Restoration, conservation and protection of artistic heritage. A conversation with Giovanni Urbani

The aspect of Giovanni Urbani that most continues to strike me, his former student at the Central Institute for Restoration (icr), is that of the admittedly singular and certainly not happy fate of being a “great outsider.” A condition that led him to the gesture, as unusual as it was consistent, of resigning from the directorship of the icr in 1983. Perhaps the reasons for his marginalization stem from the guilt (inexcusable in an absolutely immobile field such as the cultural heritage sector) of having attempted, in the very early 1970s, to break out of the schematism of a conception of restoration solely linked to the choices of taste of the humanistic side; and to have even assumed that protection could become a rational exercise based on rigorous technical-scientific foundations and not an “optional activity” such as the one currently carried out by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, as he himself insists on saying. For this reason, our conversation revolves mainly around the fact that neither the Protection Law 1089 of 1939, nor the two separate bills to reform that law recently presented in parliament by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage itself, regulate, by finally making them mandatory, such fundamental activities of protection as conservation, restoration, cataloging and even the instrument of notification.

Editor’s note. This contribution (the conversation dates back to December 1989) was published in: The Journal of Art, July-August 1990, No. 80, (ins. Vernissage, s. p.). Editorial title: Thus the new notification according to PCI and Ministry. It was later republished in Bruno Zanardi, Conservazione, restauro e tutela. 24 dialogues, Milan, Skira, 1999, pp. 31-39.

BZ. Professor Urbani, about a year ago the Communist Party presented a bill that was supposed to finally send the Protection Law 1089 of 1939 into the attic. Now it is the turn of Minister Facchiano, with another reform bill that is reportedly a distillation of three or four other such drafts produced over the years by the distinguished jurist Massimo Severo Giannini. Much has been made of these bills, and particularly the first one, often calling them “highly innovative.” What, in your opinion, are the elements of novelty, if any, present in the two bills, and to which of the two does your preference go?

OJ. If I have to say what I think, the only novelty seems to me to lie in the purpose, perhaps unconscious, or perhaps only poorly disguised, of sending to the attic not so much the Bottai Law of ’39, but the territorial technical organs of the Ministry, that is, the Superintendencies. And this simply by mandating the regions to create their own technical bodies, with tasks in every way identical to those of the state superintendencies. If things work badly today, just imagine how they would work when it all boils down to a constant conflict of competencies between state and regional offices: the former ritually succumbing to the interests of local potentates and the latter in the hands of a political staff, perhaps resulting from the USLs. When I see what our legislators’ thoughts on artistic heritage are reduced to, I am reminded of what Cocteau has a shady character in I can no longer remember which of his plays say: “Puisque ces mystères nous dépassent, feignons d’en être les organisateurs.”

And of the new role that the PCI bill entrusts to the National Council of Cultural Heritage, what do you think?

I think of it if possible even worse. Instead of restoring this body to the reasonable size and functions of a normal Higher Council, the proposal is to confirm it in its present elephantine structure, and even to make it resemble, perhaps in homage to the bicentennial of 1789 in which we find ourselves, an assembly government of the revolutionary type, endowed with all the powers and functions of the actual government. The latter, while continuing to be accountable to Parliament, would not in fact operate at all except on the directives or by acting through this assembly of over seventy members duly allotted among the different parties.

You say that the two bills do not innovate 1089/39 in anything. But in the current times, so unpropitious to meaningful reforms, may not this immobility ultimately prove to be the lesser of evils?

Actually I think that the root of all current evils lies precisely in the ’39 law. I say current, because at that time we could be content with such a reductive view of the problem of protection, so that to save “things of artistic and historical interest” it is enough to “notify” or “declare” them as such, and not for what they are, how many they are and in what state they are, but only when the occasion arises. Try turning the ’39 law on all sides, as well as the two bills we are talking about, tell me if you can pull out an indication or even a mere hint of other possible ways of exercising protection in addition to that of notification. An instrument about the effectiveness of which one could say some nice things, the nicest of which of all is that more than half a century after its birth, or rather second or third revival since the time of Cardinal Pacca, no one, and least of all the Ministry entrusted with this task, is able to specify what and how many works are notified.

Yet there are those who say that notification is the only bulwark in the face of the dangers of dispersion and looting that would result from the opening of the borders in 1993.

