Church of Santa Maria la Nova

The Renaissance pantheon of a Neapolitan patrician family in Calabria

The church now dedicated to Santa Maria la Nova was founded in 1521 on the initiative of the Duke of Monteleone, Ettore Pignatelli, under the title of Santa Maria del Gesù. The will of the client, who had already been viceroy of Sicily for some years, was to promote the construction of a true family pantheon along one of the most important roads of the city he considered the capital of its Calabrian possessions. The church was entrusted to the care of the friars minor, whose monastic complex was built at the same time. 

The marble entrance, built with reused blocks and characterized by rich decoration, can certainly be traced back to the sixteenth-century foundation. The most important intervention from the Renaissance period remains the choir-mausoleum, though without its sculptural and decorative apparatus, whose surviving works are found in the Cathedral and the Valentianum. The choir has a square plan, with slender fifteenth-century-style columns at the corners, and a keystone with the Pignatelli coat of arms. In the original design, the chapel housed the twin tombs of Hector and his son Camillo, as well as a complex and elegant decorative apparatus, punctuated by aedicules on which first five, then four statues by Antonello Gagini were to be placed. At the end of the sixteenth century, the presbytery was partly renovated on the initiative of Duke Ettore III, who decided the rearrangement of three Gaginesque statues in a polychrome altar. The internal space, characterized by a hall layout with side chapels, underwent numerous modifications and additions following the earthquake of 1783 and the Napoleonic phase of the early nineteenth century.