A screaming Magdalene shatters the stillness in a church. The Virgin Mary offers devotees her rosy bare nipples. Reliquary busts, rendered with great naturalism, break the boundary between mortal and divine. A wide array of materials -- stone, terracotta, wood, metal, gems, fabric, and paint -- were used to give life to these sculptures. Renaissance and Baroque polychrome sculptures in Campania, a region located in the southwest part of southern Italy, have been little studied. Art historical texts and museum exhibitions have, until recently, focused mostly on art made in Florence, Rome, and Venice, marginalizing southern Italy. Likewise, monochrome white marble or black bronze statues have dominated the scholarly and popular image of the sculpture of the period, and only now have scholars and exhibitions begun to examine the vibrantly colorful, blushing and bleeding sculptures that were and are so central to devotion in this region.

Campania is mostly known for its capital, Naples, a city dominated by different sovereigns over the centuries. Naples became a nexus of power and patronage, attracting artists to work in the city and importing artworks. Neapolitan sculptors also trained under foreign artists, adopting styles and forms of devotional art from central and northern Italy, Spain, Greece, and other regions. Though Naples stood at the political and cultural heart of the region, its artistic wealth reverberated far beyond the city walls, creating a cosmopolitan visual language across Campania. At the same, a great deal of fierce local pride fostered the development of diverse types of images, styles of art, and materials and techniques. These sculptures therefore reveal a colorful Renaissance that was both cosmopolitan and local, shaped by cross-cultural exchange and also a powerful sense of the importance of these particular places and their traditions.

Authors

Ariel Lacombe (PhD student, Queen's University) and Una D’Elia (professor, Queen’s University) created this database. If you have any questions or comments or would like to contribute information or photographs to this database, please contact Una D’Elia (deliau@queensu.ca).

Map

An interactive map of all the sculptures in the database is forthcoming (September 2025). It will be colour coded by material.

Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Other Regions

This database is a part of a larger project to offer information about and high-resolution images of Renaissance polychrome sculpture in different regions of Italy. Four other databases have already been published:

• Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Lombardy and Piedmont
• Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Puglia and Basilicata
• Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Tuscany
• Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Rome and Lazio

Databases of polychrome sculptures in Rome and Lazio, Sicily, the Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, and Sardinia are in progress, and other regions will follow.

Virtual Exhibitions

Because this database and those for the other regions of Italy include thousands of high-resolution photographs for research and publication, and because entries for each object synthesize previous scholarship, including conservation reports, making this information available to English-speaking audiences, the database can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses, and the students can publish their research in the form of online virtual exhibitions. For more information on using these databases for teaching, please contact Una D'Elia (deliau@queensu.ca). Students in undergraduate and graduate classes at Queen’s have used these databases to create exhibitions:

• Crafting Flesh: Collaboration in Italian Multimedia Sculpture, 1300-1700
• Performing Devotion: The Ritual Uses of Sculpture from the Italian Renaissance to Today
• Sculptures on Stage: The Drama of Devotion in the Italian Renaissance
• Sculpting the Divine in the Italian Renaissance
• The Sculptures are Watching! Behaving and Misbehaving in the Italian Renaissance Home
• Reconstructing the Social Lives of Italian Renaissance Sculptures
• The Colours of Italian Renaissance Sculpture
• Locating the Materials of Italian Renaissance Sculpture

Support

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University, and the Queen’s University Libraries.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments about this larger project or would like to collaborate on producing future databases, please contact Una D’Elia (deliau@queensu.ca).

Using the Images

Photographs of sculptures in this collection are freely available for teaching, research, and publication. Photographs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License