This Christmas has also arrived and to wish you all the best we have chosen to review some of the most beautiful illustrations of the Nativity and the Epiphany that we have encountered in our wanderings, in Italy and beyond. Then we will close the post with something new this Christmas, the Presepe Favoloso (Fabulous Crib) in the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità in Naples by the Scuotto brothers' La Scarabattola Presepiale Art Workshop. Let's get started right away:
Let's now move on to the Fabulous Crib, this masterpiece of crib art housed in the basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità in Naples; to illustrate it we turn to the text contained in the site https://www.lascarabattola.it/ A marvelous corten cabinet, created by expert architects, a labyrinthine and magical scenography where a crowd of shepherds populate the streets of a world poised between the real and the fantastic. A district of the city that welcomes a work in which it can mirror itself and reflect its great liveliness. It is the Fabulous Crib, which was born from an idea of the Scuotto Brothers of the La Scarabattola workshop, in collaboration with the set designer Biagio Roscigno, and was created thanks to the precious collaboration of professionalism and workers who made this ambitious project possible. Ambitious because it arrives in a territory that, amidst difficulties and contradictions, has long since chosen to welcome the beauty of art. The Fabulous Crib is “the beneficial coexistence of opposites, in the theatrical city open to coexistence and hopeful of redemption. It's a Suspended World." So writes Pietro Gargano, editor of the monograph on the work. “Using modernity, lost characters are recovered, combining the ancient with the modern.
Pasolini said, and the phrase should be used as a mantra, that tradition dies only if it is abandoned, exclusively, to traditionalists. Stefano de Matteis wrote that they have more Caravaggio than Cuciniello in mind. More Picasso and the Transavantgarde than the Mannerists. Their one-of-a-kind designs have back-alley, familiar faces. “This nativity scene is fabulous because it is enriched by visionary and terrifying characters brought to light from the southern fairy-tale tradition. The well with Maria Manilonga, the werewolf, Mother Siren, the 12 Carmelite monks and the damned nun, are fantastic characters who intertwine with the best known of tradition and coexist without friction with the more realistic and contemporary aspect of the scene . Thus, while two guappi challenge each other to a duel, Totò looks proudly at his bronze bust and Eduardo De Filippo finds his lost Luisella for a moment to whom he gives the mask of Pulcinella. And it's not a shame to find Maradona's features in the ability of a street urchin who dribbles with an orange, just as the presence of "ciruzzo 'o niro", a son of our post-war era, confused in the joy of the Dionysian dances orchestrated by Ciccibacco falling into sleep. In the darkness of blindness, on the other hand, the six blind men who plastically show the work of Bruegel exhibited in the Capodimonte Museum inevitably fall. This nativity scene dialogues with the ancient lesson, in a regenerating reinterpretation of the past that projects us into the great possibilities of a dynamic, future tradition. The community of Rione Sanità has allowed itself to be filled by this nativity scene with the spirit and participation of those who still manage to believe in fairy tales, which are possible if the story starts from below. “The Cuciniello Nativity is there, in the Upper Town of San Martino. The Fabulous Crib has just been born in the Lower Town, at the Sanità. Both represent a Neapolitan way to beauty. Up following the tradition, further down making it dynamic, updating it to the times and looking to a future at the gates. Let's not forget it: the Nativity of the Scuottos starts from the bottom to reach Heaven." Some of our photos to partially illustrate this work:
Hoping that we have done something welcome with these information pills and referring you to our post on the Rione Sanità for other news, we just have to wish you:
MERRY CHRISTMAS !!!