Last Christmas season, we discovered that the Metropolitan Museum puts up a Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche display each year. We didn't get a chance to go see it last year, so when December rolled around this year, I knew that it was one of the first Christmasy things I wanted us to go and see. Two weekends ago, we had some free time on Saturday, so we headed into Manhattan to check it out.
It was a very rainy and very cold day, and we weren't the only ones that thought visiting a museum would be a great rainy day activity. The line to get in the doors stretched clear down the block, but we were able to get in quickly through a second set of doors that no one was lining up for.
While Brian waited in line to check our wet coats, I bought tickets and waited in the lobby. The lobby urns, which usually hold gorgeous flower displays, were full of gardenia branches and blooms. I never got close enough to tell if they were real or not, but they were still pretty.
Brian finally found me in the lobby and we wandered our way back into the museum, looking for the tree. We found it in the center of this large room in the medieval art section. It lit up the darkened room.
It was such a beautiful display, what with the manger scene at the tree's base and the evergreen branches creating a dark sky filled with electric candles stars and pretty angels. The whole exhibit was such an impressive work of art.
The figures in the crèche date back to the eighteenth century. A lady named Loretta Hines Howard began collecting these pieces in 1925. She came up with the idea of displaying the nativity in combination with a Christmas Tree. The MET first showed her tree/crèche display in 1957. She donated the figures to the museum in 1967 and they have displayed them each year for almost 40 years. Loretta Hines Howard would go to the museum and help set up the display each year. Her daughter, Linn Howard, would often accompany her mom to help set it up. After Loretta died, Linn continued the tradition of setting up the display, along with her daughter Andrea. They set it up this year.
The 50 angels that adorn the tree are at least 12-inches tall. Brian and I both agreed that each angel on its own would make a gorgeous tree topper. It was a pretty impressive sight to see them all together, covering the tree.
From the MET's Website:
"The landscape at the base presents the figures and scenery of the Neapolitan Christmas crib. This display mingles three basic elements that are traditional to eighteenth-century Naples: the Nativity, with adoring shepherds and their flocks; the procession of the three Magi, whose exotically dressed retinue echoes the merchants and travelers one may have encountered in bustling Naples at the time of the crèche's creation; and, most distinctive, colorful peasants and townspeople engaged in their quotidian tasks. The theatrical scene is enhanced by a charming assortment of animals—sheep, goats, horses, a camel, and an elephant—and by background pieces serving as the dramatic setting for the Nativity, including the ruins of a Roman temple, several quaint houses, and a typical Italian fountain with a lion's-mask waterspout.
The origin of the popular Christmas custom of restaging the Nativity traditionally is credited to Saint Francis of Assisi. The employment of manmade figures to reenact the hallowed events soon developed and reached its height of complexity and artistic excellence in eighteenth-century Naples. There, local families vied to outdo each other in presenting elaborate and theatrical crèche displays, often assisted by professional stage directors. The finest sculptors of the period—including Giuseppe Sammartino and his pupils Salvatore di Franco, Giuseppe Gori, and Angelo Viva—were called on to model the terracotta heads and shoulders of the extraordinary crèche figures. The Howard collection includes numerous examples of works attributed to them as well as to other prominent artists.
... They have articulated bodies of tow and wire, heads and shoulders modeled in terracotta and polychromed to perfection. The luxurious and colorful costumes, many of which are original, were often sewn by ladies of the collecting families and enriched by jewels, embroideries, and elaborate accessories, including gilded censers, scimitars and daggers, and silver filigree baskets. The placement of the approximately fifty large angels on the Christmas tree and the composition of the crèche figures and landscape vary slightly from year to year as new figures are added."
After we finished viewing the tree, we walked through the Medieval Art section for awhile. We hadn't really explored this area of the MET yet. It was interesting to look at all the religious art and see how people of the past viewed Christ and His life and religion in general.
It ended up being the perfect Christmas activity for us to kick off the season in the right way, by focusing on Jesus.
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