Sansevero Chapel

Neapel · Italien · Church

Two skeletons stand with their entire circulatory system intact. Naples says the prince injected metal into two living servants.

Raimondo di Sangro, prince of Sansevero, was an inventor, a freemason and a chemist, and in his own lifetime was already wrapped in dark stories: that he practised black magic, that he experimented on his servants. The image fastened onto what stands in the chapel's underground room. The so-called macchine anatomiche are two skeletons, a man and a woman, with the entire network of arteries, veins and capillaries preserved around the bones. The legend told since the 1700s holds that the prince injected a metallising fluid into two living servants and waited for the flesh to be consumed. Scholarship points instead to the anatomist Giuseppe Salerno of Palermo, who around 1763 built the vessels from wire, beeswax and coloured silk — so skilfully that for two centuries they were taken for real.

FAQ

Hvor ligger Sansevero Chapel?

Sansevero Chapel ligger i Neapel, Italien.