Psychology of Miniatures: In Relation to Miniature Creche Settings

Psychology of Miniatures:

In Relation to Miniature Creche Settings

Article by K.R.Murdy 2022

Material culture as a field can be a problematic area to categorize. It is often applied to functional objects and used to ascertain such meanings. Miniatures and their intersections with the study of the collection, education, and popular culture are a little-explored area of research. In much of Western society, miniaturized forms such as dollhouses, dioramas, furniture, pottery, and other domestic cultures are viewed as objects of play. This is despite the consideration that many of these were historically conceived as decorative art to be collected by the adult bourgeoise. In a manner of building understanding and vocabulary around the study of miniaturization as art history and material culture phenomenon, this article utilizes a case study of the Creche/Presepe or the miniaturized Neopolitan Nativity Scene.

The Neapolitan présepe are sculptural scenes of the Nativity of Christ. While the Greccio présepe were extensive, detailed sculptures, they evolved into ⅙ scale or smaller collectible miniatures in the sixteenth century, often collected by the merchant bourgeoisie. The original large Nativities often featured the Holy family alone or with an angelic figure. The later Nativities allowed for more significant scenes, including shepherds, the Magi, and angels. At their height of popularity within Naples, the nativity had transitioned into over four to five large settings with hundreds of humans, angelic, and animal figures, as well as complete miniature architectural forms.

Roberta Catello’s essay explores the aristocratic relationship to the objects. This aristocratic involvement is seen through registered inventories like the Prince of Ischitella, Francesco Emanuele Pinto, and the Bourbon family. Both had extensive inventories and commissioned listings for présepe figures and supplemental objects. These lists also begin to provide the names of présepe artists like Domenico Antonio Vaccaro. In the case of the Bourbon family, these commission notes also included the architects, painters, and set designers who would aid in the physical arrangement of the présepe scenes. Preceding the Bourbon family’s installation of Palazzo Reale Présepe in 1844 and the demotion of Naples to a provincial capital, significant Présepe collections gradually broke up. At an undetermined date after this event, the acquisition of présepe figures became less of a relationship between patron and artist and more between antiquarian and collector. Most of these collectors were non-aristocratic, and their collections were often passed down in the family, added to, and sold off in whole or parts. The method of display also evolved.

Nineteenth-century historian Antonio Perrone wrote of prominent silversmith Vincenzo Catello’s collection “Catello displayed his figures in glass cases along the walls and the middle of a large trapezoidal room in his residence...His minor scenes were kept in glass cabinets elsewhere in the house...over time [he] linked the various scenes in the different rooms with architectural and landscape elements.” At the end of his life, Vincenzo had acquired more than a thousand figures, and with his death in 1949, the collection was split between his three sons, only one of whom continued to collect. Much of the collection, however, found homes in various Neopolitian museums. This collection aspect continued into the middle of the twentieth century, with more collectors being from a professional class. They considered collecting présepe figures and settings as saving a tradition inherent to Naples.

This providential study of patronage and collection could easily be applied to other miniaturized forms. Mon Plaisir has multiple similarities to the miniature depictions of townships and individuals as seen within the Italian présepe. Now housed in the Schlossmuseum in Arnstadt, this massive diorama was an entire miniature town constructed using multiple room boxes. It was recorded as a way to immortalize Arnstadt in the 1700s and was commissioned and overseen by the German princess Agusta Dorothea von Schwarzburg-Arnstadt. The town and surrounding countryside were constructed using over 80 room boxes and over 400 dolls. The princess borrowed and commissioned the funds and services from the Ursuline nuns. The nuns constructed the majority of the wax figure dolls and their miniature attire. The construction of Mon Plaisir involved hundreds of artisans and plunged the Princess into debt with the number of funds spent on it.

The acquisition of miniatures witnessed in Dutch cabinet houses would also be an apt point of discussion for a methodological study of patronage and collection. The Dutch created beautiful cabinets, often wooden inlaid or painted, that, when opened revealed a miniature set of rooms with furniture and figures to match. They were often a gift to a new wife of a wealthy gentleman and often sparsely furnished or utterly devoid of furnishings and fixtures. This was because often part of a gift or dowry for newlywed ladies was miniature utensils made of silver, gold, or the highly fashionable pewter and a miniature porcelain tea set or other porcelain kitchen wares. It was highly encouraged for ladies to collect and commission miniatures for their cabinets. These were often costly commissions from high-end artisans and professional artists. Many wealthy women who owned these cabinet houses kept detailed records of their commissions, alterations to the house interiors and favored craftsmen and artisans.

For both the présepe and the house miniature, another form developed alongside them as their collection continued within aristocratic, bourgeois, and modern professional classes. This form was created to sell to the general public. The producers and their patrons were less concerned with the pedigree or quality of the objects and more with their acquisition. Critics like Greenberg might categorize this transition as Kitsch, a label both the présepe and miniatures attempt to escape. In the case of the présepe, while there is no shortage of shops, particularly within the Via San Gregorio Armeno, the original threat to legitimizing the study of présepe was the Americanized Nativity scene. Within Sarah Stanbury’s essay, she emphasizes that art historians generally ignored the miniature art of the crêche due to the small, commercialized nativity figures that are especially common in the U.S. Stanbury argues that this is due to such objects being viewed as minor holiday art, Kitsch and somewhat culturally regressive.

