The Gothic nativity scene by Michele Massari

Michele Massari was a multifaceted artist, able to range from painting to sculpture with the same expressive depth, also venturing into decorative works (he painted the walls and vaults of many palaces in Lecce and, among others, the historian and now disappeared Buda bar in piazza Sant'Oronzo), engraving, papier-mâché, glass, terracotta and wrought iron. During the Fascist period he refused to take the party card and for this he lost his job as a teacher at the art institute. The nativity scene on display, like many of his works, subverts the iconographic, narrative, stylistic and formal narrative canons, and presents various ideas for reflection and social and political criticism, recalibrating the common markedly religious value typical of the genre.

Immersed in a Shakespearean setting, with clear references to late medieval Nordic culture, the composition, only part of the complete work, puts the Nativity in the background, placing the procession of the Magi at the center. "The cavalcade of the Magi, rendered in the sixteenth-century style even in the minutiae, even in the armor, in the clothes, in the harness of the horses, etc.", we read in the motivation of the award that the Chamber of Commerce of Lecce awarded him in 1947, "it is so supremely suggestive to leave us a lasting impression of majesty, grandeur and poetry, produced in spite of the small size of the puppets. Some of these (the one that blows on the hands for the cold with the head nestled between the shoulders, the one that whips two leopards on a leash, the one that lights up the road with the lantern, and others) are real works of sculpture, however, treated with a brush in an inimitable way ".

The crib can be visited according to the opening hours of the Charles V Castle: from Monday to Friday 9-21; Saturday and Sunday 9.30-21.

Info: 0832/246517.