Sulle origini e la sistemazione del monumento di Pedro de Toledo in San Giacomo degli Spagnoli a Napoli

This article aims to clarify the evolution, and particularly the installation process of the monumental tomb of the Neapolitan viceroy Pedro de Toledo and his wife Maria Osorio Pimentel in the apse of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Naples. One of the most ambitious and complex sculptural projects of the mid-sixteenth century, the tomb was originally intended for a Spanish site, as Vasari, too, records, namely the church of the feud of Villafranca del Bierzo. Through a careful analysis of correspondence between Pedro's son Garcia de Toledo, and abbot Mateo Coll, it has been possible to retrace the steps that led to the final arrangement of the tomb in the apse of the Spanish national church around 1572. The difficulties entailed by its insertion, which involved the reorganization of the presbytery, were justified by abbot Coll by invoking the most renowned examples of Renaissance funerary sculpture, such as the tomb slab of Martin V Colonna in Saint John Lateran and the tomb of Paul III in St. Peter's in the Vatican. The decision for its placement was reached about twenty years after the completion of the work by Giovanni da Nola. This limbo period had resulted in damage to several of the putti intended for placement on the tomb's base and which are no longer extant today, but can still be seen in an engraved illustration in Pompeo Sarnelli's Guida de' forestieri (1685).