Naples: The Most Elaborate Crèches
Garry Wills writes: ‘The artistry of creches involved reached a peak in eighteenth-century Naples, under the Bourbon kings, when the largest crèches would often fill several rooms and be continually added-to and rearranged to enhance the effect. The authentic presepi of that period still have the windblown drapery of the Jesuit-favored baroque period, and it is a great curatorial guessing game to identify which famous Neapolitan painter might be responsible for this or that figurine in the crèche…Examples of elaborately multi-figured Neapolitan presepi are highly prized assets of museums throughout Europe. But there are only three of them in America—at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Chicago Art Institute.’
