Nativity Scenes

The 25th amongst the Catalogues of the Museum of Ethnography is presenting a broad variety of nativity scenes, preserved in the collections of the Museum. The catalogue helps to closely observe nativity scenes from Hungary, the Carpathian Basin, Italy, France, South America and Niger.

A speciality of the book is that it focuses on the conservation process and hidden information that appear during restoration – such as the interior of special church-shaped Hungarian nativity scenes. The rich and nicely chosen imagery of the book shows the differences and similarities between the exterior and interior of nativity scenes from our collections and tells about the museum-life of the objects. The introductory study takes us back in time to meet the researchers collecting nativity scenes on their fieldworks, and in space to the stores of the Museum to see, how did the museum-life change the objects and the way we think about them.