114DIORAMASderiving from different traditions of representation and display. These
windows into nature included elements appropriated from the perform-
ing arts, such as their three-dimensionality, the enclosed proscenium, the
use of lighting, and their theatrical staging. The sublime drama staged by
dioramas engaged viewers through the operation of an astute aesthetic
maneuver that concealed the deaths of the specimens for the purpose of
preserving the lives of their referents in the wild. But besides the accu-
racy of representation and the consistency of naturalism in color, it was
the stasis characterizing the displays that enthralled viewers. This stasis
bears substantial aesthetic assonances with classical painting, classical
sculpture, and perhaps surprisingly with a form of three-dimensional re-
ligious modeling originally from Italy: the presepe (Nativity crèche).
Presepi are complex and very detailed scale models involving minia-
ture architectural scenes, artificial plants, painted backdrops, and statu-
ettes reconstructing the Nativity scene (fig. 3.3). They became popular in
Neapolitan churches during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and
by the eighteenth century they had become increasingly dramatic and
theatrical.^16 The subsequent tradition of the tableau vivant, with its stati-
FIGURE 3.3 Detail from a Neapolitan presepe, on display in Rome, 2006. Photograph
courtesy of Howard Hudson, CC BY 2.5.