But what do you want to happen in ’93 that is not already happening today? What with the trucks crossing the borders crammed with archaeological material and the yachts that can land the unknown masterpiece wherever and whenever they want, assuming there are still any left. To foil these dangers, the state has only to bring in which correct and timely buyer. As France does with its masterpieces that unknown or not cost it a sum that, bonne année, mauvaise année, does not exceed twenty billion of our liras.

Should we then, in your opinion, give up the notification altogether?

And who said that? On the contrary, on the contrary, we should rather re-evaluate the instrument of notification, that is, seriously aim it at clear and defined purposes of protection, and not, as now, at a mere hoarding whose first effect - paradoxically - is to devalue the thing notified. I try to explain. Justifying the act of service should never suffice “the particularly important interest” of the thing to be served. It should count much more that this thing can be placed in the service of a very specific conservative or evaluative purpose, to be achieved in a time and manner defined on a case-by-case basis. For both movable and immovable property, in short, it is a matter of supplementing the act of notification with a series of provisions and arrangements that instead of mummifying the thing notified make it a participant, together with publicly owned property, in a single and coherent strategy of protection. I am thinking in particular of real estate, for which the distinction between public and private becomes inessential if we decide to assert these assets as goals or fixed points for the focus of both any urban, land or landscape planning design and the criteria for “environmental impact assessments.” I realize that it is too much to ask that the current Cultural Heritage Administration be capable of tying the travesty of notification, as it is conceived by it, to this sphere of interests and competencies that eagle-eyedly overlay, in legal complexity and technical level, those of its own. But I would have been satisfied if the two bills we are talking about had shown that they possessed, at least in their larval state, an awareness of these kinds of problems.

But instead?

Instead all they have been able to do is to extend the notification to contemporary works of art. Indeed, the ministerial text stipulates that these can be notified even if they are less than 50 years old, the latter the legal time from which the logic of protection is triggered, as long as the author has already died. All appropriate averments aside, we would thus come to be the only civilized country that sanctions by law the superiority of a deceased artist over one of his living contemporaries, and that is concerned with hindering the spread abroad of its culture. And since to provincialism, like stupidity, there are never limits, here is that the Communist bill even proposes to notify the works of living artists, as long as they are 30 years old. Thus is opened the way to get to confer a state label of quality on living artists: of course according to the usual party-driven allotments. And for the exclusive benefit of mediocre or lousy artists, because the best ones would flee immediately to Paris or New York.

So, according to you, the “declaration of cultural good,” as you want to call the notification now, could even lead to the disappearance of contemporary Italian art from the international market.

It would certainly lead to its debasement on the domestic market, as now already happens with ancient art. Indeed, there is no doubt that if the Italian antiquarian market is today infinitely poorer than that of any other Western nation, this is due to the perverse effect of notification. There is no national art, however great the lineage, that takes advantage in the international market of the poverty of its own domestic market. Here, therefore, is the explanation of how at the great auctions in London or New York it can happen today that any Dutch still life of the eighteenth century will outshine a gold background of Sienese Gothic. Even the freest of markets is not free enough to be unaffected by influences such as fashions or nationalistic prejudices, especially if the latter guarantee a strong and constant support of demand in domestic markets. There is no doubt that a sound cultural policy should first take care of a careful liberalization of the art market, for example by favoring imports as much as possible. Of course, no longer hiding behind the absurd screen of temporary importation, but reducing VAT to 2 to 3 percent, if not even canceling it, and above all exempting imported works once and for all from the bogeyman of notification. In short, we must resolve to take note that wherever there is a free market, conditions for museums and every other related institution are infinitely healthier and more viable than here. I am not saying that a direct cause-and-effect relationship is to be seen in this, but rather the consequence of that long-standing movement whereby privately owned collections and works, when they are really important, inevitably end up in museums. But I would say that this aspect of the problem, as important as it is, still takes a back seat to that which concerns public heritage proper.

On which aspect of the problem how should we pronounce ourselves?

