Giulio Cordero di San Quintino e il restauro a Brescia nell'Ottocento

The essay deals with the competition “the Italian architecture during the Longobard domination”, promoted in 1826 by the Athenaeum of Science, Letters and Arts of Brescia. The competition was taken by Giulio Cordero of San Quintino, who, in 1829, published the study Dell’italiana architettura durante la dominazione longobarda (On the Italian architecture during the Longobard domination). Due to an early reappraisal of Longobard architecture, the study had a great influence on protection of monuments and restoration of historic buildings in Brescia in the 19th century, but also on the Ferdinand De Dartein’s thinking.
Furthermore, the author underlines that the idea of the competition and the preference about the topic were conditioned by the cultural climate of those years. At the beginning of the ninetheenth century the issue of re-evaluating the “raw” architecture of the “dark centuries” was well accepted by the predominant neoclassical culture (which was represented by two eminent member of the competition board: Rodolfo Vantini and Luigi Basiletti). Unlike this “ecumenical” vision, in which different ideas of art lived together, interventions of restoration were solely characterized by a politic vision, addressed to celebrate the origin of the “ home history”.