Park Avenue and Forty-seventh Street isn’t one of the places where gallery-goers usually make a stop; but it was worth the detour in December and early January, when the Banco di Napoli had up a display of the eighteenth-century Neopolitan Crib figures, which are called pastori. More than fifty examples, each between a foot and two high, all with elegantly carved heads and hands and elaborate costumes, were gathered together into a scene of the kind that some aristocratic Neopolitan families created in their homes two hundred years ago. This Neopolitan Crib, called a presepio, is the product of a secular sensibility; and the Nativity and Angels and Three Kings play a fairly small role, enveloped as they are by a panorama of figures representing the local low life and tradespeople as well as the exotic types who were described in the travel literature, of the time. According to a catalogue privately printed by the Banco di Napoli, no complete presepio has come down to our day. The bank’s holdings of figures were brilliantly united by Marisa Piccoli Catello and Silvana Piccoli of Naples into a dramatic series of scenes ranged over a picturesque mountain landscape. This was a crowded little planet, all salmon, green, scarlet, and gold, naturalistic in detail, fantastical in effect.

In spite of its tantalizing mix of theater, sculpture, and décor, the presepio looked clear, lucid, logically consistent.

In spite of its tantalizing mix of theater, sculpture, and décor, the presepio