San Marino. “An unattractive and ungainly crib”
Don Mangiarotti rejected the preparation of the Nativity scene as part of the 2021 edition of the Christmas of Wonders, judging it “clumsy and frankly not very beautiful”.
“A Republic founded by a saint A Republic that is in the council of nations. A Republic proud of its history and origins, which would have been left free” ab utroque “by its founder, for the sake of its originality – writes Don Mangiarotti in His reflection – Now we would not want a Republic that makes the original act of European civilization, the Incarnation of Christ, a story that can be presented with works that have very little artistic and very much superficiality.
I happened to pass into the city where it seems that something is being set up in the public space that should be linked to the “Christmas of Wonders” initiative.
They are frankly not very beautiful images, which would reproduce the Nativity scene with somewhat clumsy puppets.
But perhaps the wonder, or rather the bewilderment, lies in the reduction of the feast of Christmas, with the tradition inaugurated by St. Francis of the nativity scene, in a childish and trivially reductive image.
Talking and reflecting on Christmas would require, even in the context of a commercial enterprise, the ability to show the value and originality of a mystery that has fascinated men and children for the amazement and wonder of a unique and unimaginable event.
Shouldn’t public communication serve to raise man’s gaze?
Or let’s think, after the invasion of obscene posters of “gay pornography” that invaded the streets of our Republic throughout the year, that by now the San Marino people know how to digest everything, accepting uncritically what is proposed, due to a misunderstood sense of ” indisputability of art “?
Once an ad in the Aosta Valley advertised a bitter that would “make us digest even the mother-in-law”. That we also need a special bitter here that makes us accept the trivialization of Christmas as it has made us forget the ugliness passed off as art of posters, moreover, ugly and winking at a diversity that deserves respect and not mouth-watering reproductions?
A few years ago, Marko Ivan Rupnik bitterly noted that:
Once the faith in Europe inspired the whole culture, like a leaven.
And, even further back, at the beginning of Christianity, a small, persecuted and extremely varied, assorted Christian community, without any historical identity and without belonging to any culture, unhinged the powerful classical educational system, which had conquered and subjected all other cultural traditions …
Today, however, we are ape the world in almost everything […]. (MARKO IVAN RUPNIK, The art of life: the everyday in beauty, Lipa, Rome 2011, p.17)
John Paul II recalls, in his splendid Letter to artists: «The beauty that we transmit to the generations of tomorrow is such as to arouse amazement in them! Faced with the sacredness of life and the human being, faced with the wonders of the universe, the only adequate attitude is that of amazement.
From here, from the astonishment, the enthusiasm of which Norwid speaks in his poem “Beauty is to excite at work, work is to resurrect” can spring. The people of today and tomorrow need this enthusiasm to face and announce the crucial challenges that are on the horizon. Thanks to it, humanity, after every loss, will still be able to get up and resume its journey. In this sense it has been said with profound intuition that “beauty will save the world” ».
This is what we expect from works of art, and if public space is filled with them, then there will still be hope for all of us.