800 years ago, on Christmas night in 1223 in Greccio, Francis of Assisi staged, perhaps for the first time, during a mass celebrated in a forest on a mountain, a sacred representation of the nativity of Jesus. For this reason, Francis is considered the inventor of the Nativity scene. A few years after its invention, the Nativity scene entered Christian tradition both in its form of sacred representation and in the plastic version, with statues of various sizes representing the protagonists of the Mystery of the Incarnation. In Assisi, in the church that houses the saint’s remains, there is a cycle dedicated to his life characterized by a stylistic innovation that would influence the history of art for at least a century to come. Giotto’s art, with its strong emotional charge, manages to give the illusion of three-dimensional space and to revive in the observer the emotions aroused by the Christmas night of Greccio. But between the cave of Greccio and Giotto’s version, there is a change of location for the setting of the famous episode. From a cave, it moves to a Gothic Basilica. This shift demonstrates how shortly after its invention, the Nativity scene entered the church and did not remain an isolated episode that occurred only once in Francis’s biography in a cave. Through the analysis of various sources, from the Gospels to the biographers of Francis, from medieval historians to the history of art, in this article I aim to explain the origin of the Nativity scene, its significance, how it was described by Francis’s biographers, first by Tommaso da Celano and then by St. Bonaventure, and finally how it is represented in the Bardi panel first and in the Giottesque cycle of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. It is therefore a multidisciplinary journey aimed at understanding this aspect of Italian culture and tradition in depth.
