sent to the physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet and to Giovanni Giraldi, a member of the Accademia della Crusca, the Prince describes the transparent shroud as “created from the same block as the statue”. Giangiuseppe Origlia himself, di Sangro’s main eighteenth-century biographer, specifies that the Christ is “completely covered in a transparent veil of the same marble”.
The Veiled Christ is, then, a pearl of baroque art which we owe exclusively to the inspired chisel of Sanmartino and the confidence di Sangro had in him. The fact that the work was created from a single block of marble, without the aid of any alchemist’s trickery, lends the statue even greater fascination.
The legend of the veil is slow to die, however. The aura of mystery that surrounds the Prince of Sansevero and the “liquid” transparency of the shroud continue to fuel it. For his part, it was di Sangro’s aim – on this and in other occasions – to inspire wonder. It is no coincidence that it was he himself who noticed that the marble veil was really impalpable and “made with such art as to leave the most skilled observers in awe”.