The statues
Divine Love

The group of statues

Stylistic similarities with other works by Queirolo had led to the attribution of this Virtue to him. However, recent research suggests that the statue was originally part of a funerary monument dedicated to Paolo di Sangro, second Prince of Sansevero, and was executed by Michelangelo Naccherino in the early 1600s. In the next century, during the extensive renovations of the entire Chapel commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro, the sculpture was separated from the funerary monument of the second Prince of Sansevero and was partially reworked, probably by Francesco Queirolo.

A youth wrapped in a cloak looking towards the heavens and holding a flaming heart in his right hand extols the noblewoman’s love of God, commemorated in the inscription on the pedestal. The sculpture is conceptually, and in terms of certain stylistic features, linked to Decorum, while the flaming heart insistently recalls other marble groups with the same symbol. The statue received particular praise from the nineteenth-century art historian Leopoldo Cicognara, who even deemed it the finest in di Sangro’s mausoleum, presumably because “with its simplicity – observes Rosanna Cioffi – it must have seemed to him the most ‘neo-classical’ in the Chapel”. Despite the lack of profound inspiration, the artist endows the subject with a certain descriptive vitality.