BUFALE ARCHEOLOGICHE in Giornale dell’Arte April 2015 “Obsessed with integrations”

Obsessed with integrations

The restoration of the Parthenon in Athens has been going on for more than ten years with financing and tight surveillance by Unesco and, despite some criticism (always too little) we continue to call them «restorations»: why? We should we call them «maniacal exercises in stone integration» or «works that are too remunerative to be able to conclude them». They are in fact integrating and reconstructing every little hole in the Parthenon, every missing corner, without a true static reason, with new, straight, perfect, very white, very square, very smooth…ugly pieces! I have already had reason to write about the terrible Unesco restorations on the theatre in Myra, Turkey (cf. no. 349, Jan. 2015, p. 11) or those at the temple of Bassae in Arcadia (www.dariodelbufalo.it), so it could seem to be a romantic, Ruskin-like notion, but with all those white patches these monuments lose their charm of classical architecture, as ruins. Almost three centuries ago, with the approval of J.J. Winckelmann (inventor and archaeological theorist), the sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi restored the classical sculptures in Rome by integrating and reconstructing every minimal, anatomical detail that was missing. Today, those reconstructions (including those of the nineteenth century) are removed as barbarities of a past era. How many centuries will have to pass before removing the «Unescian» horrors at the Parthenon?

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