Images in a strangely familiar new world.

Whilst I enjoyed the Easter Eve service from Kings College Chapel on BBC 2, recorded before so many people had died and before we were all confined to our homes, it felt unreal. The grandiose setting didn’t relate to the everyday realities of our lives in the here and now. We haven’t been able to celebrate Easter or Passover in our churches or synagogues or with family meals and celebrations.  Our Muslim neighbours can’t celebrate Ramadan with nightly gatherings and communal meals, or gather to pray in the Mosque. 

All of us, wether religious or secular can only take part in communal celebration via Zoom, Skype, Facebook, YouTube or a myriad of competing social networks. Claire Balding and other familiar figures appear on TV to teach people like my husband, who previously shunned technology and derided social media, to use these as a lifeline to communicate with distant or  vulnerable family members. Many of us use these means to join our religious communities, classes or meetings.

Easter was a very present experience for the disciples, Mary meeting the gardener, the walkers on the road to Emmaus, friends gathered in an upper room. This Easter and Passover we have seen our online celebrants in their kitchens and living rooms, just as we have been seeing our politicians, celebrities and sports stars at home on television.

We have experienced the ordinariness of participating in religious and cultural festivals from our own homes, surrounded by pets, toys, foodstuffs, cooking pots, sofas, cushions and duvets. The Easter and Exodus messages are reaching those parts of our lives which we normally leave behind when we don respectable clothes and head out to celebrate with our communities. 

I’ve particularly loved celebrating Holy Communion with an iPad on the breakfast or supper table and picking up the bread, toast, pita, crispbread or whatever was to hand to break and share - just as Jesus would have shared the bread of the disciples Passover meal. I think I’ve been able to experience the Christian story in its Jewish roots and context more clearly than I ever did before. The Exodus story has become more significant as I wonder what will become the “New Normal”. The present situation has allowed for greater detail and intimacy, a friend shared her excitement at seeing decoration on ancient scrolls, picked up by the camera but which she’d never have spotted if she was present in a crowded synagogue. 

This experience of the sacred in the familiar took me back to my first trip to Naples. My friend had driven us to Pompeii and on the way back unexpectedly turned into the city and up a steep road from where we had the most astounding view of Vesuvius and the bay of Naples. I was tired and engrossed in my deliciously cold iced latte when I realised that she was chatting to Michael Palin, who had arrived with a film crew to get shots for a documentary about the abused and largely forgotten artist Artemesia Gentileschi, contemporary of Caravaggio. 

(Note: Artemisia has now become much more well known and the National Gallery will show an exhibition of her work when they reopen)

We headed into the coolness of the building behind us, where once again we found Michael Palin as he shared our fascination with the spectacular array of presepe for which the Museum of San Martino is famous. These are enormous complex nativity scenes, many the size of a room in which people could eat or sleep. In each a whole landscape has been built and the familiar figures of the nativity are found amongst scenes from everyday life in the surrounding villages. Horses pulling a simple plough, donkeys carrying household goods, the baker making bread and the cobbler repairing shoes, the old couple looking lovingly at one another as their grandchildren play nearby, the family roasting meat on a spit and sharing a meal. Three kings from the east walking their laden camels along the village street with nobody showing a flicker of surprise.  

These 18th century Neapolitan presepe are quite different to the smaller more familiar nativity scenes which came to the UK from Northern Italy, Germany and Austria. The nearest British art I have seen are the 1920’s  paintings of Sir Stanley Spencer (Tate Britain) who portrays Jesus carrying his cross through the throng of activity on Cookham High Street and the dead being raised to new life when the opened graves open in the local churchyard reveal biblical figures alongside people known to the artist, including his wife and a self-portrait.

On a recent trip I visited the great church of Santa Chiara in the centre of Naples. The 14th century church with baroque embellishments, was destroyed by allied bombing in WW2 but rebuilt like a Phoenix and consecrated by the Pope in 1953, amidst national celebrations. Unbelievably the majestic cloisters, built on the ancient remnants of a Greek, pre-Roman bathing complex survived the wartime assault. The unique decorations are another example of the profane amidst the sacred. The enclosed nuns had longed for knowledge of the world outside, so the ceramic artists had painted village and farming scenes, some quite unexpected for a religious order, into magnificent Majolica panels. There in a room adjoining the cloister I found another enormous presepe.  Because protective glass panels make good amateur photography impossible, I treated myself to the purchase of an online professional image of this. 

(To be concluded) Jan Loxley Blount 03/05/2020 

Here are two museum notes: 

• Of course, the baby Jesus and the Madonna, who is worshipped in Naples, play an important role here as well, but these figurines are not in the centre of interest in the Neapolitan nativity scene. For example, it is perfectly okay to place a farmer’s wife cooking spaghetti next to the three Magi. (Museum of San Martino)
• In 18th-century Naples, renowned sculptors and painters were employed by aristocratic patrons, including the Neapolitan King, to create figures and backdrops for magnificent presepie. These tableaux were highly detailed and theatrical in design, incorporating not just biblical stories but vignettes of everyday life in Naples – street-sellers, beggars, market and town folk would rub shoulders with shepherds, the three Magi (Kings) and the holy family amid an architectural backdrop of taverns and ruined temples.(V&A)