Cappella Sansevero ★★

An exuberantly baroque chapel in Naples

Sammertino's Cristo Vellato in the Museo Cappella Sansevero of Naplees"

If you want the best example of how baroque can be both ludicrously over-the-top, hauntingly beautiful, and technically brilliant all at once, search out the nondescript entrance to one of Italy's most fanciful chapels.

This 1590 chapel is a festival of marbles, frescoes, and above all sculpture—in relief and in the round, masterfully showing off the considerable technical abilities and intricate visual storytelling of a few otherwise relatively unknown Neapolitan baroque masters.

At the center is Giuseppe Sammartino's remarkable alabaster Veiled Christ (1753), one the most successful and convincing illusions of soft reality crafted from hard stone in the history of art, depicting the dead Christ lying on pillows under a transparent veil.

Three sculptures on the walls stand out as well, including Francesco Celebrano's 1762 relief of the Deposition behind the altar, Antonio Corradini's allegory of Modesty (a marble statue of a woman whose nudity is covered only by a decidedly immodest clinging, gauzy veil), and Francesco Queirolo's virtuoso allegory of Disillusion, represented by a man struggling with a rope net carved entirely of marble.

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