Art Critic

I am obsessed by a persisting thought: while my skin becomes, every day that goes by, less soft and attractive, the terracotta floor I walk on becomes more delicate and darker with the wax that is applied on it with loving care. The dilemma of life, of plastic surgery and of restoration.

In actual fact the difference is easy. The time limit is what changes. In order: the yogurt, the dog, Daverio, the terracotta floor, the Apuan Alps. For some insane people of the Italian Superintendence, time has stopped for one of these categories. But why are their antique villas, their author paintings have the privilege that my dear Tomolino is not entitled to and unfortunately not even myself?
Concerning the yogurt I could not care less; at the supermarket there is a new kind every day.

The entire issue of restoration is in this facetiousness. It is only thanks to the positivistic simplification of the thinkers of the end of the 19th century, that one thought to nullify the living aspect of objects and of handiworks. Before, like the city landscapes of Bernardo Bellotto demonstrate, the newness lived with the degradation, and plants grew on the antique. Time had the right to pass by. And our predecessors,
of those golden times, felt morally committed to take in the inheritance and to hand it down transformed and improved. Therefore intervening. For this reason the tomb
of Adriano became a stronghold, the stronghold became a building, the building became a jail, and the jail a museum.

And today, these transformations are definitely at a halt. In front of the fireplace, where once entire pigs were being roasted, today the fire extinguisher sticks out under the words “do not smoke”. I don’t like restoration. I am always afraid that the perfect restoration of a royal palace does not only imply finding again the Asburgic chromatic scale or the one of Piermarini, but also reintroducing the death penalty which was, at the time, more typical than the sand of the navigli mixed with lime.

Philippe Daverio