The great and widespreading importance that every educated country
is attributing to the problem of preserving ancient monuments reflects
in the very high technological level reached nowadays in the preservation
and restoration of the artistic heritage.
The very many examples of restoration made in the last few years
partly as a consequence of the damages caused by the war, has made
it possible to verify the validity of criteria and technological methods
and make a complete revision of the same to attain a highly improved
knowledge of the different problems both on the structure and appearance
of the ancient town as a whole and on the research on a single
building or section of historical center continually growing and
expanding.
Just because of this further improvement of the technological methods
and of a parallel and up-to-date criticism on these methods it has
become necessary a more and more intense exchange of information
among all those people who are concerned on and eagerly interested
in the problems of monument restoration.
Th variety of problems that the restaurer has to face, both at a critical
and at a scientifical and practical level is such that parallel researches
developped by technicians on cases that can be compared prove very
useful when verifying different ways of operation and different results
obtained. A larger and larger cultural information of these criteria that
can be directly transferred from one case to another makes it possible
to deepen them further.
This is generally true both when different procedures of reinforcement
and restoration of buildings or monumental parts are concerned and
when special criteria of active restoration of ruined historical centers
are to be studied by means of a new exploitation of all those architectonic
elements that nowadays do not serve their initial purpose
(and this is undoubtedly «the main problema» we have to study at
present, since we have to face it more and more frequenlly. Such a
problem requires a very strict historical interpretation of the structure
on the part of the architect who is called to work on it without delaying).
The present exhibition at Palazzo Grassi for the Second International
Conlerence of architects and monument technicians, ideally continuing
a discussion opened in 1957 in Paris during the first Conference, aims
to illustrate the two most interesting and up-to-date aspects of the
preservation and restoration of monuments.
In spite of the enthusiastic participation of the most important cultural
european and extraeuropean areas, the number of examples is nonetheless
a small one. And yet il allows the visitor to see clearly enough
and compare different methods and results, different techniques and
materials and industrial products that are available to restaurers, recent
methods of moving frescoes and wall paintings, satisfactory experiments
of reinforcing deteriorated stones by means of chemical products.
This exhibition want to indicate in which cases a restoration is necessary
and when problems have to be faced and solved in order to reach a
unity in the method of performing the task that avoids an action
sometimes only too practical or personal or of intuition, as shown in
few cases of a certain importance.
The purpose of the exhibition is to unify the experiments and widen
the filed of the theoretical researches necessary to a cohoperation
of the new and more specialized means of work and of the groups
of experts studying the same subject from different points of view.
The present exhibition is intended to be a stimulating and vital document
of the fundamental action on clarifying methods as it will be
discussed by the Conference.
PIERO SANPAOLESI