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

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.