Florence: an exhibition dedicated to Maria Lai's nativity scenes at the Museo Novecento

On view through March 28 is the exhibition L’anno zero, set up within the new exhibition space of the Novecento Museum in Florence called Room. Curated by Sergio Risaliti, the exhibition is dedicated to Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013), one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, focusing on nativity scenes in terracotta, stone, fabric and wood, one of the themes dearest to the artist, who was already present in Florence in the monographic exhibition Maria Lai. The Thread and the Infinite, an exhibition dedicated to her last spring at Palazzo Pitti.

With the nativities Maria Lai (who throughout her long life has devoted herself with constancy to a wholly personal research on the delicate poetry of existence) captures the very essence of the poor image of the birth of the Messiah and the adoration of shepherds and Magi taken from the Gospel, and fixes the year of his birth with an emblematic title: the year zero. Beginning of the story and vertigo of the symbol that lie at the intersection of fable and epic, earth and cosmos, human and divine. From Maria Lai’s hands come poor artifacts built with ancient wisdom, small monuments to the desire for peace and brotherhood that speak first and foremost to childhood, tiny sets that reproduce the whole world, history, dreams and utopias that endure scattered everywhere on earth, among peoples. Each nativity scene is a novel inventionthat never repeats itself and renews the original matrix, that Gospel plot that always replicates an experience of approaching the sacred, the manifestation of the god among us. “I love the crib,” the artist said, “as an experience of something that, the more I investigate its inexpressible, the more I find truth, the more childlike and naive I become, and the more I am reborn.”

The nativity scene first and foremost is for childhood, that era of life that we know never ended and never fulfilled. The small world of the nativity scene always remains poised between fable and story, between the miraculous, unique and unrepeatable fact and the everyday happening that always repeats itself: a child is born in a hovel but is the king of the world, and his mother, a beautiful girl married to a carpenter, gave birth to him as a virgin. The normal order of human events is reflected in a higher design. This echo, this resonance in the history of the sacred is what fascinates about the nativity scene. But it is a sacred that speaks in the language of the fable, for the wonder of children, and this is its affabulatory and a tad magical, enchanting power.

Giovanni Papini wrote “that without childhood no true sense of cosmicity is made possible and no poetry is given without cosmic song.” It is no accident that at the center of the crib’s perspective space is a child and at the top a star. These are two trajectories of the gaze, that of childhood and that of the cosmos, which Maria Lai always follows in her artistic and poetic journey. She has returned to it over the years with a constancy and dedication that tell how, from her point of view, that subject was an open paradigm from which to speak simple truths about human existence and the thirst for the infinite, about life and the dark presence of the unknown, about friendship and compassion, about ancestral questions and truths.

Thinking of the nativity scene in serial terms, but practicing it with the gaze of poetic childhood, Maria Lai overcomes cold conceptual execution to enter the world of pure imagination, that of figurative affabulation, crossing anthropology and metaphysics, fable and theology. In his works, the lyrical simplicity of the poet’s language, the musical bliss of the mystical soliloquy, accommodate and amplify in a prophetic sense his strong, essential, political voice, which registers great struggles and small revolutions, fears and sorrows, fratricidal wars and planetary collapses.

Maria Lai wrote, “I love the nativity scene because of the actuality of its migrations to unlikely destinations,” assigning to the fragile imaginings in terracotta and stone, cloth and wood, a political function that is expressed not with the rhetorical tone of ideology, but with the simple words and for this truly original to archaic culture.Many other statements by Maria Lai are preserved with which the artist wished to affirm her love for the nativity scene and to motivate her reasons: “I love the crib because, like art, it is the vast breath of a journey,” or “I love the crib because, like art, it dialogues with the infinite,” and contemplating one of his little cosmic theaters, in which the characters live inscribed in a portion of infinity, we imagine the road traveled by migrants Mary and Joseph, that of a comet star in the sky, the story of a god who came down to earth. An initiatory journey that is also that of the imagination and the gaze, that of the inner life, and that of the hope of a different world: “I love the nativity scene because it gathers us around the hope of a new world.” Of the fascination emanating from the crib she grasps the archetypal dimension of its staging or scenic architecture: “I love the crib because, in the darkness of the night, it becomes a womb, a refuge,” or, “I love the crib because in the space of a tabernacle it contains angels and stars, flocks and shepherds, tragedies and prophecies.” Maria Lai transforms memories and personal experiences into universal images, traditions and folk rituals of her homeland into a universal and international artistic language, “I love the nativity scene because it offers itself to all the languages of the world,” and “Like art, the nativity scene also has the possibility of infinite personal interpretations.”

For more information you can call +39 055 286132 send an email to info@muse.comune.fi.it or visit www.museonovecento.it.

Pictured: one of Maria Lai’s nativity scenes.

Florence: an exhibition dedicated to Maria Lai's nativity scenes at the Museo Novecento

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