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The baroque Presepio reached its highest artistic expression in
the Neapolitan Presepio, which influenced, albeit with natural regional
differences, the Presepio in Sicily, Genoa and Rome.
Apart from the persisting baroque splendour of 17th century Presepio
in Naples, Sicily and here and there in Genoa, in other regions
of Italy in the 18th century the Presepio was simpler, less spectacular
and closer to the historic reality, with figures mainly in wood,
carved in South Tyrol, and in polychrome terracotta in Lombardy
and Romagna; there was also a diffusion of the mechanical Presepio
a real concession of the century of reason.
Moreover, during this century under the influence of materialism
and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the tradition of the Presepio
experienced a period of undeniable decadence. Only in the next century
Romanticism, exalting the highest spiritual values, such as religious
sentiment and sense of family and tradition, values expressed in
the highest grade in the Presepio, brought it back into fashion
although with profoundly different characteristics.
Closed for ever its great season of art, in the 19th century the
Presepio, having lost its former great numbers of devotees and consequent
use in churches and patrician homes, became simpler and spread to
all the social classes, becoming a popular tradition with an accentuation
of its elements of domestic rituality.
Inexpensive figures in clay, plaster or papier-mache were produced
to satisfy the demand of an ever vaster public; artists were replaced
by artisans who often used moulds and there was a repetition of
old motives, without the addition of new original elements; moreover,
in this century, the Presepio rediscovered that aspect of ingenuous
and spontaneous popular expression forgotten in the rich baroque
homes and, losing in sumptuousness, it gained in fantasy.
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Fides News
Fides
News 2004