Corsi e ricorsi della scultura altomedievale italiana: reimpieghi e rivisitazioni tra Otto e Novecento

[Machine translation] Starting from a historiographical analysis that highlights the rising, between, the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, of, a strongly innovative glance at sculptural materials dating from the first centuries of the, Middle Ages, the paper focuses on the revival of these artefacts in the Contemporary, Age. They were often discovered and recovered during restorations, sometimes quite, invasive, involving Late Antique and Early Medieval religious buildings in an attempt to, bring back to life their hypothetical “original moment”. This process led sometimes to, complete reconstructions of liturgical enclosures, ambos, canopies and altars. In other, cases, these items were enhanced through a cultured reuse, sometimes in private contexts, (villas or noble chapels), or they even became part of new liturgical furnishings, in which, they were reassembled with a function that was often different from the original one, a, practice that still continues throughout the 20th century. These reuses/revisitations of, Early Medieval sculpture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent interesting, and refined clues to understanding an aspect, perhaps minor but not marginal, of the, reworking of the Early Medieval past in contemporary times., 1.