In 1741 a group of Moravians founded the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These immigrants and others who came after them brought their crèches and their crèche traditions to Bethlehem. Neighbors began to copy their traditions, and before long, they spread to other communities. The Moravians call the crèche a “putz,” which comes from the German word putzen, meaning, “to decorate.” The putz includes the manger and the Holy Family as well as numerous figures and details of German village life, including people, animals, landscapes, and homes set among fresh moss, buildings, and water. As large numbers of Italian, Polish, Czech, and Portuguese Catholics and German Catholics and Lutherans came to America in the 19th century, nativity set traditions grew but simplified in display and figures. The Da Prato Company of Charlestown, Mass. was one of the first American companies to design and make nativity figures. By the end of the 19th century, many American stores were selling plaster and lead nativity figures with a dwindling number of background settings.

The history of the art form of the présepe being generally ignored due to its commercialized counterparts mirrors that of the current state of the miniature in the academic sphere. The collecting and commissioning of miniatures came to England in the early eighteenth century. At this time, pieces were still commissioned from individual artisans, but trinkets and novelty shops became primary sellers of the items. Miniature shops like William Hamley’s Noah’s Ark opened in 1760, catering to adult patrons. They began produce the less expensive roombox and miniatures for the lower merchant classes. With the invention of the lithograph in 1796, by1800 Hamley’s and other similar shops began to produce lithograph dollhouses. In this century, miniatures became acceptable toys for children due to their lower prices and materials. Eventually, the shops began to print catalogs that featured various lithograph dollhouse styles and even foldable houses and roomboxes, this industrialization removing the artisan producer. In both the case of the présepe and the miniature, their cheaper popularized forms are what stood at the forefront of modern minds, thus removing them from the conversation.

Within researching the sparse methodology surrounding the présepe, methods answering or even attending to my questions of: “what would compel the historical interest by producers of these objects to miniaturize them for their adult patrons?” and “Is miniaturization of material cultural objects a method discussed in essay-ship on the présepe?” was almost non-existent. Historians researching the art of the présepe do not address the miniaturized nature of the decorative figures and scenes. It is only within Stanbury’s essay that the miniaturization of the présepe is referenced; through the methodology of Susan Stewart’s writings on the miniature and longing, “Susan Stewart, who speculates that the Italian nativity scene may be the precursor of the dollhouse, argues that the drive behind its miniaturized capture of life is a nostalgic desire to freeze conflict and override class difference in a silent and uncontaminable miniature form.” She uses the ideas of nostalgia and arrested time to present the présepe’s nostalgic nature as a desire to return to a pastoral, simple past and for social and urban repair. She references the ideas of Stewart’s theories of the “arrested life” of the miniature, wherein it creates a closed circuit of longing and temporality. “That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life…a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception…a constant daydream that miniature presents.” It is presented that the “hermetic enclosure” of the miniature by nature brings about narratives that challenge the normal boundaries of time and space.

Through this reference to Susan Stewart’s work, I chose to further explore Stewart’s methodology of the miniature. Her theoretical approach explores scale and collection and our human fascination with it, from a psychological standpoint. Specifically, within her essay on the miniature, she creates a map of miniature types and their relationships to one another. Stewart begins with a discussion on micrographia or minute writing, an experimental art form involving the writing and printing of minuscule manuscripts during the fifteenth century. She recognizes that the first small books were created in the convenience of handling, only to develop smaller and smaller, beyond their purpose of readability as a demonstration of craftsmanship. This demonstration began as a physical representation of time and labor, usually lost within the initially defined scale of the item, only to be emphasized within the miniature form of the object. This collapse of physical space also created a collapse of time, labor, and celebrated new technology and the craftsman’s skills.

Beyond the miniature book, she delves into the nature of the miniature and the invention of childhood, and nostalgia for non-existent timelines. Stewart argues that “The writing of miniaturization does not want to call attention to itself…rather, it continually refers to the physical world.” in doing so, this establishes a referential field of signs, allowing the reader to disengage themselves from representation entirely. In the world of literary depictions of miniature, it displays a temporal, mystical nature of the miniaturized world. After this she begins to discuss the culmination of these ideas in other miniatures, primarily the diorama and the dollhouse, She argues that one sees the dollhouse’s origins in other objects initially intended for adult amusement, such as the fashion doll and the crêche/Presepe. She utilizes the dollhouse and room box because it is meant to be “consumed by the eye”. Extravagant displays like Princess Agusta Dorothea von Schwarzburg-Arnstadt’s Mon Plaisir represent miniature constructed imagery of an idyllic classed lifestyle. Such examples support the theory of the miniatures being used to“...stop time and thus present the illusion of a perfectly complete and hermetic world.”

Stewart’s methodology, as utilized by Stanbury, could be a promising tactic in the future discussion of miniature reproductions of material culture. While the actual essays on the présepe provided interesting methods, their limited analysis seemed unable to answer the questions being asked of miniatures. The theories of temporality and nostalgia could not only answer the questions proposed but possibly elevate such objects as the viable subjects of academic discussion, just as the présepe was elevated within the sphere of art history.

Psychology of Miniatures: In Relation to Miniature Creche Settings Article by K.R.Murdy 2022

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