Tomb of Charles of Anjou, Duke of Calabria

Tino da Camaino. Funerary monument of Charles of Calabria, 1333.

On 10 November 1328, before the church was completed, prince Charles of Calabria, the favorite son of king Robert of Anjou, died at just 31 years of age. His father commissioned a monumental burial for him to the Senese Tino da Camaino, one of the most famous sculptors of the time. The monument, placed under the cross-vault of the church, marked the inauguration of the building as the burial place of the Angevine royal family, a function the king and queen Sancia of Majorca had singled the church out for from the beginning. The artist, as was common practice at the time, used ancient marbles retrieved in Rome. He used a design he had already employed for other tombs in Naples: a burial chamber with a supine statue of the deceased resting on an ark supported by allegorical statues of the Virtues. The monument is crowned by a Gothic tabernacle on pillars graced with Cosmatesque mosaics. The front of the sarcophagus, the part of the monument that was most damaged by the bombing of 1943, was painstakingly put back together again, and the restored parts are clearly distinguishable. It shows the duke of Calabria in his capacity as Vicar and Great Justice of the Kingdom, flanked by ecclesiastics and courtiers. At the foot of the prince are a wolf and a lamb drinking peacefully from the same spring, a symbol of Charles’ justice in dealing with all the kingdom’s subjects.