Wanderings

At a recent evening of “medieval reenactments” in the nearby borgo of Ponticello— a very old and lovely village with lots of alleys, staircases, and passageways, off which numerous door-less “rooms” (more like caves) make wonderful showcases— craftspeople of all stripes set up exhibits of their wares. Naturally an element of kitsch was unavoidable, yet the event had its charms, along with one major surprise.
        There were the usual makers of linen and wool things for body and home, cast- iron and ceramic objects, soaps and candles, homemade jams and jellies. The smell of porcini funghi pervaded one corner, deliciously. An old woman offered us chestnuts (one of this region’s mainstays, sentimental as well as alimentary) that would put any Fifth Avenue vendor to shame: they were sweet, fresh, slightly chewy morsels. Insubstantiated ideals, I swear: the Platonic Form of Chestnut, in fact.
       Providing assistance and entertaining themselves, a number of village kids dashed around in vaguely medieval outfits. They performed such tasks as beating mattresses draped over a stone wall (hear ye, parents: there’s no better way to help your brood get out their ya-ya’s!); ironing hand-towels (an extremely heavy, cumbersome iron strained the biceps of one poor lass); and sausage-making (undertaken by a hefty boy who ate loads of ground meat on the sly while helping his nonno crank the handle of an old table- top machine—as serviceable now as the day it was made—which pumped the meat into casings).

 And then there was Francesco Pellegrini.
      Signor Pellegrini works in a medium rare among artists anywhere: nuts. Using tiny scalpels and tweezers, he scrapes out the innards of walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds, creates little figures from those leavings, then sculpts and assembles tiny mises-en-scene within each hollowed-out nutshell. As if all that weren’t complicated enough, he sometimes embeds nut-stages within nut-stages, using hinges—so you can open a nut like a matryoshka, find another, open it, find another…

What figures does he implant in the nuts, what drama is he enacting over and over? He’s made hundreds of little nut-theaters, and in each one the same cast of characters appears: il presepe or the Holy Family—which is to say, Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and a couple of animals: a donkey and a cow.

Francesco Pellegrini is a man obsessed with one particular family. He is anything but faithful to its original locus, however. He’s done a few traditional manger scenes, but they’re not what sustain him. Instead, he likes putting the family in all manner of unexpected settings. There’s the Holy Family on a Carousel, the Holy Family Taking a Trip, the Holy Family in a Bottlecap, the Slow Holy Family (on a turtle’s back), the Holy Family of the Tailor (in a thimble and, astonishingly, the eye of a needle)—and dozens more, comic and often unexpectedly moving. The artist has envisioned the Holy Family in places you and I couldn’t hope to dream up.

When asked questions about his creations, Francesco Pellegrini flashes a large easy smile. They’re just what I do, he says, I’ve been doing them forever, I like it… This artist has found what he can contribute: to his own store of contentment and purpose, and to the rest of us who gaze flap-jawed at these miniatures he chisels every day. His creations speak of habitation, human and other (for what are nuts if not hard-shelled homes for the soft, woody-sweet beings that live within them?), and they depict what’s coldly called the nuclear family (warmly: babbo mamma bambino)—without forgetting animals and their intimate proximity to our daily lives. And this peculiar, unusual, ever- expanding collection of nut-works does something else as well: it celebrates hard-to-see- ness, easily-overlooked-ness. Nuts aren’t supposed to contain multitudes, after all, nor even a couple of humans, their kid, and a pair of beasts; yet in this artist’s mind, they do. (“I could be bounded in a nutshell,” said Hamlet, “and count myself a king of infinite space…”)

Francesco Pellegrini’s work embodies…what to call it? Faith? I wouldn’t use that word. Nor belief. I’d say an ease with ineffability, with all that cannot be put into words yet shapes our daily sense of what’s real. Even if the Holy Family means not a whit to us. It means niente to me; yet as I peer into Francesco’s miniature theaters and see the tiny figures there, I feel they’ve been gathered by him not for safety’s sake but to do something essential—what Cormac McCarthy’s character “the man” in his marvelous novel The Road called “carrying the fire.” “There is no god and we are his prophets,” the man says. But also, of the fire: “It was always there. I can see it.” And, of his child: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”