Quarant’anni di scelte in assenza di giudizio. I temi estetici tra eresia e ortodossia

The article points out one of the positions that have characterized the world of the restoration of the last forty years and which can rightly be called "heretical": renunce, starting around the Eighties, to the instrument of the historical-aesthetic judgment. The judgment had been throughout the nineteenth century, continue to be so in twentieth, the first device to discern between the works of art, historical monuments and the rest of human production; exercising it, it was possible to compile lists of goods to be protected. By the time the criteria that founded it, at start very limited, underwent profound changes. These, allowed to enlarge the audience of recognizable objects and add entire categories (rural architecture or the modern movement, industrial archaeology ...). Nevertheless, propose to eliminate the historical and artistic judgment from the horizon of the restoration meant collocate conservation on a completely different plane, trying to redefine the foundations, the entire theoretical construct developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it is rational to give up to take charge of the aesthetic aspects of the works that we have to protect, in a world that considers the perceptual elements, and those related to the images, very important? And if the answer is negative, what benefits we could gain in studying the aesthetic aspects of the things that we need to protect? Can we do it without recalling the old anachronistic definitional theories?