Manual of Nativity-Scene Art and Practice

The world of nativity-scene art and practice is far wider than it usually seems. Yet there is no recognised general work that brings together its foundations, its history, its languages and its procedures. The knowledge is scattered across publications, archives, traditions, vocabularies and workshop experience.

That dispersion has consequences: different concepts are confused with one another, some public definitions narrow the real scope of the field, and each part is interpreted without seeing how it relates to the others.

The Manual does not study the nativity scene as a sum of isolated techniques and traditions. It regards it as a complete artistic discipline, in which research, sculpture, scenography, history and language explain one another.

Its purpose is to restore the connections that dispersion has hidden and to make visible the true artistic and cultural scope of a tradition with Christian roots.

I write it from a twofold experience: that of the sculptor, and that of someone for whom the nativity scene has been part of the way he looks at things since childhood.

A figure can stand on its own as an autonomous sculpture. A scene, on the other hand, needs figures to inhabit it and to establish relationships within it. Understanding that difference makes it possible to study both the figure and the scenic space with precision, without reducing one discipline to the other.

Tradition is approached as an inheritance worth knowing, comparing and understanding. Research does not replace creation: it gives it foundations, so that every artistic decision is a conscious one.

And I write it in a way that is worth stating today, because it can no longer be taken for granted. This Manual is not made of answers requested from an artificial intelligence. I use an assistant of that kind as a working tool: it locates, compares, organises and drafts. But a generated answer is a text that nobody has checked yet, and nothing enters here in that state.

Every statement comes from a source the reader can open, with its reference; what is my own reading is presented as a reading, with the reasoning in view, and what could not be proved carries its mark. Before it is accepted, every text goes through a reading meant to knock it down, not to approve it. Nothing is here because I say so, nor because a machine says so.

How it was made: The open workshop