Archetypal dream images

This Christmas season, the Council for Culture and the Arts clearly sought to sponsor more artistically creative events, especially musical, than in previous years. Gone is last year's live crib on the site of the ruins of the Opera House, but directly facing it, in the courtyard of the Social Policy Ministry, there is on exhibition a Neapolitan crib, with the Nativity placed on the site of a ruined classical temple. Did it give you a similar impression to last year's placing the Birth of Christ in the midst of Barry's fallen columns?

There is an undoubted interest in seeing the crib that Fr Edgar Vella and his collaborators have been putting up over the past few years with increasing sophistication. The crib is very different from the ones you see either in gestation all the year round in a particular quarter of Naples or at Christmas time usually in the crypts of churches. You only see the classic, 18th century type of crib with its tripartite composition of the Annunciation to the shepherds on one side, the Nativity in the middle and a Tavern scene of indifferent revellers on the other side nowadays in museums or exclusive private collections.

When I was looking at the crib in Palazzo Ferreria in Valletta, there was a Neapolitan present who loudly expressed his disappointment at not seeing a figure of Berlusconi with his smashed face. This is because the 21st Century Neapolitan crib is marked by the setting being almost totally contemporary with the inclusion of figures in the news.

I remember once seeing a crib in Naples which included the figure of Edoardo de Filippo in a nightgown, referring to his comedy Natale in Casa Cappello. Another time there was a figure of Che Guevara.

The characteristic setting of the modern Neapolitan crib is that of a descending route, sometimes in spiral form, from city heights down to a darkness-wrapped cavern at the very bottom, where the Nativity is taking place inconspicuously. In the underground levels of the churches the crib is often a life-sized labyrinth in which the visitor steps in between static human figures and live animals, a few donkeys as well as many sheep.

The defining aspect of the contemporary Neapolitan crib is its representation of the chaoticity of our times suspended, as it were, for a brief intermission of eternal peace, with Christmas meaning that this intersection of the timeless with time can occur whenever we open our eyes to the divine epiphany.

Why has the crib retained its appeal even when cities like Naples are overrun by Mafia-type organisations and by atheist campaigners?

The crib has been compared by writers like Roberto De Simone to a summary display of archetypal images such as those that recur in dreams almost at all times. Take, for instance, the windmill that is often a feature of the Neapolitan crib that has also been inherited by the Maltese traditional crib. Most obviously the movement of the sails of the windmill evoke the wheel of time, but the massive grindstone with which the wheat is crushed into flour is an ancient symbol of death.

That symbolism is the generally unsuspected origin of why the circus clown counterpoised to the Auguste is white-faced. The impression of flour coating is a semi-secret allusion to mortality. But, of course, the meaning is reversed when Christ gives Himself as the Bread of Life.

The dark, cavern-like location of the Nativity evokes the unconscious depths out of which the images that embody the most profound human aspirations emerge. Christ is perceived as being born on the threshold between chaos and mystery, between death and the Divine, on a twilight boundary zone. It is this more popular and less elegant version of the Neapolitan crib that others have set up in Malta in the wake of Fr Edgar's pioneering efforts.

Does the classic Neapolitan crib have any particular relevance to Malta today?

According to Joseph Muscat, who besides being an internationally-known expert on Malta's marine heritage, is also both a historian and a creative producer of the Maltese crib, the oldest surviving crib in Malta is that at the Benedictine nuns' St Peter's Monastery in Mdina. I am not sure but it may well be yet another of the Blessed Adeodata Pisani's unappreciated, important contributions to Maltese culture derived from her Neapolitan background, just as her key role in the creation of a Maltese lace-making tradition has remained almost totally unrecognised. However beautiful this crib is, it does not represent the classical, 18th century quality model that Fr Vella's has.

He has enabled the Maltese public to see the classic source of our crib tradition. It is obviously mediated through later Neapolitan and even more through Sicilian developments that the model reached Malta.

Here the product was simplified even more. Although such master craftsman of papier-mâché as Carlo Darmanin and the Cospicua confectioner Giusti achieved a huge reputation for their pasturi, they attempted to reach neither the intellectual nor the aesthetic quality of the work that Fr Vella is showing us. However, their very crudity perhaps allowed the Maltese product to be more expressive of the unreflected if not altogether unconscious force of the crib archetypes.

The clay figures (in contrast with the intricate inner construction of the 18th Century Neapolitan ones) communicate a very earthy feel complemented by the more supernatural or ethereal wax figures (of the Baby Jesus or the Dove representing the Holy Spirit that used to hover over Our Lady). Many examples of the great variety of Maltese cribs typically conceived to be placed on tables were on exhibition both in the crypt of St Francis (thanks to the Friends of the Crib Association active for more than a score of years now) and at the Tourism Ministry.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.