First of all, by finally opening our eyes to the absurdity that leads us to speak of a heritage without being able to specify what concrete things it consists of, to the point that instead of designating them by their names (paintings, sculptures, churches, towers, castles, etc.), we resign ourselves to homogenizing them under the collective name of “cultural heritage.” If I had to point to the main reason for our ills, I really think I would first blame the obscure ideological coercion whereby out of the blue, some thirty years ago, we all found ourselves no longer talking about works of art and historical evidence, but about cultural heritage. An evil binomial functioning like a black hole, capable of swallowing everything, and nullifying everything into empty verbal forms: artistic, historical, archaeological, architectural, environmental, archival, library, demoanthropological, linguistic, audiovisual, and so on and so forth. A huge empty box within which, according to Spadolini’s courtly program, “the entire historical and moral identity of the nation” should have found a place, except that he was unable to squeeze in only the last or penultimate of the ministries.

But how can this state of affairs be remedied?

With a new law of protection, which, however, unlike the existing one and all its subsequent proposals for reform, or rather reframing, should be hinged on the principle that the heritage owned by the state - and the various types of entities accountable to it -, is not assimilable to so-called non-disposable public property, such as water or subsoil resources, as it is only improperly reducible to a generic entity, determined only by the corresponding conceptual abstraction. Rather, this heritage is a well-determined entity, consisting of a very large but certainly finite number of concrete things, each of them endowed with its own characteristics that make it unique and unrepeatable. The misunderstanding, which to me is rather a scandal, of considering cultural heritage as a generic entity, and not as a set of individual things, arises on the entirely erroneous assumption that the substantial part of this heritage consists of privately owned things, the identification of which can only be arrived at accidentally, as a result of fortuitous or unforeseeable circumstances. Now, even and given that the private patrimony is in its entirety indeterminate and indeterminable, it is hard to see why the same fate should befall the public patrimony by law, which is, on the contrary, in the public eye. Tell me if it is not a scandal that in order to get an idea of this heritage, the Red Guides published by the Touring Club come in infinitely more useful than all the acts so far produced by the competent Administration, including the farces of Memorabilia and the Cultural Fields.

Including the Galasso law?

That one I would rather call the dream of a decent person, in whose shoes, however, I would not have wanted to be the day she woke up, finding herself around Regions and a Ministry for whom a Landscape Plan must not be much different thing from the phoenix.

I am afraid I have lost the thread of the previous argument. Am I mistaken or had we reached the point where, if one accepts its premises, it remains to be defined what follows, for the public artistic heritage, for the practical purposes of protection?

It follows that protection cannot be a generic task to be exercised, as it is now, discretionarily and relying only on the goodwill of the Superintendents. Protection should be exercised in strict relation to the quantity of things to be protected, defined one by one as to intangible qualities, and by well circumscribed homogeneous categories as to material characteristics, environmental boundary conditions, state of preservation and its evolutionary tendency. This is the only way to get out of the absurdity of legislation for which public heritage is a kind of mysterious object, an aeriform entity against which it is therefore impossible to carry out concrete and defined protection actions. A bit like what would happen to Anas, just to give an example, if it knew nothing about the roads entrusted to its management, and therefore even less about the technical ways in which this should be exercised. In short, it would be a matter of bringing public assets back from the gaseous state to the solid state; after which we could also imagine private assets as a kind of asteroid belt, destined by historical law to rejoin the public planet, provided that the latter is consolidated and viable enough to exert sufficient pull. For, as Tocqueville said, “on ne s’attache qu’à ce qui est vivant.”

If I understand you correctly, your proposed law would be a kind of Copernican revolution: in the sense that it would reverse the terms of the ’39 law, putting public and parapublic heritage at the center of the system of protection, and leaving private heritage to itself, or nearly so.

Revolution, and moreover Copernican, seems to me a bit much. This is about simple common sense. I repeat: On the one hand, there is a public estate whose extent is or should be, if anyone bothered, quantifiable and qualifiable with great exactitude. On the other hand, there is a private patrimony which, on the other hand, is, in principle and in fact, essentially indeterminable, except for the real estate part, but which nevertheless, all things considered, weighs infinitely less than the public patrimony. Now, the absurdity of the current law is that the indeterminacy of the private portion is taken as an absolute, which includes in itself the public portion as well. With the rather absurd result that the very public part of the artistic heritage-as you say and as in fact everyone can see-comes to be left to its own devices.

Let me understand this even better. Once the terms of the problem were reversed, that is, once the state had, let us say, counted what belongs to it, notifying it, so to speak, to itself, what would characterize this new kind of protection?

