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When the Council of Trent, which closed in 1563, issued precise
norms for devotion to the saints and relics it encouraged the diffusion
of the Presepio as an expression of popular piety. The Jesuits,
a new Religious Order constituted precisely during that Council,
took over the tradition almost monopolising it: in their hands the
Presepio served for didactic purposes to win back reformed Christians
and evangelise in the recently discovered lands of the New World.
The Presepio, Catholic and Mediterranean, counteracted the Christmas
tree, Protestant and Nordic, started by Martin Luther; moreover
the Jesuits imposed their taste for ornamental profusion and distanced
it increasingly from its original Franciscan simplicity. The 17th
century saw the appearance and development of scenic effects which
revolutionised the Presepio. Nativity Scenes became a mirror for
the culture which produced them, reflecting the society of the day
and the most vivacious aspects of daily life with traits of intense
realism: they were enriched with unusual and exotic elements and
spectacular scenery, displaying inventive imagination typical of
Baroque.
At this time the Presepio began to step out of churches to enter
patrician, bourgeois homes as an object of luxury interior decoration,
mounted and remounted differently year after year.
The large statues were replaced with wooden figures sometimes partly
of straw with head and limbs in terracotta, wax or wood adorned
with sumptuous clothing, fostering private Presepio, which had none
of the monumentality and immobility proper of Nativity Scenes in
churches. .
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Fides News
Fides
News 2004