The Chapel, commonly known as S. Anna, has two superimposed canvases of different sizes, depicting S. Anna, in fact, with the child Madonna and S. Gioacchino, and the Madonna in vision to S. Carlo Borromeo and S. Filippo Neri .

 

The largest canvas occupies the central part of the front, which is divided into three areas by four columns with the shafts animated by a weaving of zigzag denticles; the smaller one rests on the underlying first entablature weighing on the Corinthian capitals, in correspondence with the internal columns. In the two niches that open between the same columns, a table and a chair are the scarce furnishings of that room in which you can breathe a tender intimate atmosphere, which, not even the figure of the Father, imbued with brightness, on the back, manages to dilute. The canvas is signed by  Nicola Gliri a cleric painter from Bitonto. In the second half of the seventeenth century, together with Carlo Rosa, continued the pictorial cycles initiated by Paolo Finoglio in the churches of S. Benedetto and Ss. Cosma and Damiano of Conversano. and by Cesare Fracanzano, to then satisfy the ecclesiastical clients of half of Puglia, attentive to the devotional request of the faithful.

 

The central canvas is a painting that reproduces such an important and much replicated theme in Counter-Reformation iconography: the spiritual partnership between Saints Carlo Borromeo and Filippo Neri operating theologically respectively in Milan and Rome in the 16th century. The first, an exceptional personality for pastoral commitment, more than any other embodied the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, of which he was the manager, as a living refutor of Protestantism; the second, founder of the Oratorians, distinguished himself as consolation to the sick and the dying and humble teacher of children. The canvas, signed by Gabriel De Sabbato · and dated 1705, is of good pictorial quality and can be admired for the search for a balance of formal solutions, with an authentic, human, almost everyday religious tone.

 

High on a throne of soft clouds is represented the Madonna with a large blue mantle, who, holding the blessing Child in her right hand, placed upright, towards whom she turns her smiling face, indicates the two Saints with her left down.

 

St. Philip, holding an open book on which he bends his eyes, is turned with the bench towards his companion; S. Carlo, with a red cardinal's mozzetta, reverently tries to turn to his eldest companion, momentarily lifting his gaze from the open book which he supports with his right hand. On the study and meditation table, place it obliquely in front, there is a crucifix and a red hat.

 

Interesting are the angels placed behind S. Filippo and next to S. Carlo, attentive vigilant participants. Commenting on these, an inscription on a cartouche reads: «mundi per abstinentiam».

 

Critically, the first to take an interest in the painting and to attempt a stylistic examination was Antonio Gambacorta, who wrote about it: "It is a good painting that fits into Apulian Baroque painting with Jordanian tendencies" And to Luca Giordano, at least as an iconographic inspiration (commissioned by Fathers of the Oratory, the great painter painted six canvases in 1704, a year before his death, including "The meeting of Sts. Carlo Borromeo and Filippo N cri", "St. Charles kissing the hand of St. Philip »Together with« The two Saints in prayer », for the third chapel in the right aisle of the Church of the Gerolomini in Naples), he had looked at our painter. The painting is a serene representation with an intimate atmosphere, inserted in a canonical scheme, far from the stylistic acceptance of the new formal and chromatic solutions dominant in Naples in the early eighteenth century enlightenment and reformer.