Visions Across Time: The Birth of the Presepio

Harleen Kaur Bagga

My project contributes to a new theory of the life-size in religious art from the Italian peninsula. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, artists began to render bodies that were neither colossal nor miniature but had dimensions that imitated life. This decision was not an arbitrary one. I demonstrate the relevance and effects of such life-sized figures by focusing on polychromatic wooden and terracotta sculptures in Lombardy (Sacro Monte of Varallo), the sculpted compianti (Lamentation) groups of Emilia-Romagna, and the presepio (Nativity) genre of Naples. 
By examining these sculptural tableaux, I uncover how the scale of the life-size was intricately connected with theological and philosophical debates surrounding the soul. At a time when the borders of the known world were expanding, people started debating which bodies were allowed to have souls. This is evident from Christopher Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World: “let Christ rejoice upon Earth as he rejoices in Heaven, as he foresees that so many souls of so many people heretofore lost are to be saved.” Soon after, Pinturicchio added figures of these newly discovered “Amerasian” people to the fresco depicting the Resurrection of Christ in the Vatican’s Borgia Apartments, alluding to Pope Alexander VI’s agenda of converting and redeeming hitherto non-Christian souls. Curiously, the indigenous people at Christ’s feet were so small that they remained hidden for centuries before a 2006 restoration brought them to light. Their small scale rendered them literally invisible.
When Amerigo Vespucci sailed to the Americas, he too was invested in the question of souls. But this time, the emphasis was also on what the native peoples believed about their own souls. In a 1502 letter to his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, he lamented that the indigenous people “understand nothing of the immortality of the soul.” Vespucci’s insistence on the soul’s temporal dimension betrays a widespread concern raging across Europe. It was precisely in these decades that the Church attempted to logically justify its stance on the immortal nature of the soul. The imperative to establish this immortality was tied to the Church’s other teaching since how could there be purgatory, indulgences, or even the very need for the Church to act as a mediating body if the soul was not immortal? 
On the eve of the Reformation, the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) issued the papal bull Apostolici Regiminis. In defending the soul’s immortality, the bull claimed that the soul was the very ‘form’ of the body. This emphasis on form recalled Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism, which stated that living beings were animate because of their ‘form’, meaning essentially their anima or soul. On the basis of a reading of texts such as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Pietro Pomponazzi’s Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul (1516), which offer insights into contemporary views on bodies and souls, this project argues that Renaissance life-sized sculptural tableaux did not only appear to be life-like (ad vivum/al vivo), but were actually thought to possess souls on account of their size (“grande quanto il vivo,” to use the terminology Giorgio Vasari employed a few decades later).