≈ 12 min
From raw material to garment
The previous chapters have laid out the ground: the material evidence is fragmentary, the written sources name without describing, the images show by means of conventions, and clothing always responds to the body, the climate, the work, the social condition and the specific situation of whoever wears it.
This chapter does not start from scratch. It continues that same research, but in order to put the materials on the palette of the nativity-scene sculptor.
There are two ways of creating a figurative work. The first works from life: the sculptor has the model in front of him —the face, the body, the drapery arranged, the accessories—, composes the pose, observes it, makes sketches, interprets and reproduces the volume of what he sees. The second works from visual memory and reflection: the sculptor has no model, no object, no gesture to look at; he has only what he has studied, what he has read, what he remembers having seen somewhere, and what the mind is able to imagine from all of that. Both ways are legitimate. The difference between them is what demands most of the sculptor.
This Manual works in the second way. There is no model. There is no first-century wardrobe to open in order to dress Mary. There is no fat-tailed sheep in the studio yard from which to copy the fleece. There is no Galilean potter to tell how he throws his pot. There is no Bethlehem shepherd to pose in «contrapposto disteso». There are only notes: what the research has managed to gather, what the sources say, what the archaeological finds show. The notes are the absent model, reconstructed on paper.
That is why this website is an open workshop. It is not a closed publication of conclusions, nor a catalogue, nor a showcase. It is what in sculpture is called the studio: the place where the work is thought out, documented, reasoned and made. From here on, what in documentary figurative sculpture we call study notes come into play. These notes, which would normally be reserved material, I shall set out below, because without them neither how the final decision is reached nor the way of proceeding can be understood. A note before going on. This work is offered to whoever wants to go into it in depth, without obliging anyone. As with a good newspaper, each reader decides how far to go: they can stop at the headline, read the whole article or turn the page. The Manual presents; it does not impose. The study notes and jottings remain available to whoever wants to enter them; whoever reads only the headlines will at least take that away.
The situation has a trap that should be named early, because it works even without the sculptor noticing. When there is no model in front of him, the mind fills the gap with what it has to hand: images seen a thousand times, the figures on the shelf at home, the nativity scenes of childhood, the illustrations in missals, the posters of biblical cinema, the nineteenth-century paintings of Orientalism. That received visual memory is not neutral: it comes loaded with conventions, with inherited errors, with plastic solutions repeated out of inertia. If the sculptor does not correct it with research, convention slips into the work without permission. The finished figure ends up looking more like earlier figures than like the world it set out to represent.
A concrete example. Let us imagine for a moment two shepherds beside the same fire, on the outskirts of Bethlehem, on the night of 24 to 25 December. The place lies in the hills of Judaea, at about 770 metres above sea level; the climate is Mediterranean; in December, the night-time temperature drops to 4 or 5 degrees above zero, with damp and wind. The first shepherd wears a lambskin thrown over his shoulder, leaving his chest and arms, his legs and his feet bare. The second is covered by a heavy woollen mantle, which covers his head, shoulders and back, and he presses it against his body with his free arm. Both are in front of the fire because it is cold and because, in a scene of shepherds, the fire is not only atmosphere: it warms, lights the small perimeter of the flock and helps keep away the wolf and other animals that could threaten it.
Seen as figures, they are not the same. The first is an ornamental figure. The lambskin does not cover, does not protect, does not keep warm: it hides parts of the body and leaves others bare, it organises a showy silhouette, it evokes a distant place —the East, in the abstract— without belonging to any specific place. It is ornament. The second is a figure that belongs to the scene. The heavy mantle responds to the real cold of a December in Judaea; the gesture of wrapping himself up responds to the wind; the thick matter of the fabric folds and falls with a weight that the sculptor’s hand has had to understand before modelling. The scene holds him up, and he holds up the scene.
What is at stake between the one shepherd and the other is what in composition is called visual persuasion: the capacity of a figure to integrate into the scene around it or to give itself away as an added object. The difference is not aesthetic; it is proof. A figure coherent with its material, its climate, its gesture and its context holds; a figure without that coherence is seen to float, and the whole scene loses truth. Visual persuasion is not the subject of this chapter —it is developed in the cross-cutting block Composition—; it is named here only because it is what is at stake when the sculptor decides the material of a garment.
This repertoire can be called the palette of the nativity-scene sculptor. The metaphor comes from painting. A superficial painting manual says «oil and pigment» and goes no further; a serious manual distinguishes whether the oil is linseed, cold-pressed or hot-pressed, whether the oil is walnut or white poppy, whether it carries a cobalt drier or beeswax, whether the pigment is genuine madder lake or aniline —which will fade with time—. That degree of detail is not erudition; it is what allows the painter to decide with good grounds what he puts on each centimetre of canvas. The same happens here. It is not enough to say «wool»: one has to know whether it comes from a fat-tailed sheep or from a fine European breed, whether the fleece has been washed or is spun in the grease, whether the dye is vegetable or mineral, whether it comes from the plant or the mollusc it is assumed to come from. The palette of the nativity-scene sculptor is the repertoire with which the figure will be able to belong to the world in which it sets out to exist.
There is a consequence that should be named at the end, because it is the one that really changes things. When the sculptor has assimilated the palette —the painter’s or the sculptor’s or nativity-scene maker’s—, theory and references stop being memory and become perception. It settles into his way of looking. From then on, when he sees something that does not fit, he notices it in seconds: the eye tells him that something is wrong, that it does not add up, even before the mind can explain why.
Without that trained eye, prettiness covers up the error. Take a nativity scene set in the Baztan valley (Navarre) or in the Aosta Valley (Italy), without a single green, with palm trees beside the stable. The sculptor has modelled it with impeccable craft, the composition is elegant, the lighting works. A viewer from Sicily or from Níjar who has never set foot in either valley will celebrate it as a little gem: for him there is no absurdity, there is beauty. But put that same nativity scene in front of someone from Elizondo or from the Aosta Valley and the scene collapses. The Navarrese will no longer see the beauty, he will see the absurdity; and he will not even be able to look at the whole as before.
The same happens with the biblical nativity scene. A figure modelled with a mantle of nineteenth-century Orientalism may be celebrated by a viewer who does not know the raw materials of first-century Judaea: the image seems familiar to him, evocative, biblical. But to someone whose eye is already trained, the same figure gives away its incoherence in seconds. And, above all, the sculptor who has studied the palette will no longer be able to model the Orientalist figure: his own eye will not let him. Research does not end in data; it ends in a way of looking.
The raw materials of the first century —wool, linen, leather— are the tools the sculptor needs to know so as not to fall into the first shepherd. He does not know them because he has them in front of him; he knows them because he has studied them. Each one has its animal or its plant, its way of being produced, its physical behaviour, its range of colours, its limits. Each one folds differently, falls differently, keeps warm differently, suggests a different work. Knowing them is the condition for the figure being modelled to be capable of belonging to the scene in which it will be placed.
This block therefore goes through the raw materials of first-century clothing in the Mediterranean Levant, with particular attention to Judaea and Galilee, where the principal scenes of the Nativity cycle are set, without losing sight of the fact that not all materials came from the interior: some, such as marine purple, necessarily point to the coast and to the trade networks that connected the coastline with Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. For each one there will be set out what is known, how it is known, what material consequences it has and what it leaves to the sculptor to decide. The route goes from wool to linen and to leather, with the significant absences —cotton, not yet present as a household material; silk, whose file is closed in Jewellery and personal ornaments: savings worn on the body— named in their place. The sources and the workshop notes will appear throughout the text, not relegated to the end, because they are part of what is being set out.