Rebuilding Temple G at Selinunte? Old and wrong idea: Brandi and Bianchi Bandinelli already said so

The idea of rebuilding Selinunte’s Temple G, revived yesterday by Vittorio Sgarbi, who since November has been the new culture councillor of the Sicilian regional government and who throughout the election campaign has flaunted the hypothesis of reconstruction as his warhorse, is not new, let alone original. In the past few hours, the Ferrara-based art historian has released estimates of the cost of raising the columns of the temple, which was knocked down by an earthquake in the early Middle Ages, when Selinunte was already uninhabited and in a state of neglect for centuries. And since that event, all that has remained of Temple G is a pile of ruins on which stands a single column, dubbed “the spindle of the old woman” by local residents.

The last attempt to bring the idea of a reconstruction of Temple G to the public’s attention dates back to 2011: at the time, Sicily’s governor was Raffaele Lombardo and the main spokesman for the reconstruction was writer and historian Valerio Massimo Manfredi. The project was met with criticism from much of the scientific world, and produced as its only concrete result a wooden model of what the temple must have looked like when it had not yet been destroyed. However, some aspects of the historical event of the building should be emphasized: it is in fact a work that was never completed. More in detail, the project was interrupted by theCarthaginian invasion of Selinunte, which in 409 B.C. put an end to the ambitions of the inhabitants: the enemies besieged the city and, once they entered, subjected it to looting and destruction, slaughtering its residents. The event essentially decreed the end of the city: several inhabitants later returned, but Selinunte never achieved the splendor and importance it had before the defeat against Carthage, and by 250 BCE it was already largely abandoned. The great temple therefore remained unfinished, plus we do not know for sure what its original appearance was. Therefore, the only possible project for Temple G might be an anastylosis, which is that particular type of reconstruction that involves the recomposition of destroyed buildings or portions of buildings through the use of the original pieces that have been preserved, relocating them exactly where they were in ancient times, and only on the basis of secure data.

The various restoration charters issued over the years to regulate the subject provide precise guidelines on anastylosis. The 1972 Italian Restoration Charter, in particular, indicates that only “definitely documented anastylosis” is allowed, while the Venice Charter, drawn up in 1964, prescribes that “any reconstruction work is to be excluded a priori, while only anastylosis, that is, the recomposition of existing but dismembered parts, is to be considered acceptable.” In the case of Temple G in Selinunte, is it possible to speak of a definitely documented anastylosis? And above all: would the image of the raised temple (because only to this operation would the intervention be limited, as was done for the much-criticized anastylosis of Temple E, which took place in the 1950s) be faithful to that which appeared before the gaze of the ancients, who were accustomed to seeing the columns not as free windows on the landscape, but as a frame enclosing the walls of the naos? But these are not the only risks that anastylosis would entail. Anastylosis did not always prove rigorous, and often the original materials were also supplemented with elements of a radically different nature (Temple E itself, supplemented with concrete inserts, is an example). And again: the ruins have been lying inert for centuries, abandoned to the action of time and agents, resulting in their further ruin. Consequently, even if they were put back up, they would certainly have little to do with what the temple must have looked like before the collapse. Many fear, therefore, the reconstruction of a historical forgery: but even if a forgery does not turn out to be the case, to engage in a titanic undertaking to restore only a faded shadow of an unfinished temple is perhaps to be considered a reckless, risky operation and, at the very least, one of dubious scientific value.

Jean Pierre Houël, Ruins of the Great Temple of Selinunte (1782; ink, black stone and gouache on paper, 35.1 x 54.5 cm; Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins)

This is what Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli thought at the time when Temple E was rebuilt. The great archaeologist wrote, to this effect, that “the most serious example of a mistaken initiative, however, is now offered by the reconstruction of Temple E in Selinunte. A great deal was spent, over one hundred million; miracles of technical ingenuity, which only an intelligent passion for the ancient monument could dictate, were performed by the management of the work; and all this for a deplorable result. Deplorable from several points of view. A now-classic landscape, on which pages of high poetry have been written, was altered, a landscape that now had its own cultural value as it was; and this destruction of a cultural value (evidently unheard of or unknown to those who wanted the restoration) could have been justified, at most, by a definite scientific archaeological interest, so that the loss of one cultural value would be offset by the acquisition of another. Instead, reconstructing, as was done, without first surveying the fragments piece by piece, destroyed the possibilities of ascertaining and studying those structural details of ancient architecture, which are still the subject of investigation and discussion, especially in order to specify the complex and partly still ignored relationships between Greece and Sicily. Culturally and archaeologically, therefore, the result is entirely negative.”

Then there is a serious problem of expediency: raising the columns of Temple G would be tantamount to wiping out some 1,400 years of history with a flick of the wrist. On the same arguments were the scholars who made criticisms, sometimes even heavy ones, about the anastylosis of Temple E. Cesare Brandi had this to say about the latter operation: “Even if the reconstruction had been done impeccably, without that fumbling about how to fill in the gaps, so that the temple flaunts itself as a sampler of surreptitious techniques that are mostly foolish, it would have been equally a mistake to have reconstructed it: for one does not pay attention to the majesty of a ruin that history, through more than twenty centuries, had handed over to us clothed in such tragic beauty, that nothing more was needed, even for a layman, to fantasize what it was - giacque ruina immensa - when it was standing.” One thinks of the drawings, paintings, and prints left us by the artists of the past who visited Selinunte and were struck by the sight of what nature and the centuries had caused to the work of man: the contemplation of the ruins is certainly far from our sensibility, and it would be the fruit of a late Romantic revival to use it as an argument against anastylosis, but it is equally true that a reconstruction would take the form of an arbitrary intervention against a centuries-old history of which those ruins are an integral part.

A possible reconstruction of the Temple G of Selinunte would have nothing to do with the anastylosis of the frescoes of the Basilica of Superior of Assisi, which collapsed with the tremors of 1997 (an example that, in the course of a debate, the aforementioned Valerio Massimo Manfredi cited to justify the possible operation on the Sicilian sacred building): but in the case of Assisi, it was a matter of repairing very recent damage within a building that was still intact, as well as of returning to the Assisi community one of its recognized symbols.

Operations of this kind must certainly be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but starting the reconstruction of a temple that collapsed approximately fourteen centuries ago is perhaps not exactly a priority for Sicily’s cultural heritage system. There is no need to enumerate the list of those in scientific and academic circles who have reiterated their opposition to the event (suffice it to say that, when the hypothesis of reconstruction was ventilated by Lombardo in 2011, Settis spoke of “a regime work out of time” and Giuseppe Voza of a “folly,” and even in the 1970s - evidently the proposal is cyclical - a group of professors from the University of Palermo called the proponents of the project “new vandals”): suffice it to say that interventions should be conducted to safeguard and to preserve, and not to give rise to operations that have little to do with history.

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