The loveliest season of the year has just begun. The basilica of Saint Mary Major is overflowing with the faithful, the seats are all taken, as are the chairs and benches that have been added to the lateral naves. And there are still crowds of people standing, taking part in the three-hour celebration. It is the year of our Lord 1291, Christ is born again among us; perpetual for us is His coming to this world because we also are witnesses of the event, we also can live this moment of great joy. And the miracle slowly unfolds. Slowly the tired faces of the men relax, slowly, swept up by the extraordinary beauty of the Christmastide chants. Hearts are made tender, glance by glance smiles are exchanged. Daily tensions, nearby wars, poverty, and even hunger seem no longer to matter, and perhaps they don’t, as pain melts away and evil is far removed. Even those who haven’t spoken in years can be seen, this evening, discretely raising a hand in silent greeting, and the gesture is returned.
But while the bishop with his court of prelates solemnly officiates at the mass, there is something which every so often distracts the faithful, captures their attention, something about which they comment and discuss in hushed voices. In the right nave of the basilica, more or less in the center and visible to all, there is a small chapel serving as refuge to a woman and a baby, to a man leaning on a staff, to three other men who hold little gifts, to a cow and an ass. They are made of marble, nearly life sized. They are immobile in their stony gazes, yet they inspire those looking on, as they marvel at the quiet tenderness of the scene. The are the first stone Crèche in Rome, a strange sight for the eyes and a quickened pulse for the heart. People ask who might have made them, whether the artisan is from Rome or from far away. Some wonder at the essence of this ancient magic that permits solid stone so to move the human heart.
It is wonderful to imagine that it must have been like this, that Arnolfo di Cambio’s Crèche was thus welcomed in 1291; to travel back in time and picture the faces of those whose souls were touched by such timeless art.
Who was Arnolfo di Cambio? Certainly one of the great artists of the second half of the thirteenth century, one who gave a new impulse and aesthetic to late medieval art, ushering in a renewal of this ‘language’ that came of age in the Renaissance. Arnolfo di Cambio did in sculpture what Pietro Cavallini and then Giotto did in mosaic and in painting. He gave a new plasticity to the faces of the Gothic, rendering them lighter, softer. His figures extend themselves into space timidly, trying to become three dimensional, within spaces attempting to do the same. These new perspectives are the result of a rediscovery of classical art and a fresh attention to nature and to realism.
Arnolfo di Cambio was born in Colle Val d’Elsa in Tuscany in 1245, and already by the age of twenty he was active in the workshop of the artisan Nicola da Pisano, a master in the age that had just begun to attempt softer and more fluid renderings of the human form, evolving beyond certain rules of the Gothic tradition. Arnolfo quickly became a valued assistant to the master, and with him worked on numerous projects of note, such as the pulpit of the Duomo of Siena. By 1270, however, he was already in Rome, where the imposing architectural and artistic heritage of the city served as a new stimulus to his creativity. Arnolfo’s masterpieces are principally the works he produced at the end of his career, following a return to Rome after having spent many years in Perugina, Orvieto, and Florence. In Rome he created the ciborio, or eucharistic tabernacle, for the basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls (1285), the Chapel of the Crèche in Saint Mary Major (1291), the ciborio for the Basilica of Saint Cecile in Trastevere (1293), the funerary monument to Pope Boniface VIII and the famous Saint Peter in bronze in the Basilica of Saint Peter on Vatican Hill (end of the century). All of these works are today easily seen and visited and are a wonderful window to the mystery of the medieval times.
The figures of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major are perhaps far from the beauty and perfection of Michelangelo’s David or that of other Renaissance sculptors. But they incarnate, in stone yet rough and unrefined, a sublime joining of old and new, of rigidity and a timid approach to space, the rustic simplicity of frank and simple men, that moves us. The poetry of the simple man, poetry of man who dares not meet God’s eyes, for it is not given to men to look into the face of the Almighty, but who casts down his gaze onto the stones where God has left the footprints of His Son, Jesus. The statues remind us a bit of the gestures of a babe just placed on his feet by his mother. He is afraid to walk, and like a wooden marionette tries to move his legs forward. But he doesn’t cry because, in spite of his fear, he knows that his mother will throw her arms around him before he falls. There is, in short, such great beauty in the simple, almost awkward gestures of Saint Joseph, in his fearless and devoted eyes, in the mute language of the Magi who press their precious gifts to their breasts, in the movement of the Madonna who holds the baby Jesus, almost rocking Him; this beauty remains in spite of the alterations made to the faces during the Renaissance.
But why was the Crèche commissioned by Pope Nicholas IV specifically for the Basilica of Saint Mary Major? Following a logic that was to become custom in the Renaissance, he wanted the Crèche for the basilica and wanted it to be the work of the greatest artist of the time as a reflection of the centrality of the basilica to Christendom and the sacred relics housed there.
Saint Mary Major, as the name so clearly suggests, is the principal basilica dedicated to the cult of the Virgin, which developed quite early in Christian history, not least as a result of the Church’s efforts to redirect the attentions and energies of pagan cults dedicated to female deities. Even as early as 431, the Council of Ephasus defined the doctrine according to which, in virtue of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin was not only the Mother of Jesus, but also of God. And it was to the Mother of God that the basilica was built between 430 and 440, then consecrated by Pope Sixtus III. But it was only at the beginning of the seventh century that the sacred relics were brought from Palestine. The event, shrouded in legend and mystery, was closely connected to another that shook the Christian world in 640: the conquest of Palestine by the Arabs, who put an end to the pilgrimages to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Pieces of the swaddling cloths revered as those that gently caressed the body of the baby Jesus and fragments of the manger that was believed to have served as his first crib arrived at the basilica around the year 640, while it is not until a few centuries later that mention is made of the cradle in which he slept as a child. Obviously, such relics were the most precious in Christendom, and they were venerated as such. For having held the very body of the most holy Son of God, they moved the faithful to the remembrance of God’s saving grace. They were, more than any other relics, the tangible signs of His intangible Omnipresence, His will, His Power. Since the Holy Sepulchre was now unreachable, Pope Theodore I, responding to these enormous historical changes, wished to create a “Second Bethlehem.” This is why, in the right nave of the basilica, he built a small area in which to venerate the sacred relics. During the following century, papal books began to refer to the basilica as “Sancta Maria ad Presepem,” or Saint Mary of the Crèche.
It was Pope Nicholas V, of Franciscan origin and thus respectful of the teachings of Saint Francis and his devotion to the Christ Child, who in 1291 made significant changes to the interior of the basilica with the intention of inspiring ever greater veneration for the sacred relics of Christ. But in this very same year another catastrophic event took place, and its tremors ran through all Christendom. The Crusaders were forced to retreat before the advance of the Muslims, forever losing Palestine and the Holy Land. It is in this context that the Crèche of Arnolfo di Cambio was sculpted. In the face of war, it is ever Art that responds to Faith.
Politics and devotion, love and necessity meet and speak, in an eternal dialogue, in the choices of Nicholas IV, as in those of so many others throughout Christian history. As ever, fervor and faith, as if on the wings of the wind, carry hope and inspiration, effecting miracles in the human heart. The works of art thus produced, perhaps by divine grace, glow with the devotion of the human hands that made them. We invite you to visit the Crèche of Arnolfo di Cambio and travel back in time, losing yourself in the humble devotion of these few figures, finding peace and piety, seeing with the eyes of a child.
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