In 1480, Ottoman forces seized the port city of Otranto on the heel of the Italian peninsula, holding it for over a year before an Aragonese-led campaign retook it. Among the military commanders who fought in the recapture was the Neapolitan nobleman Galeazzo Caracciolo (1460–1517), head of the Caracciolo di Vico branch of one of Naples’s most powerful baronial families. Three decades later, it was Galeazzo who commissioned a private chapel in the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara, a building already laden with Angevin dynastic memorials, including the towering tomb of King Ladislaus of Durazzo. The chapel he planned would serve as both a family burial place and a declaration of the Caracciolo di Vico’s status within the Neapolitan aristocracy under Spanish viceregal rule.
Construction began around 1514 and continued until approximately 1517. Who designed the chapel is a question that has never been satisfactorily settled. A dedication inscription on the building names Giovanni Tommaso Malvita; Vasari credited the design to Girolamo Santacroce, though Santacroce, born around 1502, would have been implausibly young. More recently, the attribution has shifted towards Giovanni Donadio da Mormando (c. 1455–c. 1526), with the humanist poet Jacopo Sannazzaro (c. 1456–1530) proposed as a guiding presence behind the chapel’s intellectual programme.The question remains open, and the range of candidates itself tells something about the difficulty of tracing architectural authorship in early Cinquecento Naples, where commissions involved complex negotiations between patron, designer, and learned adviser.
Whatever the identity of the architect, the result is striking. The chapel adopts a centralised plan, its interior articulated by a rhythmic sequence of Carrara marble pilasters and arches surmounted by a circular drum and coffered dome. The space recalls a number of prestigious models, both ancient and modern: the Pantheon, Roman triumphal arches, and the contemporary architectural experiments of Bramante (1444–1514), Giuliano da Sangallo (c. 1445–1516), and Raphael in Rome. The chapel has been described as the first example of High Renaissance architecture in the Spanish viceroyalty of southern Italy, and while such claims of priority should always be treated with caution, the building’s ambition is hard to deny. Its marble floor echoes the geometric pattern of the dome above, reinforcing the sense of a self-contained, intellectually coherent space that functions almost as an independent structure within the larger Gothic church.
The sculptural decoration accumulated over the following decades, drawing on some of the most accomplished practitioners working in Naples. The Epiphany altarpiece, dating to around 1516, was carved by two Spanish sculptors, Diego de Siloé (c. 1495–1563) and Bartolomé Ordóñez (d. 1520), both of whom had spent time in Rome and were deeply conversant with the work of Michelangelo and Donatello. A letter written in 1524 by the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte confirms that both Spaniards worked on the chapel. The central relief of the Adoration of the Magi, generally attributed to Ordóñez, is notable for a delicate pyramidal composition that recalls Leonardo. Siloé’s contributions, including the figure of Saint George, tend towards a softer, more fluid handling of drapery. Both sculptors soon left Naples: Siloé returned to Burgos in 1519, where he went on to design the cathedral of Granada; Ordóñez moved to Barcelona and then Carrara, where he died in 1520, leaving several major commissions unfinished.
The funerary monuments within the chapel were the work of leading Neapolitan sculptors, added over the course of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. Giovanni da Nola (c. 1478–1559), Girolamo Santacroce, Annibale Caccavello (1515–1595), and members of the D’Auria family, including Giovanni Domenico D’Auria, all contributed to the ensemble. The sarcophagi and standing figures of the Caracciolo patrons populate the niches of the drum, giving the chapel the character of a dynastic portrait gallery in marble. After Galeazzo’s death in 1517, his son Colantonio (d. 1562), who became the first Marchese di Vico in 1531, continued the chapel’s development. Both father and son are buried there.
What makes the chapel a rewarding subject for study is the way it concentrates, within a small circular space, a set of questions about how Renaissance architectural and sculptural ideas reached Naples and what happened to them when they arrived. The centralised plan, the Carrara marble, the Roman references in the dome: these all point northward, towards Tuscany and Rome. The Spanish sculptors on the altar point west, towards the Iberian networks of the viceregal administration. And the Neapolitan sculptors who filled the chapel over succeeding decades brought their own local traditions, shaped by the city’s long history of absorbing and reworking imported forms. Whether the result is a coherent synthesis or a layered accumulation of distinct campaigns is, perhaps, a matter of perspective, and of how closely one looks.
References
De Divitiis, B. (ed.) (2023) A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (1350–1600). Leiden: Brill
Aceto, A. (2010) ‘La Cappella Caracciolo di Vico in San Giovanni a Carbonara a Napoli (1514–1517) e il problema della sua attribuzione’ [in Italian]. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/15264817 (Accessed: 24 December 2024)
Warr, C. and Elliott, J. (2010) Art and Architecture in Naples, 1266–1713: New Approaches. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell
