The dossier: «The Real Decreto 481/2022: the declaration that demotes what it declares»

1. The word used only for the dead

In Spain, a Real Decreto (royal decree) is the instrument by which the Government gives legal form to an administrative declaration — in this case, the recognition of a cultural practice. The Real Decreto 481/2022, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, Spain's official state gazette (BOE no. 142, of 15 June 2022),¹ declared Belenismo — the Spanish name for nativity-scene art and practice, and the decree's own word— a «Manifestación Representativa del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial» — Representative Manifestation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage—. One does not have to be Spanish for this to matter: the same question arises in any country with a nativity-scene tradition, because the mechanism examined here is not exclusive to Spain. Whether the person who creates the figures is called a santonnier in France or something else in another language, the underlying question is identical in any language: is what is being declared heritage a tradition of craftsmen, or is the work of artists being recognised, without saying so, under a name that demotes them?

The dossier on which the decree rests — the resolution initiating the procedure (BOE no. 4, 5 January 2022)² and the final technical report of the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, the state's cultural heritage institute (IPCE, March 2022)³— commits, without meaning to, a contradiction that gives the whole problem away. In its historical part it calls eight figures of the past «escultor» — sculptor— without hesitation: Bernat Roca, Jorge Fernández, Juan Bautista Vázquez, Luisa Roldán, Francisco Salzillo, Ramón Amadeu, Domènec Talarn, Arturo Baltar.⁴ But in its operative part — the part that defines what Belenismo is, what it protects and whom it recognises— the word «escultor» disappears. Article 2 of the Real Decreto, the definition that governs everything else, does not use it even once.

Put another way: the report keeps the word «escultor» for those who are already dead, and those who today go on doing exactly the same thing, while they are alive, it calls «artesanos» — craftsmen—.

2. The compelling reason

This demotion is neither random nor the result of carelessness. It has a precise legal cause.

Spain transposed the 2003 UNESCO Convention into its legal order through the Ley 10/2015, de 26 de mayo, para la Salvaguardia del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial — the law of 26 May 2015 for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage—.⁵ That Convention organises intangible heritage into five domains, and no more: oral traditions and expressions; performing arts; social practices, rituals and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship. Among the five there is no domain for authored visual creation. UNESCO itself explains why: the Convention «is mainly concerned with the skills and knowledge involved in craftsmanship rather than the craft products themselves»⁶ — what interests it is the skills and knowledge handed down, not the pieces that result from them.

For nativity-scene art and practice to enter that Convention, it had to do so through the only door available: as a tradition of transmitted craft skill, not as a discipline of authored creation. The decree does not invent the demotion: it inherits it from the only legal pigeonhole it had.

And yet there was room not to commit it. Article 2 of the Ley 10/2015 itself defines intangible cultural heritage on the basis of community recognition and transmission between generations, but without expressly denying that, «en algunos casos» — in some cases—, it is particular individuals who sustain a practice. The law did not require the individual to be erased; the Real Decreto had that room and did not use it.

The expression «transmitted skill» deserves a closer look, because it is the heart of the UNESCO definition and the decree inherits it without examining it. The phrase assumes an unbroken chain: a master teaches a technique, the apprentice receives it, repeats it, and one day passes it on in turn. But not even the reproduction of a nativity figure — let alone its invention, which is another matter— sustains that chain. Materials and procedures change with the industrial technology of each period; they are not handed down from parents to children: the plaster mould gives way to the silicone mould;⁷ ceramic plasters are reformulated to make casting easier; carving by hand coexists first with the pointing machine⁸ and later with laser or computer guidance; today, 3D modelling and 3D printing or milling start from an OBJ or STL file that did not exist a generation ago. Whoever reproduces a nativity figure today did not learn the technique from their father: they learnt, all over again, the technique of their own time. That is not a transmitted tradition; it is a technology that replaces itself every few decades, and that each generation learns again from scratch.

A comparison with two other modern practices of image-making helps to show the mechanism. Photography and film can be made today with a mobile phone, without a workshop, without a master, without a guild — and it occurs to nobody to call «image craft» the work of a photographer or a film-maker who exhibits or screens that work as their own creation. What decides whether a practice is art or craft is not the age of the technique, nor the existence of a manual trade behind it: it is whether the person who practises it is granted, or denied, the act of invention that comes before it.

3. What if the criterion were the family?

If «transmitted skill» does not withstand technical scrutiny, a second hypothesis remains, and this one need not be supposed: the technical report itself states it, saying of the «artesanos y fabricantes de figuras» — craftsmen and makers of figures— that «los conocimientos suelen transmitirse de una generación a otra en el seno de grupos familiares» — knowledge is usually passed on from one generation to the next within family groups—.⁹ Perhaps what the decree protects is not the technique of reproduction but the family transmission of the trade — the workshop that passes from parents to children—. It deserves to be tested with names.

Annex 1 of the report («Talleres de producción», production workshops, 2022) records sixty active entries under the strict category of «Artesanos figuristas» — craftsman figure-makers—. Among them, and in the body of the report, only three workshops can be linked by documents to a dynasty of more than one generation:

• Carratalà: Lluís Carratalà i Vila (1895-1991) and his daughter Montserrat Carratalà i Molleví (1924-2009), both of them figure-makers — the report itself says so in those words («y su hija» — and his daughter—).⁹ Neither of them appears any longer in Annex 1 of 2022: the dynasty has no active continuity today.
• Jiménez Rada / Mariscal: Antonio Jiménez Rada (1873-1949), «cuya obra fue continuada por su hijo» — whose work was continued by his son— José Jiménez Mariscal (1909-1995) — the «Rada e hijo» workshop, Rada and Son, in Granada.⁹ Annex 1 of 2022 lists «Artesanía Jiménez Mariscal. Granada» as an active workshop, but the report does not say whether a descendant runs it today.
• Castells: three documented generations — the grandfather, a wood sculptor who turned to clay figures; three sons, of whom Martí Castells i Martí (1915-1995) is the «escultor figuraire» — sculptor and figure-maker— named in the report; and a third generation that still appears in Annex 1 of 2022 under Barcelona. A monograph devoted entirely to this family — Germans Castells, art i figures per al pessebre (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2018)¹⁰— sums up its course like this: «Milers de figures han sortit de les mans dels sis components d'aquesta nissaga de grans artesans» — thousands of figures have come from the hands of the six members of this dynasty of great craftsmen—. Three generations, a book published by the Generalitat itself that praises them without reserve — and not once does it call them artists or sculptors. The same gesture this chapter criticises, this time in the source that honours them most.

The rest of the sixty entries are not linked to any dynasty in the sources reviewed, which does not prove that they have none: Annex 1 gives no genealogical information about anyone. This Manual does not count how many dynasties there are or what proportion they represent, because the count would say nothing either way. What can be said is what a dynasty passes on and what it does not.

What is passed on in a family workshop is the moulds, the clientele and an established name. That makes access to the trade easier, and it is no small thing; but it is exactly what a master's workshop passed on to its apprentices, which has been the general way of learning sculpture throughout its history — the chapter on the sculptor documents this with the discipline's own sources in hand—.¹¹ The dynasty is a particular case of that pattern, not something else: what forms the sculptor is the workshop, not the blood. And there is something prior to the workshop that is neither inherited nor taught: wanting to be one. If the dynasty guaranteed anything, whoever lacks one could not learn the trade, and they do learn it; and the descendant who does not follow it would have lost something, and has lost nothing, because there was nothing to inherit. What remains today of many dynasties, moreover, is not sculptors but workshops that keep the moulds of an earlier sculptor and go on reproducing them: that is reproduction, not dynasty, and the decree itself would mistake it for «transmitted skill».

And if family transmission were really the criterion that decides whether a trade is craft and not art, it would have to be applied to the sculptor the dossier itself displays as its summit: Francisco Salzillo was the son of the Italian Nicolás Salzillo and «creció entre los útiles del taller de su padre» — grew up among the tools of his father's workshop—.¹² That is a dynasty, and nobody calls Salzillo a craftsman for it. The same holds outside sculpture: the Bach family produced 53 musicians — organists, cantors, town musicians— over some 300 years and seven generations, from Veit Bach (d. 1619), Johann Sebastian's among them.¹³ No source calls them «craftsmen of scores»: they are described as a «hereditary art, which culminated in the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach»¹³ — an art, not a trade, and one that culminates in a genius. The longest and best-documented family transmission in the history of music never led anyone to call what it produced a craft. The label is not decided by the genealogy of whoever makes the work.

4. Labourer, craftsman, artist

Two questions that the decree merges into one need to be separated: who makes the object, and with what degree of invention they make it.

A saying, wrongly attributed for years to Marco Pierre White or to Saint Francis of Assisi, put it precisely as early as 1916: an anonymous version published in the newspaper American Falls Press (Idaho, 16 March 1916) distinguished between «he who works with his hands» (the labourer), «he who works with his head and his hands» (the craftsman) and «he who works with his head, hand and heart» (the artist). The lawyer Louis Nizer popularised it in 1948, in his book Between You and Me, in almost identical words.¹⁴ What separates the three is not the tool, nor the material, nor whether the result is repeated: it is how much head, hand and heart goes into what they do.

Where that line is drawn outside the nativity scene — in the official vocabulary of sculpture, which distinguishes the author from the executant by the fact of having conceived the model; in the dictionary of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, which defines craft by the repetition of pieces and places sculpture among the fine arts; and in the practice of artists themselves, who publish prints and sculptures in numbered editions without ceasing to be their authors— is developed in the chapter on the sculptor, and is recapitulated here in two sentences. What makes an object craft is not that it is repeated, but that there is no original behind it conceived by anyone: the espadrille maker repeats a type of espadrille, not a work of his own. When what is repeated is an original — a numbered print by Goya, a sculpture published in a limited edition, a nativity figure reproduced from a mould—, the repetition is the edition of a work, and the work remains its author's.¹⁵

The distinction is easier to grasp with an example from the trade itself. Making a clog or an espadrille requires following a technique already learnt and repeating it: there is no invention in each piece, and that technique can indeed be passed on from one generation to the next without more ado. But creating a new figure — a different pose, a different trade, a gesture that did not exist before— first requires an artistic mental act that was not there. Only after that act does someone take the mould, someone else reproduce, someone else fire, someone else paint. That later chain is indeed made up of operatives, of craftsmen if you like — but the first link, the one that brings into existence the figure the others will repeat, is the sculptor. What is inherited in a family workshop — moulds, firing, painting, management— is not the act of inventing a new pose, which still requires, for every figure, that first individual link. It is exactly this merger — invention and execution under a single word— that Article 2 of the Real Decreto commits when it speaks of «el arte de fabricar las figuras del Belén a través de sus artesanos» — the art of making the figures of the nativity scene through its craftsmen—: it leaves no room for the moment when the figure, before being made, first has to exist in someone's head.

And this does not depend on fame: the condition of artist is not a licence granted by an outside authority, but something one takes on and that others recognise, or do not, over time — this is taken up again further on, with names.

5. Another axis of confusion: quality is not category

One more axis needs to be distinguished, because the error is not made by the decree alone: it also happens within the trade itself. Some collectors call the nativity figures they consider of poor quality «cacharrería» — junk—, so as to reduce their artistic level to a bare minimum. But that phenomenon — the existence of weak work within a discipline— occurs in all the arts without exception, and in none of them is it concluded from this that the whole discipline is craft.

The American art critic Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay «Avant-Garde and Kitsch», took up the term «kitsch», which German had used since the last quarter of the 19th century, precisely to name cultural production of low quality and doubtful taste¹⁶ — but he did so within painting, and it occurred to nobody, on that account, to reduce the whole of painting to craft. The French painter Jean Dubuffet coined the term «art brut» in 1945 to classify a kind of work made outside academic conventions, often by people with no training¹⁷ — and he went on calling it art, not craft, because what distinguishes one category from another is not the level of finish, but the nature of the act from which it springs.

The quality of a particular work is a judgement made within a discipline, about that work; it does not decide which discipline the work belongs to. A weak nativity figure is still weak sculpture, just as a weak painting is still weak painting. Confusing the two judgements — that of quality and that of category— is another, quieter form of the same demotion that the Real Decreto commits.

6. What Article 2 says, word for word

It is worth reading Article 2 of the Real Decreto 481/2022 word for word, without paraphrase, because it is the text that defines — and therefore governs— everything else:

«Por tanto, el Belenismo sería, por una parte, el arte de fabricar las figuras del Belén a través de sus artesanos, y por otra, el colectivo especializado en armar o montar el Belén, empleando ciertos conocimientos y destrezas, en un proceso en el que se aplican técnicas y prácticas tradicionales y actuales.» — Therefore Belenismo would be, on the one hand, the art of making the figures of the nativity scene through its craftsmen, and, on the other, the specialised group that assembles or sets up the nativity scene, using certain knowledge and skills, in a process in which traditional and current techniques and practices are applied.—¹

Read the first half again: «el arte de fabricar las figuras del Belén a través de sus artesanos» — the art of making the figures of the nativity scene through its craftsmen—. The subject of the art is not the person who conceives the figure: it is the making itself, and whoever carries it out is named a craftsman, not an author. The word «escultor» — the same word the report uses without hesitation for Salzillo, Roldán or Amadeu a few pages earlier— does not appear even once in the article that defines, today, what making a nativity figure consists of.

7. The report's two groups

On its pages 4 and 5, the technical report distinguishes two groups within nativity-scene art and practice, and the contrast in how it describes each of them is revealing:

«En el primer grupo, formado por los artesanos y fabricantes de figuras y demás elementos del Belén, los conocimientos suelen transmitirse de una generación a otra en el seno de grupos familiares o talleres, siguiendo una trayectoria estilística mantenida con escasas variaciones a través del tiempo [...]. El segundo grupo, formado por diseñadores y montadores, no siempre procede de una formación consuetudinaria como en el caso anterior, sino que se corresponde con personas creadoras, profesionales, en las que confluyen ciertos conocimientos de historia, paisajismo, decoración, diseño, electricidad, pintura, fontanería, albañilería, carpintería, matemáticas y botánica.» — In the first group, made up of the craftsmen and makers of figures and other elements of the nativity scene, knowledge is usually passed on from one generation to the next within family groups or workshops, following a stylistic path maintained with few variations over time [...]. The second group, made up of designers and assemblers, does not always come from customary training as in the previous case, but corresponds to creative people, professionals, in whom a certain knowledge of history, landscaping, decoration, design, electricity, painting, plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry, mathematics and botany comes together.—³

Whoever makes the figure is described as inheriting a path «con escasas variaciones a través del tiempo» — with few variations over time—. The scenographer, on the other hand, is called a «persona creadora, profesional» — a creative person, a professional—. The same sentence that denies invention to the first grants it without reserve to the second, a few lines further on.

8. Types of nativity scenes, without sculptors

A few pages further on, the report classifies nativity scenes by their style of construction. It distinguishes «populares (domésticos)» — popular (domestic)— from «artísticos» — artistic— and describes the latter as «obra de belenistas profesionales, con técnicas y materiales que permiten una representación lo más realista y detallada posible» — the work of professional nativity-scene makers, with techniques and materials that allow as realistic and detailed a representation as possible—.¹⁸

Among the styles listed there appears, with no apparent irony, the «Salzillesco» — named, literally, after Francisco Salzillo, the same sculptor whom the report calls «escultor» without hesitation a few pages earlier. The style that bears his name enters the report's technical classification as a category of serial production, alongside the «popular Murciano» or the «Olotense»¹⁸ — but at no point in this section, nor in those that define what Belenismo is, does the word «escultor» reappear for anyone working in that style today.

9. The fault line, with names

Let us go back to the eight names that the report itself calls «escultor», without qualification, in its historical part: Bernat Roca, author of a nativity group around the middle of the 14th century; Jorge Fernández, who carved two nativity groups in 1513, now lost; Juan Bautista Vázquez; Luisa Roldán; Francisco Salzillo (1707-1783), who in 1776 was commissioned to make the nativity scene now kept in the Museo Salzillo in Murcia; Ramón Amadeu i Grau (1745-1821); Domènec Talarn; and Arturo Baltar (1924-2017), author of the Ourense nativity scene.⁴ Not once does it call any of the eight a craftsman.

It might be objected that calling them «escultor» is not a concession on the report's part, but a fact already settled by art history before the report was written. That is true. But that is precisely what needs looking at closely: no authority granted them that standing at the time they were working. Art history came to recognise it with the passing of time, work by work, without there being — then or now— any body that certifies who is a sculptor and who is a craftsman, in the same way that there is no examination that certifies who is a writer, painter, photographer, ceramist, actor or dancer. There lies the difference from professions such as medicine or engineering, which do require a qualification to practise: in art, one grants the standing to oneself, and it is others — time, criticism, the public— who confirm or deny it.

