CHIESA DI SANT'ANGELO A NILO

This church with its wide red and grey baroque façade owes its name to the fact that in the first century AD the area was occupied by a colony of Egyptian merchants from Alexandria. This is also evidenced by the statue of the god Nile discovered nearby and displayed in the centre of the small square next door: the river is depicted in the form of a man with a full beard, holding a horn of plenty and leaning on a sphinx. The church was completed in 1384 and is also known as the Brancaccio Chapel, named after the family who ordered its construction next to his palace. People come here mainly to admire the funerary monument of Cardinal Rinaldo Brancaccio, who died in 1423. This work, carried out in Pisa between 1426 and 1428, was entrusted to two great Renaissance artists: Michelozzo, sculptor and architect, and the young Donatello, author of the bas-relief of The Assumption adorning the sarcophagus. He applied a technique he had developed in Florence a few years earlier, called stiacciato: the relief is extremely light, the figures barely emerge from the background, and the work should ideally be subjected to a raking light that exalts the delicacy of the modelling. To achieve this effect, the artist did not use sculptor's scissors but files. Also, take a look at the painting above the altar, a Saint Michael by Marco Pino, a major painter of the sixteenth century in Naples.