RICERCA ITALIANA     

History and Criticism of Conservation Activity of Historical and Artistic Heritage in Southern Italy (1750- 1950)

Università degli Studi di Lecce

Abstract

Summary

This research program is the natural extension of the experience of the international study meeting held in the Auditorium of Museo di Capodimonte in 1999, about "Storia del restauro dei dipinti a Napoli e Regno nel XIX secolo" (now edited in a special volume of «Bollettino d'Arte» - 2003).
During that meeting, many inquiry tracks emerged, all liable to be further explored. Themes discussed in that occasion share a new horizon in historical research; dealing with guardianship, preservation and conservation fields, it resolves to open new critical and methodological ways in a reviewing process, concerning instruments themselves of History of Art.
A decisive input to this process comes from modern data processing technology, that consents the constitution of updateable and increasable data banks, creating new study possibilities due to control in gathering and compilation stage, recovery during the research, web diffusion of the results.
This project aspires to find an important strength in organic cooperation between various institutions: Archivio di Stato di Napoli, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano, Soprintendenza Archeologica delle province di Napoli e Caserta, Archivi di Stato di Napoli, di Palermo e delle province pugliesi, Soprintendenze di Puglia e Sicilia, Museo Provinciale di Lecce.
According to this is clear how formation, care, conservation and documentary collections Institutions become direct >>>

Principal Investigator

Regina POSO Università degli Studi di LECCE

Research Objectives

The first aim of the national research is to create an Archive and Data bank of the history of restoration of the artistic heritage in Southern Italy from the second half of the 18th century up to 1950.
The chronological limit proposed by the three universities on the cultural areas which have to be examined is suggested by the wide documentary fonts, mestly unknown, to which it is necessary to apply to acquire new data of knowledge, and that, by means of informatic systems already used by the Secco Suardo Association, want to obtain the following:
- acquiring all the documents related to history of restoration in Naples, Sicily and Apulia
- acquiring all the documents from the artistic literature and fonts aiming to reconstruct a dossier concerning every restored work of art to permit better results in the other restoration operations
- promoting and consenting access and consultation of the data-bank to restorers and conservators involved in the restoration operations
- possibility of consulting the archivistic and visible fonts (drawings, engravings and photographs) regarding the restored works of art, thaks to an informatic system
- improving of the biography regarding painters-restorers (18th-19th century, mainly sicilian) and restorers (20th century) to include in an updated Biographic Dictionary of Italian Conservators
- promoting of the acquired data with the publishing of inventories, catalogues and indexes on >>>

First Results

Exploring unknown sources will permit to know various aspects connected to the theme of restauration: scholars, artists, collectionists, scientists, technicians and connoisseurs, protagonists of a story not always lived and dialogued, that goes from the opposite poles of the re-use, of the re-establish, of the conservation and of the restoration.
The use of the great archives documentation wil be compared with the works of art and then transferred in an informative data bank. Only in this way it will be possible to verify all those choices whose methodological substratum justifies some operative methods.
The analysis of the historical lexicon of the acquired documentation will complete the new historic data, which will included in the informative system already described (RES.I, AR.CO and GUIDA), experimented for research and similar to the Associazione Secco Suardo.
The comparison between the obtained results will be presented in a Seminar of studies concerning the subject, which will be held in Lecce.In the second phase the objective is that of compiling "dossiers of the history of conservation" from the works examined, in this way supplying a work instrument for the person who, in charge of supervising activity, would be facilitated in the projection stage. A correct, programmed conservation cannot exclude, in fact, a good knowledge of a historic dimension which diminishes any operation to be carried out on the works, as the choice, always preferable >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Studies about history of guardianship and conservation of the Italian historical artistic heritage - from the states of ancient regime up to the first half of XX century - notably increased in the last twenty years. They reveal with rising clearness that, in Italy more than elsewhere, they also involve history of the Institutions. Also for such reason these studies have been conducted with rising awareness of the necessity to plan the search on various levels, all strongly interdependent: the analysis of the restorations performed on the single objects (sometimes repeated on the same works, even in few years); the attempt to reconstruct figure and activity of some restorers of the past; investigation on theories and techniques of restoration applied; consideration of mutual conditioning among museological choices and conservation practice; evolution of juridical discipline of Cultural Heritage.
The tight connection among these various levels of investigation, the wideness of the available documentation since the half of XVIII century and the necessity to organize the information in a system preventing its dispersion, made more and more evident the necessity of the creation of a data bank for the acquisition and the consultation of the material (documentation coming from public and private archives; graphic and photographic records of the works,
before, during and after restoration; chemical analysis, et cetera).
A first effort in such sense was made by >>>