"Giace il Berterado scolpito alla guerriera". Un cavaliere francese sepolto a Montevergine

This essay examines the Lautrec sepulchre, which used to be in the abbey-church of Montevergine and now kept in the abbey Museum. The artwork is made of a double-gabled sarcophagus supported by two lions; on top of the slopes viscount Bertrand (d. 1335) and his prematurely died son Jean are depicted. An unpublished record in the Angevin Registers confirms the old tradition that assumed the viscount being buried in the Madonna chapel. In addition, the double-face typology of the tomb allows the author to hypothesize its original location in the arcades between the chapel and the nave of the abbey-church. The author reconstructed the complicated history of the monument, which was testified for the very first time in 1579 as placed nearby the first two chapels of the left aisle; in the 17th century, it was moved to the Sacrament chapel and, around the half of the 18th century, to the monastery cloister. Later, the sepulchre became part of the lapidary museum set in the Sanctuary by abbot Matteo Jacuzio (1716-1780); finally, after being divided into two parts, it went back to the Sacrament chapel. Only in 1967, it was recomposed in the newly founded abbey Museum. Thanks to the careful analysis of the documentation, the author could identify the very moments when the artwork was dismantled – and why that happened – and when the original position of the gisants was inverted on top of the cover slopes, causing a mistake that currently still exists. The direct observation of the monument, the analysis of the funerary sculpture in the Kingdom of Naples between the 13th and the 15th century, together with the comparison of the sepulchre with two illuminations in the Statutes of the Ordine del Nodo (Paris, Bnf, fr. 4274), have led the author to an innovative reconstructive hypothesis. About the controversial authorship of the artwork, the author trends to attribute its making to a sculptor for sure culturally linked to Southern Italy, probably educated in the sphere of Tino di Camaino.