CRÈCHE DIVIDES VATICAN
Eccentric Nativity scene infuriates conservatives, baffles public.
VATICAN CITY — A couple stood in front of the Vatican’s new Christmas Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square, trying to understand exactly what they were looking at.
The three wise men — lifesize and cylindrical — looked as if constructed from ceramic oil drums. Joseph and Mary, likewise torpedo-shaped, seemed like enormous, Biblethemed Weebles. Two enigmatic, totemic figures stood in the middle of the platform. One held a shield and a decorative spear and had for a head what appeared to be an overturned cauldron, carved like an angry Halloween jacko’-lantern; the other wore an astronaut’s helmet and held the cratered moon in its hands.
“That one there?” Giorgio Banti, 71, asked his wife, Anita, as they gazed at the figures Wednesday morning. She shrugged and read the informational poster: “First landing on the moon.”
Every year, the Vatican unveils a different Nativity scene, usually donated by an Italian town, to be displayed next to the ancient obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square. Last year’s artists sculpted the holy family, the Magi, angels and donkeys out of 720 tons of beach sand. The one in 2017 highlighted works of mercy, with a man visiting a prison cell and another burying a shrouded body (complete with a dangling pale arm). In 2016, the display featured a Maltese fishing boat meant to evoke the travails of refugees.
This year, the Vatican went in another direction, toward Castelli, a town in the Abruzzo region of central-eastern Italy.
Between 1965 and 1975, students and teachers at a local art school there sought to revive that tradition by using ancient coiling techniques — rings of ceramic stacked in sections like marble columns — to create more than 50 Christmas-themed figures.
The reviews haven’t been so hot.
“It’s hideous,” said Mrs. Banti, who looked at the ceramic menagerie — chicks that looked like fallen meteorites, a camel made of ceramic cubes — with horror.