Santa Maria della Vita a Napoli. L’èkphrasis per la ricostruzione digitale dell’ambiente liturgico ‘scomparso’ | Santa Maria della Vita in Naples. The Èkphrasis for the Digital Reconstruction of the ‘Disappeared’ Liturgical Environment

The church of Santa Maria della Vita in Naples represents a clear example of how documentary descriptions, both of textual and visual nature, should be combined through a critical-interpretative approach to reconstruct the memory of a complex and stratified building which, in the face of an initial period of prosperity, then slowly experienced a state of abandonment and neglect. The building, founded in 1577, and currently inaccessible, is described in many historical guides of the city of Naples from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, by virtue of its strategic position on a path of worship and for the proven importance of the place as an experimentation of new architectural forms outside the city walls. In recent centuries, however, the progressive abandonment of the church has been followed by a legitimate process of internal spoliation, where all the works of art contained in the liturgical space have been moved to other places and, in the architectural context, never brought back to the church under consideration within this study. The critical analysis of the descriptions present in the historical guides and the visual comparison with paintings preserved in Neapolitan museums and institutions have allowed a partial, but promising, operation of iconographic reconstruction of the liturgical space inside the church. The information deduced from the research, validated metrically through comparison with the integrated digital survey, allowed the creation of an explorable digital model where the space of the Sacred appears reconfigured.