Obelisco San Domenico - Naples - Italy

by Paolo Signorini

Title

Obelisco San Domenico - Naples - Italy

Artist

Paolo Signorini

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Properties inscribed on the World Heritage List - Historic Centre of Naples 1995

The spire of San Domenico is a Baroque sculptural work located in Piazza San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, in front of the church of the same name.
Chronologically, it is the second great spire raised in the city, after that of San Gennaro.
The spire was commissioned in 1656 by the Neapolitan people as a votive offering to Saint Dominic to ward off the plague of that same year. The Dominican fathers thus, in addition to offering their economic contribution to the cause, in any case to a lesser extent than the sums allocated by the local population , also took care of the management of the construction site that would open in the square. The Dominicans therefore initially entrusted the commissioning of the work to Cosimo Fanzago, at the time also engaged in the conclusion of two other similar works, the obelisk of San Gennaro, begun in 1636, and the statue of San Gaetano, begun in 1657. Fanzago worked on the San Domenico project between 1656 and 1658, until he succeeded him in the assignment, for reasons related to the lack of speed of the Bergamo architect, Francesco Antonio Picchiatti, who maintained the construction site until 1666 significantly modifying the original project, of which, however, only partial traces remain in the ornamentation of the marble and bardiglio base.

The works in this period went slowly probably also because the archaeological remains of the Cumana gate were found in the area. After a small parenthesis of Lorenzo Vaccaro, a pupil of Fanzago, which took place around 1680, who replaced Picchiatti, the works resumed only after almost fifty years, in 1736, with his son Domenico Antonio Vaccaro who was appointed architect of the building site and who it followed steadily until its completion a year later.

Vaccaro, in addition to affixing the friezes and decorative sculptures that were missing on the monument, partly already performed by Fanzago in the seventeenth century and only retouched by him, provided to further modify the ideas of Fanzago and Picchiatti in order to achieve a better integration of the parts created by his predecessors.

The spire could therefore be said to have been completed in 1737 even if it still lacked the statue of Saint Dominic, whose attribution is not certain, as the work was placed at the top of the monument only in 1747, therefore two years after it disappeared by the Neapolitan sculptor, who however made the sketch of the work.

Uploaded

August 5th, 2023

Colors

Embed

Share

Tags