Santa Chiara: An Angevin Gothic Monastic Complex in Naples
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Classical, Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Naples, Roman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page14 sections
History
Santa Chiara is a Catholic religious complex in Naples, Italy, founded under the Angevin rulers Robert of Naples and Sancha of Majorca in the early fourteenth century. Construction of its basilica began in 1310, and the church was completed in 1328 in the Provençal Gothic, or Angevin Gothic, style. The wider monastery followed by about 1340. Santa Chiara became the largest Gothic monument in Naples, a principal church of the Poor Clares, and a major royal burial place.
Foundation under Robert and Sancha
Queen Sancha’s interest in enclosed religious life helped shape the foundation. Her brother Philip of Majorca, a Franciscan associated with the movement known as the “brothers of the poor life,” also influenced the project. The Poor Clares, the female branch of the Franciscan tradition founded by Saint Clare of Assisi, followed a religious life centred on enclosure. Santa Chiara was therefore planned with a separate choir from which the nuns could observe Mass while remaining hidden from the nave. It was described as the first Poor Clare church to provide this arrangement.
Pope John XXII approved the project in 1317. Philip’s relationship with the papacy later deteriorated after his anti-papal sermon of 6 December 1329. Papal bulls issued in 1336 and 1337 prevented the proposed transformation of Santa Chiara into a centre where Franciscan friars and Poor Clares could observe the rule with particular strictness. The Franciscans, the religious movement founded by Saint Francis of Assisi, nevertheless remained closely connected with the complex.
Gagliardo Primario directed the basilica’s construction, while Leonardo di Vito was associated with the monastic buildings and designed the nuns’ choir. The church opened for worship in 1330 or received authorization for worship in 1340, and the complex was consecrated in 1340 or 1341. Before the basilica was formally complete, it housed relics of Saint Louis of Toulouse, the Franciscan bishop and Angevin prince who was King Robert’s elder brother. One relic, his brain, was kept in an ornate reliquary surmounted by a crown donated by Sancha.
Franciscan devotion and royal identity
Santa Chiara became both a religious institution and a dynastic monument. Giotto and other leading artists of the period worked there, and Giotto decorated the nuns’ choir with scenes from the Apocalypse and the Old Testament, together with references to the New Testament. The complex later received the tomb of Robert of Naples, known as Robert the Wise, who ruled from 1309 to 1343, and the burial of Queen Sancha. Members of the Angevin and Bourbon royal families of Naples and Sicily were subsequently buried there.
The basilica also became associated with important events in the history of Naples and the wider Mediterranean. On 14 August 1571, the papal banner of Pope Pius V and the command staff of the Christian coalition were solemnly delivered at Santa Chiara to Don John of Austria before the Holy League fleet left for the Battle of Lepanto. In 1590, Antonino da Patti served as custodian of the royal monastery. He later came to be regarded as venerable because of graces and miracles associated with the sick.
A Neapolitan tradition holds that couples married at Santa Chiara will enjoy happiness without separation, poverty, or mistrust. This belief forms part of the complex’s continuing religious and cultural identity.
Baroque remodelling and wartime destruction
Between 1742 and 1796, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro and Gaetano Buonocore extensively remodelled the basilica in Baroque forms. Giovanni del Gaizo is also associated with the reconstruction of the interior. The work replaced much of the medieval decoration with Baroque furnishings and paintings by artists including Francesco de Mura, Sebastiano Conca, Giuseppe Bonito, and Paolo de Maio. Ferdinando Fuga designed the marble pavement, which was laid in 1762.
An Allied bombardment on 4 August 1943 severely damaged Santa Chiara. The fire that followed lasted almost two days, destroyed much of the interior, eliminated the eighteenth-century frescoes, and reduced many of Giotto’s paintings to fragments. In October 1944, Father Gaudenzio Dell’Aja became the Franciscan representative responsible for reconstruction.
Post-war restoration was completed in 1953. It concentrated on the surviving medieval architecture and aimed to return the basilica to an intended fourteenth-century appearance rather than recreate the eighteenth-century additions. The approach, and its treatment of historical authenticity, remained controversial. Surviving sculptures were moved into rooms of the monastery, now part of the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Chiara, while most of the monumental, mainly royal, tombs remained in the basilica, although some had suffered severe damage.
The wider monastic complex
The monastery originally had four cloisters, each a covered passage surrounding an open courtyard. They were the Poor Clares’ or majolica cloister, the Cloister of San Francesco, the Friars Minor’s cloister, and the service cloister. After the nuns moved into areas formerly assigned to the friars, the latter two became associated with the adjacent Church of the Clarisses.
