If you say the word “presepio” to an Italian, those very crowded Neapolitan festivals generally come to mind where everything happens and in the middle, looking for it, there is also the Child. Neapolitan nativity scenes are undoubtedly wonderful and the most important is that of the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, “the Cuciniello nativity scene”, set up in 1878, famous throughout the world and at the head of an infinite number of variations on the theme. As many as eight hundred shepherds wander around and you end up not even knowing where to look, enchanted by a crowd of people doing anything: eating, playing music, hanging out at the tavern, making love, having stalls selling meat or vegetables; The Magi also enter the traffic jam with a procession with trumpets, pipes and drums. The costumes are ancient Neapolitan ones with the characters dressed in every detail, including coral necklaces, lace or rags, slippers and slippers. Above is a flotilla of angels that look like drones spiraling towards the sky. So much stuff. Dizzying, like all great Neapolitan art. But this is not the nativity scene.
At school we learned that the nativity scene was invented by Saint Francis, and to understand something about the topic it is best to go back exactly 800 years and go and see what happened on that Christmas night in 1223, perhaps with the help of a beautiful book by the late Chiara Frugoni recently reprinted ((The Nativity Scene of Saint Francis. History of Christmas in Greccio, Il Mulino ed, 2023).
As Christmas approached and also the end of his life (he died in 1226), Francesco decided to want to imagine Greccio, with the “eyes of the body”, as Tommaso da Celano narrates in the Life before Francis of Assisi written between 1228 and 1229, the memory and memory of the Child born in Bethlehem. He therefore orders a friend, the knight Giovanni, to prepare a manger for him (in Latin praesepe means exactly this) with hay, an ox and a donkey. Greccio thus became a new Bethlehem, which Francesc was extremely happy about. The local inhabitants came running, the friars sang with joy and Francis joined in the singing and then, above all, he preached on the birth of Christ in such a way as to inflame the hearts of those present, so much so that one of them had a vision and saw the Child lying truly in the manger. But be careful, it was the vision of one and not all.
It wasn’t the first time that things like this had been done in church, on the contrary. These types of sacred representations “Ludi theatrales” have been remembered since after the year 1000 in Germany, in France, in Padua, often with priests disguised as the Madonna and Saint Joseph, shepherds, and statues for the Child and from 1207 the Pope had forbidden them. However, Francis did not want a little theater, he simply wanted, by reconnecting to the mystical and contemplative monastic tradition, to demonstrate that Jesus was visible in any place, through the Eucharist, without the need for anything else. He had therefore thought of a Eucharistic nativity scene, without frills.
What interested him most about Christmas was the idea of peace, in the highest sense of the term, peace that was to spread over the world from the birth of Christ, without any more hatred for anyone. And with peace there had to be his beloved wife, Madonna Poverty to whom he had given his heart. Anyone who has been to Greccio knows what poverty means in that rugged little convent attached to the rock which at the time must have been a very difficult place to live. In Greccio, among other things, in a time of war, Francis disavowed the crusades: there was no need to reconquer anything because the kingdom of heaven is not a place but was wherever you wanted to see it and it was certainly not necessary to kill and conquer to reach Bethlehem, because Bethlehem was there. Francis’ message could not please a church armed for the crusades: all the revolutionary ideas of the Assisi towards people of different religions had to be canceled (in his trip to Egypt Francis had, among other things, admired Islamic spirituality) .
The story of Greccio had to be traced back to the safe lines of Catholic theology: a devout sacred representation and nothing else. And so it happened. The events of Greccio, over time, were attenuated, Francesco’s very harsh rule softened, and even the iconography of the scene progressively took on other aspects.
The oldest image of Francis in Greccio is in the panel of the Bardi chapel by Coppo da Marcovaldo in Santa Croce in Florence, painted around 1243 with episodes from the life of the saint inspired by the first life of Saint Francis, that of da Celano, which he had collected direct testimonies, and which is prior to the revisions of the memoirs carried out by Bonaventura da Bagnoregio who wrote a new and official one on the orders of the pope, between 1260 and 1262. In that panel the saint appears dressed as a deacon (in reality it is not certain that he is never been ordained a deacon) while preaching the Gospel, and is the main protagonist, however located on the lay side, on the right, with religious on the left. At the foot of the altar-crib, there is the Child with an ox and a donkey very angry and with disturbing features and who seem to want to eat him raw. The image is located on the border of the definitive officialization of Francis’ life and we will then find it in elegant and codified forms in some frescoes, such as the very famous one by Giotto in Assisi or that of the end of the 14th century in the Chapter Hall of San Francesco in Pistoia . Except that in all the following nativity scenes by Greccio Francesco no longer speaks: he holds the Child in his arms, meditates, prays, but speech has been taken away from him. This is because the question of Francis’ sermons, including the very emotional one in Greccio, was difficult for the official church to digest and absorb, considering that Francis was not a priest and had no religious studies behind him, so much so that it was willingly transformed into a sermon to the birds. In the Bardi panel, Francesco also preaches to the Sultan who listens to him attentively, demonstrating that a dialogue with Muslims was also possible, if based on the message of peace and love.
Those birds, which appear in the Bardi panel, or those lay people who are next to Francis, always in the same panel, imply the true meaning of his sermons, reserved for those to whom no one spoke, who were abandoned like sparrows in the wind: the miserable , the rejected, the wretched of the earth. And in any case in the heart of the saint for the first time the humble animals were close to men, so much so that he also wrote to the emperor to ask him to give plenty of food to eat on Christmas night to the “brother oxen and donkeys”, recommending then that, obviously the poor were fed by the rich.
A thousand births in art will follow, often enchanting, sometimes surprising, and thank goodness that at a certain point Baby Jesus will also deign, in a delightful naïve miniature by a fifteenth-century German nun: Sibilla von Bondorf, to visit a woman: Clare of Assisi, the spiritual sister of the whole adventure earthly and celestial of Francesco, who, happy as a little girl, happily plays with the divine child, plump and blond, who appeared to her at the foot of the bed in a riot of little angels who play and flutter like butterflies.
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– 2024-04-27 05:45:10