Simply that this would finally be exercised actively instead of passively. Let me explain further. We have said that the only instrument of guardianship defined by law today is notification. A passive tool if ever there was one, in that it is of discretionary use by the public administration, and with no solicitation to private individuals other than to hide the thing notified as the miser does with his gold coins. That is, hoping that everyone will forget about it and first of all the State that notified it: moreover, an eventuality, as we have seen, among the most probable. As luck would have it, this State is much better served than it deserves, namely that the Superintendents, without any law requiring them to do so, and indeed with the ministerial impediments that everyone knows, try to preserve the memory of the public good with the catalog and to delay its ruin with restoration. Worthy and meritorious actions, but whose lack of consequentiality, at the very least, cannot be kept silent. Given that the catalog, for being conceived as a Penelope’s web, to be unraveled and reweaved as studies progress, is abysmally far from any conclusion; so that, in the continuing indeterminacy of the public heritage, we know if possible even less about its state of preservation, and therefore about the criteria from which to derive, for example, the rational decision to restore one thing rather than another. Let us then not talk about how to restore it.

But at least on the principle of exercising protection over a defined stock of property, and in relation to equally defined causes of deterioration, it seems that Minister Facchiano does not think differently from her. The law that finances, if I am not mistaken, with 30 billion, the Operation Risk Map, clearly inspired by what you yourself proposed in 1976 with the Pilot Plan for the conservation of cultural heritage in Umbria, is now a done deal. Indeed, I would say that this law aims even higher, since it proposes to identify even throughout the country the various deterioration factors-pollution, seismicity, depopulation, etc.-that put our works of art at risk. These would finally be included in an “outline inventory” to be carried out in a few months, as opposed to the decades it would take for the actual catalog.

I thank you for the evocation of the Pilot Plan, a ghost dear to me, but one that certainly does not inhabit the high ministerial rooms. However, I would like to point out to you that the operational conclusions of that study, which not surprisingly was presented as an Executive Research Project, were deferred to the field verification of our design hypotheses. These consisted mainly of a series of indications about the extent and distribution of both the Umbrian heritage and the various deterioration factors to which it was presumably subjected. Indications in some cases very detailed, but all resulting from known data, because they were published or otherwise inferable from normally accessible information, censuses or statistics. It was therefore a matter of identifying the most correct and least expensive method of assessing the relevance of such data to the state of affairs. What we did was to indicate the tools, methods, objects and places of what I then called “field verification.” On the outcome of this would then depend the choices to be made, within a certain number of variables that we had in any case defined, regarding the size, organization and working methods of a structure assigned to the conservation of Umbria’s artistic heritage. The final intent was obviously, once the Umbrian plan was realized, to derive from it the guidelines for a national plan. It seems to me, on the other hand, that the Risk Map project presumes to be able to arrive at this same result on the basis up by down of the methodological indications of the Pilot Plan, starting instead of from Umbria from three or four different study areas. With what benefit to the economics and feasibility of the undertaking I really cannot say. Anyway, many good wishes.

I join in the good wishes, although it seems to me that the undertaking, by hiding or almost hiding its derivation from the Umbria plan, leaves a lot to be desired as far as intellectual honesty is concerned. But even supposing it succeeds, will the means, which I assume to be enormous, then be found to move from the plane of studies to that of practical achievements?

It may sound strange to you, but the last thing I would worry about would be just that. To repeat, as has been repeated for decades, that it is impossible to meet the needs of the sector by allocating only 0.20 percent, or so, of total public spending to it is hearsay pure and simple. If nothing is known about the real extent of the heritage, it is foolish to pronounce as it is about the amount of funding to be allocated to it. Rather, one should start with a precise and rigorous idea not of how much but how to spend.

Which is to say?