The former friars’ spaces later became the Church of the Clarisses, which gained an independent entrance after the post-war restoration. In 2007 it was rededicated to Jesus the Redeemer and Saint Louis of Anjou and became an external body of the Santa Chiara complex. The monastery also contains conventual rooms, a library, a chapter house, kitchens, refectories, an archaeological area, and the Museo dell’Opera.
The archaeological remains were exposed during the wartime damage and the work that followed. They revealed a Roman bath complex, probably connected with a patrician house and dating from around the end of the first century AD. The baths are described as the most complete Roman bathing establishment in Naples. The Museo dell’Opera was established in 1995 to reconstruct the history of the church and its fabric, bringing together archaeological finds, objects recovered after the fire, sculptures, sacred objects, reliquaries, architectural fragments, and Baroque nativity scenes.
Remains
Basilica layout and exterior
Santa Chiara stands on the site of Roman baths beside the former Church of the Poor Clares. The basilica faces Via Benedetto Croce, on the lower decumanus and the eastern section of Via Spaccanapoli, at the northeastern side of Piazza del Gesù Nuovo. It is a large rectangular, single-nave church without a transept or apse. Including the nuns’ choir, it measures approximately 130 metres, while other measurements give an internal length of 110.5 metres. The nave is about 82 metres long, and the width is variously calculated at approximately 33 to 40 metres. Its walls rise approximately 45 to 47.5 metres.
Ten side chapels open on each side of the nave. They are incorporated into the main body rather than projecting outward, and their vaulted roofs support continuous galleries. Large pointed openings, including paired openings on the left and triple openings on the right, accompany the galleries. Upper lancet windows form the clerestory, the high window zone that lights the central space.
The gabled façade has a three-arched Gothic porch. The central pointed arch frames the entrance, whose red and yellow marble doorway bears Sancha’s coat of arms. A largely reconstructed rose window occupies the façade, and a high wall encloses the forecourt. The principal Gothic portal dates from the fourteenth century. It has a lowered arch, an undecorated lunette, and a projecting drip-like element made of piperno slabs. In 1973 the portal was moved about five metres farther back from the street line.
Presbytery and nuns’ choir
The presbytery contains the high altar at the centre, with rectangular choirs on either side. A wall behind the altar separates the main church from the nuns’ choir, while screened openings allowed the Poor Clares to see the service without being visible from the nave. Above the altar is a large pointed stained-glass window, followed by three rose windows and a smaller rose window near the roof apex.
Leonardo di Vito conceived the nuns’ choir as a small church resembling a chapter house. Two large piers and ribbed vaults divide it into three sections. The space contains the arcosolium, a tomb set within an arched recess, of King Robert by Giovanni and Pacio Bertini. Fragments of Giotto’s Apocalypse and Old Testament scenes survive there alongside fragments of Renaissance frescoes and other post-war remains.
Royal tombs and high altar
The presbytery contains the partial tomb of King Robert by Giovanni and Pacio Bertini. Nearby are the tombs of Maria of Durazzo and Charles of Anjou, Duke of Calabria, dating from approximately 1311 to 1341. Maria’s monument is attributed to an unidentified Durazzo master, while Charles’s is attributed to Tino di Camaino. The tomb of Maria of Valois, dating from around 1335 and also attributed to Tino di Camaino, retains her recumbent figure, angels holding a curtain, Annunciation figures beside the sarcophagus, and the Virgin and Child on the gable.
Most of the original high altar survives from around 1336 and is attributed at least partly to Pacio Bertini, although its mensa is later. A wooden structure enclosed it in the mid-seventeenth century, and it was later incorporated into a polychrome marble Baroque altar begun by Maurizio Nauclerio in 1735 and completed by Ferdinando Sanfelice ten years later. Much of that Baroque altar was destroyed in 1943. The medieval altar has pointed trefoil arches on columns, with reliefs of Franciscan, animal, and vegetal motifs. Five surviving freestanding figures represent Saint Luke, Saint Andrew, an elderly apostle, Saint Gregory the Great, and Saint Bartholomew. All except Saint Bartholomew are displayed in the Museo dell’Opera. A fourteenth-century wooden Crucifix, probably from Siena and made by an unknown artist, stands behind the altar.
Bell tower and surviving furnishings
The detached bell tower stands to the left of the basilica. Work began in 1328 but stopped at about one-third of the planned construction, probably after funding declined following Robert’s death in 1343. Building resumed in the early fifteenth century, but an earthquake in 1456 almost destroyed the tower. Only its marble base remained, after which the structure was rebuilt in Baroque form and completed around 1604 under the engineer Costantino Avellone.
