Angels overhead

Recently I went to see the newly acquired 18th-century Neopolitan crèche at Chicago’s Art Institute. The giant crèche fills a 15’X15’ cabinet. It will be exhibited for only five weeks because the dozens of terra cotta figurines, each about five to eight inches tall, are dressed in handmade embroidered fabrics too fragile to be exposed to the air year-round. (Hopefully the crèche will be back next Christmas).

Directly in front of me was a crowded Neopolitan neighborhood scene. I tried to take in some of the dozens of scenes in a busy marketplace frozen in time. There’s a woman carrying a basket of fruit that is itself a carefully created miniature still life. Animals (there are 50 of them) race under tables (dogs), munch on grass (sheep) or peck at the feet of a woman who is shaking feed from her apron (chickens). On the porch of a taverna some men play musical instruments while another sits waiting with a deck of cards. Meat carcasses hang in the open air; women chat animatedly around a fire. There are caned chairs, ceramic bowls, candlesticks and tambourines; there are lovers and pickpockets. In one corner a shepherd sleeps through it all. It’s like reading a Dickens novel.

Then I looked up past the cacophony of humans to a ledge above. There sits the newborn babe and family. It seems completely detached from the scene below—apparently no one below has yet seen the Holy Family except for a couple of shepherds and a swarm of miniature cherubs.