German Background:
Around the 1800’s, nativities were banned in Germany. By the time Sebastian Osterrieder was born in 1864, they were being allowed again, but nativities were never as popular in Germany as they were in Italy. By the late 1800s in Germany, the tradition had just about disappeared.
Osterreider Family, Educational, and Spiritual Background:
Osterreider’s father died when he was a young man and he took over the family bakery business for a few years. Even in his early 20s, he knew he wanted to be a sculptor and he managed to study with some of the finest artists in Munich and in Rome. While he was studying in Rome, he became enamored with the Italian presepi or nativity scenes. Typically, presepi show Mary and Joseph and maybe shepherds and wise men in Biblical attire, and everything else is a miniature Italian village. Presepi figures are usually terra cotta heads with wired bodies and fabric clothing. German nativity figures were usually wood carvings only.
When he was a young man, Osterreider developed a strong clientele among religious leaders in Rome. At first, he was doing mostly angels for altarpieces, but his real love became nativities—or as they are called in German, krippen or cribs. He opened a studio in Munich and became the most respected sculptor of his day. By the time he was at his peak production in the 1920s, he was getting 1000 marks for a small nativity. This was the wage for one man working a full week, which doesn’t sound like it would be that expensive—but thanks to World War I, Germany was destitute, and inflation was rampant. The churches that purchased his nativities often made huge sacrifices to do so. Some had to buy their pieces over time—the Holy Family one year, shepherds the next, and so on. Others had to stop buying completely when their money ran out. That’s why some church nativities lack wise men. I read of one church that had purchased Osterreider angels for their altarpiece but just couldn’t come up with the money for a nativity to go with it. This bothered them so much that they tried buying an Osterreider nativity some 50-60 years later, but they still couldn’t manage it. They ended up commissioning a completely new nativity instead.
Osterreider was an artistic man, and a religious one as well. He felt strongly that nativities should be as historically accurate as possible unlike the Italian presepi. In 1910, the Deutsches Museum, now the German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology, wanted him to make a series of dioramas and paid for him to travel to the Holy Land. He used the time to sketch and observe the people and animals living there—what they looked like, what they wore, the tools of their trades. Unfortunately, Osterrieder’s dioramas no longer exist, but Munich’s Bayerisches National Museum, the National Museum of Bavaria, owns at least two of his nativities and puts them on display every December.
Osterreider’s Artistic Techniques:
Osterreider was known for his very lifelike figures. He developed a process where he could reproduce his woodcarvings relatively inexpensively. He developed a process called French hard casting, where he’d hand-carve a piece, make a mold, and then use that mold to construct a duplicate in wood and plaster, sometimes even reinforced with copper. A mold would only last maybe 2-3 castings, so it wasn’t cheap, but it was a lot more efficient than carving each piece individually.
Osterrieder also made his figures’ clothing lifelike by dipping the fabric in rabbit glue before draping, a technique borrowed from the Italians. He also insisted on providing an appropriate setting for each of his nativities. He offered three different kinds of settings: Roman ruins, like those featured in Old Masters’ paintings, an Alpine house or chalet, or Oriental. Oriental is the German word for something from the Middle East, and in this case it meant a setting like Bethlehem.
Existing Nativities and Their Locations:
So far, I have found six Osterrieder nativities in the U.S.: three in convents (Ancilla Domini Chapel, Donaldson, Indiana; Sancta Maria in Ripa, in St. Louis; and the Adorers of the Blood in Ruma, Illinois; and three in Cathedrals in Belleville, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; and Peoria, Illinois.
In Germany, I have located about 40 Osterrieder nativities. There are a few that deserve special mention. The museum in Abensberg, Osterrider’s hometown, has at least two of his nativities, including the Kaiserkrippe, the crib built for Kaiser Wilhelm himself. The crib at Belleville, Illinois is supposed to be an exact duplicate of the Kaiserkrippe.
The Paderborn Cathedral once had a spectacular Osterreider nativity, supposedly the equivalent of Osterrieder’s nativity at Linz, Austria.
Unfortunately, it was destroyed during World War II.
A common Christmas tradition in Germany is the Krippenweg—kind of a tour of local churches and schools and museums where people just go in to see their nativities. Whenever an Osterrieder nativity is part of a Krippenweg, it’s always the featured attraction. Even today Osterrieder is considered the greatest German nativity artist ever—and he’s universally credited for re-introducing Germany to the crib tradition.
Outside of Germany, I have found several Osterrieder nativities: in the Luxembourg Cathedral, the Barbara Chapel of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, the Utrecht Cathedral, the Vatican, and the Linz Cathedral. The nativities in Utrecht and the Vatican Hotel were both commissioned by Pope Pius XI and are supposedly duplicates of each other.
The nativity in the Linz Cathedral is considered Osterrieder’s masterpiece. It takes up their entire crypt. It was restored in 2020. You will be interested to know that the manger in the Linz Cathedral has three child angels peering inside, just like the Ancilla Ancilla Domini Chapel nativity has.