Coffee Table Book of: Nativity Scenes (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Nativity Scenes is a large-format coffee table book about the nativity scene, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It goes from the stable and its carved figures to the cribs of Naples, Provence, Krakow, the Alps, Spain and the Andes, and on to living nativities and the crib through the season.

It opens with the stable and its figures: the Holy Family in carved and painted wood, an ox lying and a donkey standing on straw, a shepherd kneeling with a lamb in his arms, three kings in red, blue and green with gold crowns, and an angel with gold wings.

Then the Neapolitan crib: a grotto among broken columns, a tavern hung with hams and strings of onions, a little stall of fish, fruit, cheeses and loaves, a shepherd boy asleep on a rock of cork, two musicians, and a camel led by a groom in a turban.

Then the santons of Provence: a little village of painted card houses, a miller, a fishwife and a shepherd, a villager with both arms raised in wonder, and an open mould beside unpainted figures. Then the szopki of Krakow: towers and spires covered in coloured foil, one glowing from within in a dark room.

Then the Alps and Bohemia: a stable built like a mountain barn, a walled town of white houses with a palm tree, a whole crib in a case on the wall, and a crib of flat painted card.

Then a two-storey wooden box theatre with its puppets on wire rods.

Then carved wood and stone: the Holy Family in a honey-coloured wood with a dark wavy grain, a kneeling camel, a Holy Family of pale pink stone, a group carved from a single dark block, and a stable of bamboo with a roof of palm leaves.

Toward the end, the crib through the season: a stable with an empty manger, the infant laid in the manger, the kings walking along a shelf and offering their gifts, and the figures laid in white cloth in a box of straw.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the cribs, how they are made and the customs around them, rather than about the pictures: what the tavern of a Neapolitan crib stands for, how a box crib holds a whole crib in a case, how a vertep was played on two floors, and which box named for the patron saint of cattle came before the Ayacucho retablo.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.