Have you ever seen what the so-called restoration projects and the related expert reports of expenditures consist of on the basis of which the Ministry distributes its funds among the Superintendencies? The plans, in most cases, boil down to a half-page rant about the historical and artistic merits of the thing to be restored, followed by another half-page of complaints about its state of preservation. The estimates are nothing more than a kind of servant’s bill, in which the various restoration operations are priced, without decipherable logic, when “by body,” when “by measure,” and when “on the cheap,” that is, in two or all three ways. As for prices, the company decides, or we adjust according to the price lists circulating among the Superintendencies based on I don’t know what unofficial custom. Pass for the Ministry, which we all know is in the grotesque situation in which it finds itself, but is it possible that not even at the Court of Auditors can be found anyone to whom it jumps to the eye that in all this there is nothing that even remotely resembles the rules that for public works have been in force even for almost a century? Where are the surveys of the thing to be restored, the contract specifications, the reasoned price lists, the specifications of measurement systems, the special specifications? And then, once the work is underway or completed, where are the accounting records, work logs, and construction manager’s manuals? Who is entrusted with in-progress inspections, who prepares the relevant minutes, and so on? I am well aware that the restoration of a work of art is a very different thing from the construction of a dam or a viaduct, so it would be foolish to subject it to the same discipline that applies to the design and execution of this kind of work. But does this mean, perhaps, that restoration can do without any specific discipline, any codified instructional method, any organized body of accounting rules and technical specifications that would stand comparison, as far as reasoning is concerned, with those with which anyone who puts his hand to a public work is required to comply?

It sounds as if you are proposing to remake a new Restoration Charter in this regard.

Never mind this blessed Charter, which perhaps, as a statement of historical-critical intent, has its own cultural dignity, but which, as far as technical content is concerned, is up against the precepts of Friar Soothsayer. Here it is a matter of getting out of the perverse circle that from a Ministry, not only deaf but fiercely hostile to every instance of technical progress, leads to peripheral technical organs, the Superintendencies, that repay it with a total lack of trust and thus with a commitment limited to just enough to make it dumb and happy. Add to this the unwise welfarist demagoguery that has led to clogging the Superintendencies’ staffs with personnel most often lacking any professional qualifications, as is basically what the Youth Unemployment Act 285/79 is, and you will have completed the picture of disaster.

I am the first to disbelieve this, but I ask it anyway. Can’t the entry of large construction companies into the field, through the Fio procedures and the concession institution, serve as an incentive, putting it in some competition, for the technical growth of the Superintendencies? And of the unification between the Ministries of Scientific Research and Cultural Heritage, in the name of degree programs in Cultural Heritage, what do you think?

First of all, he is right to disbelieve in the first of the two events. Because in that case the Superintendencies are even transformed from technical offices into “Contracting Stations”: that is, into pure and simple principals. And blessed are those who believe that, by reserving the construction management, the Superintendencies can cope in experience and capacity with the site management, which is the responsibility of the contractors. As for the second case and the ridiculousness of the situation, given the state of our University, its association with the Ministry makes me think of the classic one between the blind man and the cripple.

But training restorers, in the Pci and ministerial bills, will be done by the regions.

And here, much to my chagrin, I have to blame myself for not having been able to foresee, when I worked in 1982 for the state and regions to sign a memorandum of understanding for the training of restorers, into what a bind politicians and bureaucrats would have turned this initiative. My idea was that the new laboratory-schools would be created on the model of the three-year courses of the Institute of Restoration, integrated with that of the old and glorious Experimental Stations of Industry and Agriculture. That is to say, I was thinking of these laboratory-schools as bodies in the financing and organization of which the Ministry, to which in any case the primary task of supervision and direction would fall, would have to collaborate with the Regions and possibly the University and private enterprise. The basic design was to make these laboratory-schools service facilities primarily for the Superintendencies and then for those others, primarily the Regions, who had an interest in developing in defined territorial areas the training of restorers. A development therefore to be commensurate with concrete local needs, so that the Superintendencies could plan the training of restorers in relation to those needs. Which could then be met either with in-house staff and students, or with alumni organized in consortia or cooperatives. Instead, in the Communist and ministerial bills, the laboratory-schools depend totally and exclusively on the Regions, relegating the State Administration to an absolutely marginal role. With very serious damage to the Superintendencies, which would thus be deprived of a task that more than any other could have retrained them on the technical-scientific level, and which would certainly find the Regions totally unprepared.

So, no glimmer of hope, no positive element in this panorama of disasters?

It depends. If we forget about the historical-artistic heritage and think only of our interests as taxpayers, a positive note exists: the trillion in residual liabilities that the Ministry has been unable to spend, and which therefore the state could recover. Who said that the ministerial bureaucracy is of no use at all?

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