The tower has a square plan and three visible levels divided by marble cornices, although the original design may have included at least five. The lower level is faced with stone blocks. The upper two are built in brick with marble pilasters, Tuscan below and Ionic above. A trabeation between the second and third levels contains triglyphs, metopes, and Franciscan liturgical symbols. The lower section is the only surviving medieval part, while the upper levels belong to later rebuilding.
The tower’s intended height and original number of levels remain uncertain. One interpretation regards it as unfinished, while another holds that two upper levels were lost during popular revolts in the later seventeenth century, when Spanish troops used the tower for heavy artillery and rebels may have occupied it. Four Angevin inscriptions around the tower recount the basilica’s foundation history from 1310 to 1340, though their sequence is chronologically incorrect, perhaps because they were repositioned during fifteenth- or sixteenth-century rebuilding. A spiral staircase leads to the roof.
Ferdinando Fuga’s eighteenth-century marble pavement survived the 1943 bombardment and extends throughout the church. Its centre contains the large Angevin coat of arms. The presbytery also contains the Mascioni opus 825 pipe organ, built in 1962. It has 2,327 pipes, 40 stops, three 61-note keyboards, a 32-note concave-radial pedalboard, and fully electric transmission, with two bodies placed on opposite sides of the altar.
Chapels and funerary monuments
The counterfaçade contains the early fifteenth-century tomb of Agnes and Clemence of Durazzo by an unknown sculptor. Faith and Charity serve as caryatids, while the sarcophagus shows the two women beneath a canopy held open by angels and bears a relief of the Pietà. Nearby is the canopy from the tomb of Antonio Penna, made by Antonio Baboccio da Piperno between 1407 and 1411. The sarcophagus was moved in 1627, but the canopy remained as a frame for a fourteenth-century fresco of the Trinity. Above it is a Madonna and Child associated with Antonio and Onofrio Penna and attributed to an artist close to Giotto.
The left chapels preserve a varied group of medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern works. The first contains the post-war tomb of Salvo D’Acquisto, the carabiniere who sacrificed his life to save civilian hostages during the Nazi occupation. The Chapel of the Antonian Miracles contains tombs attributed to the Durazzo Master of Drugo and Nicola de Merloto, including military and heraldic imagery. The Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Jesus preserves the fourteenth-century tombs of Raimondo Cabanis, grand seneschal of King Robert, and his son Perotto, together with a post-Giottesque Virgin and Child and a tomb slab showing an armoured man.
The Chapel of Saint Joseph contains the Cito family coat of arms in its floor and a fragmentary fresco of Jesus with a saint. The next chapel holds a monumental nativity scene, while the sixth provides a lateral entrance to the outer courtyard. The Chapel of Saint Francis survived the bombing with its eighteenth-century Baroque decoration. It contains the sarcophagi of Raimondo Del Balzo and Isabella de Apia, a 1616 Saint Francis by Michelangelo Naccherino, Del Balzo family medallions by Giovanni Marco Vitale, and ceiling frescoes by Belisario Corenzio.
The Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli contains the sarcophagi of Catello and Antonio De Vivo Piscicelli and a slab with relief medallions of the Virgin and Child, an unidentified saint, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The Chapel of Santa Maria Francesca contains a Roman sarcophagus from shortly after the middle of the second century AD. Its reliefs show the myth of Protesilaus and Laodamia, and it was reused in 1632 as the tomb of Giovan Battista Sanfelice. The Chapel of the Franciscan Martyrs contains the tombs of Paride and Marco Longobardi and three sixteenth-century panels attributed to Giovanni da Nola.
On the right, the Chapel of Saint Agnellus Abbot contains fourteenth-century tombs known as those of the Knight of the Knot and Antonio Penna. Penna’s monument forms part of Baboccio’s Gothic canopy, and its relief shows the Virgin and Child with groups of saints. Fragments of Giottesque frescoes remain on the front wall. The Chapel of Saint Benedict preserves a fresco probably depicting Saint Benedict, two Del Balzo tombs, reliefs of saints and warriors, and eighteenth-century monuments to Carlo and Teofilo Mauro by Gaetano Salomone.
The chapels dedicated to Saint Peter of Alcantara and Saint Anthony of Padua now form one connected space after their dividing wall was removed. The first contains a painting attributed to Paolo De Matteis and a noblewoman’s tomb attributed to the Durazzo Master. The second preserves a painting by Nicola Maria Rossi, Carbonelli family funerary decoration attributed to Bartolomeo Mori and Andrea Falcone, and the sarcophagus of Iacopo Carbonelli, who died in 1699.
