Description
The Church of Santa Maria Incoronata is a fourteenth-century Gothic church on Via Medina, in the historic center of Naples: it is the only fourteenth-century building left in that area. It sits about three meters below street level, has two naves and keeps fourteenth-century frescoes by Roberto d'Oderisio on the Seven Sacraments.
To get in you have to go down two flights of stairs. It was not built that way: it is the city that grew up around it when, in the sixteenth century, the moats were dug and the walls of Castel Nuovo raised a short distance away.
The façade is simple, with a pointed-arch portal in Carrara marble: two angels hold a crown of thorns and Christ is in the keystone. Along the right wall runs a portico with pointed arches of the Sienese type, perhaps from the old courthouse on which the church was built.
Inside, the plan is unusual: two naves, a main one and a side one. No one can explain it with certainty. Perhaps they served two rites, Latin and Greek, perhaps worship and lectures and study, or perhaps it was the queen's taste, since she had seen similar buildings in Hungary.
In the first bay of the main nave are the frescoes by Roberto d'Oderisio, from 1352-1354, with the Triumph of Religion and the Seven Sacraments. In the lunettes are biblical stories of Joseph and Moses, painted by the same artist between 1340 and 1343.
According to an old reading, Petrarch and Laura appear in the Baptism, and elsewhere the queen and her children. But these are groundless guesses.
In the left aisle, at the far end, the Chapel of the Crucifix keeps sinopias and detached frescoes, made between 1403 and 1414 by an artist from the Marche known as the Master of the Stories of Saint Ladislaus, with scenes from the saint's life. Along the inner façade are funerary slabs from 1373 to 1544.
Around 1352 Queen Joanna I wanted the church to commemorate her coronation and that of her husband, Louis of Taranto. She adapted the old Royal Court and kept in it a thorn from Christ's crown, a gift from King Charles V of France, formerly in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
Hence the name, Santa Maria Spina Corona, later Incoronata. In the eighteenth century it was given a Baroque dress; Gino Chierici's restorations, between 1925 and 1929, gave back its Gothic look. The bombing of 1943 partly destroyed the building above the church, removed between 1959 and 1961.
Don't miss
• The frescoes by Roberto d'Oderisio.
• The two naves.
• The pointed-arch portal.
• The Chapel of the Crucifix.
Did you know?
• Its name recalls the thorn from Christ's crown that Queen Joanna I received from the King of France.
• The eighteenth-century high altar in polychrome marble and semiprecious stones is the only element left from the Baroque phase.
To get in you have to go down two flights of stairs. It was not built that way: it is the city that grew up around it when, in the sixteenth century, the moats were dug and the walls of Castel Nuovo raised a short distance away.
The façade is simple, with a pointed-arch portal in Carrara marble: two angels hold a crown of thorns and Christ is in the keystone. Along the right wall runs a portico with pointed arches of the Sienese type, perhaps from the old courthouse on which the church was built.
Inside, the plan is unusual: two naves, a main one and a side one. No one can explain it with certainty. Perhaps they served two rites, Latin and Greek, perhaps worship and lectures and study, or perhaps it was the queen's taste, since she had seen similar buildings in Hungary.
In the first bay of the main nave are the frescoes by Roberto d'Oderisio, from 1352-1354, with the Triumph of Religion and the Seven Sacraments. In the lunettes are biblical stories of Joseph and Moses, painted by the same artist between 1340 and 1343.
According to an old reading, Petrarch and Laura appear in the Baptism, and elsewhere the queen and her children. But these are groundless guesses.
In the left aisle, at the far end, the Chapel of the Crucifix keeps sinopias and detached frescoes, made between 1403 and 1414 by an artist from the Marche known as the Master of the Stories of Saint Ladislaus, with scenes from the saint's life. Along the inner façade are funerary slabs from 1373 to 1544.
Around 1352 Queen Joanna I wanted the church to commemorate her coronation and that of her husband, Louis of Taranto. She adapted the old Royal Court and kept in it a thorn from Christ's crown, a gift from King Charles V of France, formerly in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
Hence the name, Santa Maria Spina Corona, later Incoronata. In the eighteenth century it was given a Baroque dress; Gino Chierici's restorations, between 1925 and 1929, gave back its Gothic look. The bombing of 1943 partly destroyed the building above the church, removed between 1959 and 1961.
Don't miss
• The frescoes by Roberto d'Oderisio.
• The two naves.
• The pointed-arch portal.
• The Chapel of the Crucifix.
Did you know?
• Its name recalls the thorn from Christ's crown that Queen Joanna I received from the King of France.
• The eighteenth-century high altar in polychrome marble and semiprecious stones is the only element left from the Baroque phase.