Vincent van Gogh sold very few paintings in his lifetime and died with hardly anyone recognising him as the artist nobody disputes today.¹⁹ Nobody decreed his standing as a painter in 1890; art history came to recognise it afterwards, in no hurry at all. The difference between Van Gogh and a nativity-figure sculptor alive today is not one of nature — both create an original work from a mental act of their own—; it is one of time: the first has already been given his time by history; the second is denied it by the report, by decree, without even being left the possibility that the time may come.

10. A recent case of the same fault line

The person who signs this Manual serves here only as an example, because his is the case he knows best and the only one he can document at first hand; what is said of him applies to anyone in the same annex. Annex 1 of the technical report of the RD 481/2022 catalogues him, in the category of «Artesanos figuristas» — craftsman figure-makers— for Catalonia, as «Emili Solé Carcolé. Riudaura. Girona»²⁰ — without distinguishing, as throughout the list, between the unique piece and serial production, and without anyone first asking him whether his name should appear in a dossier at all, or under what word. If the report's criterion were really reproduction, that name could not be there: in 2022, the man catalogued as an «artesano figurista» had never taken a mould from a nativity figure; all his nativity work up to 2021 had consisted of unique pieces, with no series and no repetition. Only since that year, when he took up digital modelling, have his figures allowed reproduction, and that reproduction is limited to eight copies, which is the number the discipline of sculpture records as the usual limit of a serial edition and the one Spanish tax law sets for the casts of a sculpture to count as art objects.²¹ His training is that of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona — a university degree, on a par with any other, not a guild apprenticeship—, he has public and private sculpture to his name, and his collectors regard him as a sculptor. Four years later, the list of exhibitors at the XI Feria Internacional de Belenismo (Alcobendas, 2026), organised by the Grupo Artes Belenistas — «Artesanos y Escultores», craftsmen and sculptors—, presents him as «Escultor figuras para Belén» — sculptor, figures for nativity scenes— (Emili Solé Carcolé, Riudaura, Gerona).²²

Two documents, four years apart, describe the same person doing the same work with two incompatible words. The contradiction does not lie in him: it lies in the fact that the word each document applies to him depends on who is cataloguing, not on what he does.

11. Reductio ad absurdum: Salzillo

Let us apply, then, the Real Decreto's own operative definition to the work that serves as the canonical reference of the whole European nativity-scene tradition: the nativity scene of Francisco Salzillo (1707-1783), commissioned in 1776 and now kept in the Museo Salzillo in Murcia.⁴

According to Article 2 of the Real Decreto itself, Belenismo is «el arte de fabricar las figuras del Belén a través de sus artesanos» — the art of making the figures of the nativity scene through its craftsmen—.¹ Applied literally, that definition turns Salzillo — the same man the report calls «escultor», as seen in section 9— into a craftsman maker of figures. His work, the very one that gives its name to an entire style («Salzillesco») classified in the report's own list of types,¹⁸ would be described, under the definition that today governs the legal recognition of nativity-scene art and practice, in the same terms as any serial figure out of an industrial mould.

Nobody would seriously maintain that Salzillo's nativity scene is craft and not sculpture. But that is exactly what follows, without forcing anything, from applying to it the definition the State itself has laid down by decree for everything that is still being made today in that same trade. If the definition failed only for Salzillo, it would be a slip. It fails for Salzillo, for Roldán, for Amadeu, for Talarn, for Baltar — for the eight names that the same report calls sculptors without hesitation. The definition does not have an exception; it has a blind spot, and that blind spot falls exactly on those who are alive today doing the same as they did.

12. Closing

Nativity-scene art does not need this decree to deserve recognition. It deserves it like any art — painting, sculpture, poetry, printmaking, ceramics—, none of which has, or needs, a declaration of intangible cultural heritage to uphold its standing as art. The problem with this Real Decreto is not its brevity: it is that, however brief, what it says is wrong — it is a text squeezed into the only legal pigeonhole available, that of traditional craftsmanship, for a practice that in its origin, in its finest example and in its mechanism of creation is every bit as artistic as any of those others.

Naming precisely is not a rhetorical whim. It is the least that is owed to whoever, today, goes on doing what Salzillo did, and to whoever history — if it gives them the time the decree denied them— will tomorrow also end up calling a sculptor.

References