The Chapel of Saint Clare contains a detached post-Giottesque fresco of the saint with devotees and a late eighteenth-century painting by Pietro Bardellino showing her death. The Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament preserves a sixteenth-century Madonna of Graces and a fragment attributed to the school of the Bertini brothers, with the Kiss of Judas. The Chapel of the Nativity contains the central funerary band from the tomb of Louis of Durazzo, showing a swaddled child carried heavenward by angels, and a painting by Marco da Siena from about 1557.
The Chapel of the Bourbons retains its Baroque structure and contains the burials of the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies and their consorts. It also preserves Girolamo Macchietti’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, painted around 1585. Nearby is the fourteenth-century fresco known as the Madonna of the Sewing, which shows the Virgin within a mandorla, an almond-shaped halo, sewing beside the meditative Christ Child, with the Cross behind them as a sign of the Passion.
Sacristy and conventual rooms
The Baroque sacristy is entered from the right side of the presbytery and contains frescoes and furnishings dating from 1692. An adjoining room preserves a seventeenth-century embroidered textile. A vestibule has eighteenth-century maiolica decoration, while another room contains sixteenth-century frescoes by a Flemish painter depicting the Last Judgment, saints’ lives, the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Shepherds, and the Virtues.
The Sala di Maria Cristina contains fragments of Giottesque frescoes depicting the Crucifixion. It takes its name from a 1936 exhibition of objects associated with Queen Maria Christina of Savoy, who was later buried in the basilica. The former chapter house, once the nuns’ refectory, contains a fourteenth-century Crucifixion fresco. The large refectory, formerly used by the choir nuns, retains eighteenth-century architecture, furnishings, and wall frescoes by unidentified artists, together with an early twentieth-century vault painting of Saint Paschal Baylon and Saint Clare adoring the Sacrament.
The library holds approximately 50,000 volumes, including an important Franciscan history and culture collection and about 40 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century codices. Former kitchen rooms contain two chimney flues, although their identification as the monastery kitchens was mistaken.
Cloisters and former Church of the Clarisses
The majolica cloister, also called the Clarisses’ cloister, is the principal surviving Baroque feature of the monastery. Its fourteenth-century Gothic framework remains, but the cloister was remodelled between 1742 and 1769, chiefly under Domenico Antonio Vaccaro at the request of the Poor Clare superior Ippolita Carmignano. It measures approximately 82.3 by 78.3 metres. Two paths crossing at right angles divide the garden into quarters.
Seventy-two octagonal columns form an open pergola, and both the columns and associated benches are covered with polychrome painted maiolica by Donato and Giuseppe Massa. The scenes include flowers, Neapolitan landscapes, bucolic episodes, daily life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples, and allegories of the four elements. The surrounding walls retain degraded seventeenth-century frescoes of saints, allegories, and Old Testament scenes. Two fountains have maiolica bases; one incorporates fourteenth-century lion sculptures, while another was formerly surrounded by a feature described as a “sea of maiolica.”
The smaller Cloister of San Francesco has undergone repeated structural alterations and was once converted into an oven. Post-war restoration returned it to its original function, while only its medieval arcade pillars survived the bombing. The Friars Minor’s cloister lies beside the basilica and links the Santa Chiara convent with the former Church of the Clarisses. Its varied capitals support pointed or octagonal arches, combining Corinthian forms with simpler capitals close to Romanesque models. The service cloister behind the former refectory is the only one of the four to retain its original fourteenth-century Gothic structure.
The former Church of the Clarisses contains a vestibule, a chapel that was once the monastery chapter house, and a choir formerly used as the friars’ refectory. The choir preserves a large fresco by Lello da Orvieto, dated approximately 1340, showing Jesus the Redeemer among saints and donors.
Roman baths and museum collections
The archaeological area preserves the Roman baths beneath the medieval complex, including structures associated with a patrician house. Their exposure after the 1943 damage and subsequent work established the Roman setting of Santa Chiara. The Museo dell’Opera displays finds from the excavations and restoration, surviving architectural details, sculptures and fresco fragments recovered after the fire, sacred objects and reliquaries, liturgical furnishings, and a wooden Ecce Homo attributed to Giovanni da Nola.
The complex’s funerary remains extend beyond the royal monuments. Santa Chiara contains burials connected with Angevin and Bourbon rulers, their consorts, and numerous children and relatives, as well as members of the Durazzo, Del Balzo, Cabanis, Penna, Carbonelli, and Longobardi families and other Neapolitan noble houses. Together with the Roman remains, medieval tombs, surviving paintings, Baroque cloisters, and post-war fabric, these features preserve the layered history of one of Naples’ principal religious monuments.
