Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, completed in 1753, is carved entirely from one block of marble. The commission called for a life-size figure of the dead Christ beneath a transparent shroud made from that same block. The veil’s appearance comes from the sculptor’s work in marble, not from fabric transformed by alchemy.
The chapel’s origin belongs to legend. A 1623 account places the story around 1590, when part of the di Sangro garden wall was said to collapse and reveal an image of the Madonna. The image drew pilgrims, and a small votive chapel followed. A surviving inscription over the entrance records that, in 1613, Alessandro di Sangro destined the temple to the Virgin as a burial place for himself and his family.
The chapel’s seventeenth-century arrangement remained largely in place until Raimondo di Sangro, the seventh Prince of Sansevero, began its enlargement and enrichment in the 1740s. He shaped the works into a coordinated artistic programme, bringing together painters, sculptors, family tombs and allegories of virtue.
Two works give the family programme a personal register. Antonio Corradini’s Modesty, completed in 1752, commemorates Raimondo’s mother, Cecilia Gaetani d’Aquila d’Aragona. Francesco Queirolo’s Disillusion, made in 1753–54, is dedicated to his father, Antonio, Duke of Torremaggiore. Around them, the chapel’s sculptures form an ensemble whose rich symbolism does not resolve into a single interpretation.
In the underground Cavea, two standing anatomical studies show male and female skeletons with reconstructed vascular systems. Palermo physician Giuseppe Salerno made the models: Raimondo acquired the male study in 1756 and commissioned the second. Beeswax and dyes are among the materials used to reconstruct the vessels. Researchers have discussed whether injection experiments informed that reconstruction; this possibility is distinct from the unsupported legend that murdered servants were turned into anatomical displays.
Raimondo intended the Veiled Christ for the underground Cavea, which he also planned as a burial space for future generations of the family. The chamber was never completed as he imagined it, and its present arrangement reflects later interventions. Today it holds the Anatomical Machines.
The chapel preserves the di Sangro family’s burial history and Raimondo’s eighteenth-century artistic programme, alongside the Anatomical Machines attributed to Giuseppe Salerno.
