The Gospel of Luke says that the pregnant mother of Jesus could not find shelter in an inn, so she had no place to put down her newborn but in an animals’ food trough—phatne in Luke’s Greek, the word rightly translated as praesepium (Latin), krippe (German), crèche (French), presepe (Italian), manger or crib (English). They all mean food trough. Yet this humble picture of a homeless mother having this as her last resort is turned into grand theatrical displays in our annual crèche unveilings. In this celebratory setting, the vagrant woman has become queenly, she is receiving royalty, she is lit by angelic hoverings. The dirty trough has become a tidy little bed of straw.
Franciscans are supposed to have been the original patrons of crèches, since St. Francis, according to legend, created the first presepe to celebrate an outdoor Christmas Mass in 1223, giving it a populist air. Initially, the figures were life-size and the scene centered on the Holy Family, but during the Baroque period, the scale was vastly reduced while gaining complexity with the addition of peasants, horsemen, merchants, dogs, cows, goats, and even water buffalo. Actually, Jesuits in the seventeenth century used modeling figures and increasingly intricate architecture and illusionistic landscapes to stage the Nativity story as a teaching device, and some of their aristocratic patrons began to commission artists and architects to make grand examples of this playful new form for their palaces. The artistry involved reached a peak in eighteenth-century Naples, under the Bourbon kings, when the largest crèches would often fill several rooms and be continually added-to and rearranged to enhance the effect. The authentic presepi of that period still have the windblown drapery of the Jesuit-favored baroque period, and it is a great curatorial guessing game to identify which famous Neapolitan painter might be responsible for this or that figurine in the crèche. [...]
All Neapolitan presepi include contemporary figures and their pets, but only Chicago’s has its own villain—the innkeeper who turned the Holy Family away from his place. But while he scowls, musicians play and dance the tarantella for his merry customers, sounding their castanets and tambourine, while on a lower level men play cards, women nurse babies, dogs and cats prowl. On the right side of the scene, it may surprise people to see the classical statue of Hercules dug up in the baths of Caracalla in 1546, here enshrined as an alabaster miniature. But, like the elephant of Charles IV in Pittsburgh, the Hercules was a famous sight in eighteenth-century Naples, where king Ferdinand IV brought it from Rome in 1787. This was just another way of saying the Savior is born to us in every place and every time. But especially in Naples.
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