The tomb of King Ladislaus of Durazzo (1377–1414) rises to a height of some eighteen metres inside the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples, dwarfing every other monument in the building and most funerary sculpture anywhere in the Italian peninsula.
The church occupies a site once used for the collection and burning of the city’s refuse, outside the eastern walls of medieval Naples, from which the name carbonara derives. Founded by the Augustinian friars in 1343 on land donated by the Neapolitan patrician Gualtiero Galeota, the church was enlarged and redecorated under the patronage of Ladislaus, who intended it as a dynastic pantheon for the last Angevin rulers of Naples. The monument was commissioned after his death by his sister and successor, Queen Joanna II of Naples (1373–1435), and is generally dated to between approximately 1414 and 1428. It is attributed to the sculptor Andrea Ciccione, also recorded as Andrea da Firenze, Andrea Guardi, and Andrea di Francesco da Firenze (c. 1388–1455), though his identity remains a matter of some scholarly uncertainty. What can be said with confidence is that Ciccione, if he is indeed the principal author, also executed the nearby tomb of Sergianni Caracciolo in the same church, the murdered lover of Joanna II, who was stabbed to death in the Castel Capuano in 1432 on the queen’s own orders.
The monument’s structure ascends through several registers in a manner that blends late Gothic verticality with the figurative language of the early Quattrocento. Its formal conception appears to derive from the earlier tomb of Robert of Anjou in Santa Chiara (c. 1343–1345), which similarly functioned as both altarpiece and dynastic screen, though the Ladislaus monument introduces significant innovations. The lowest tier presents caryatid figures of the Virtues, among them Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and Magnanimity, each carefully chosen to frame Ladislaus as an ideal Christian sovereign. Above them, a central arch shows Ladislaus and Joanna II enthroned side by side, a detail that speaks as much to Joanna’s own need for dynastic legitimation as to her brother’s posthumous glory. Higher still, the king’s reclining effigy is presented with hands folded in prayer, and at the apex an equestrian statue depicts him armed and in full chivalric regalia. An inscription on this figure names him ‘Divus Ladislaus,’ a classicising epithet that aligns the monument’s rhetoric with the emerging humanist culture of fifteenth-century Naples, drawing on the language of Roman triumphal arches such as Trajan’s Arch at Benevento. The uppermost register is crowned by a figure of the Virgin Mary, completing a theological programme that moves from earthly power to divine intercession. Whether any of this persuaded contemporary viewers of the king’s piety is another question; Ladislaus was feared as much as admired, and his reputation in life rested more on military aggression than spiritual devotion.
Ladislaus belonged to the Durazzo branch of the Capetian house of Anjou, a dynasty whose hold on southern Italy had been secured by Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), brother of Louis IX of France, who seized the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266 with papal backing and Hohenstaufen blood on his hands. After the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the Angevins lost the island of Sicily to the Crown of Aragon, and the rump kingdom, centred on Naples, became their principal domain. Ladislaus’s father, Charles III of Naples (1345–1386), briefly extended the family’s reach by claiming the throne of Hungary, ousting Louis I’s daughter Mary in December 1385. He was crowned at Székesfehérvár, but the triumph was short-lived: Elizabeth of Bosnia, mother of the deposed queen, arranged his assassination in February 1386, and he died of his wounds at Visegrád. The nine-year-old Ladislaus inherited the Neapolitan throne into a kingdom fractured by baronial rebellion, papal hostility (Urban VI refused to recognise him and called a crusade against him in 1387), and the competing claims of Louis II of Anjou, backed by the Avignon papacy during the Western Schism. For a time, his mother Margaret of Durazzo controlled little more than Naples and its immediate surroundings; when unrest broke out in the city, she and the young king fled to the fortress at Gaeta.
Much of Ladislaus’s reign was consumed by these entanglements. Recognition by Boniface IX in 1389 gave him papal legitimacy, and by 1400 he had recovered Naples from the Angevin faction. He married strategically, first to a wealthy Sicilian heiress whose dowry he spent on his military campaigns (and whom he subsequently divorced with papal consent), and then, in 1401, to Mary of Lusignan, daughter of the King of Cyprus. He fought to expel his Angevin rivals, exploited the papal schism to his advantage, and launched repeated campaigns into central Italy, twice occupying Rome, in 1408 and again in 1413. At the height of his power he controlled significant territory in the Papal States, and contemporary observers noted the ruthlessness with which he pursued his ambitions; later tradition would cast him as a model for Machiavelli’s Prince. His death on 6 August 1414, at the age of thirty-seven, cut these campaigns short. The cause remains disputed: some contemporaries suspected poisoning, possibly at the hands of a woman with whom he was intimate, while later tradition attributed his decline to syphilis.
Joanna II, who succeeded him, inherited a kingdom already beginning to unravel. Her reign was marked by factional struggles, shifting alliances with both Aragon and the Angevin claimants of Provence, and the absence of a direct heir. When she died in 1435, the Durazzo line died with her, and the contested succession that followed ultimately delivered Naples into Aragonese hands under Alfonso V. The tomb in San Giovanni a Carbonara, then, commemorates not a dynasty at its zenith but one at its point of extinction, a fact that lends the monument’s triumphalism a certain retrospective irony.
That the monument survives at all is remarkable: Allied bombing in July 1943 tore open the nave roof and badly damaged the church, yet the tomb came through largely intact. The tomb of Robert of Anjou in Santa Chiara, the earlier royal mausoleum on which the Ladislaus monument was directly modelled, was less fortunate, suffering partial destruction in the same campaign. What remains in San Giovanni a Carbonara is therefore the fullest surviving statement of Angevin funerary ambition in Naples.
References
Bruzelius, C. (2004) The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266–1343. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
De Divitiis, B. (ed.) A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (1350–1600). The Renaissance Society of America,. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Dunbabin, J. (1998) Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe. London: Longman