Ritorno alle origini: il vescovo Giovanni Battista Scalabrini e i restauri della cattedrale di Piacenza fra Otto e Novecento

The contribution intends to highlight little-known aspects of the huge restoration campaign of the Piacenza cathedral promoted by Giovanni Battista Scalabrini between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The theme was addressed by Roberto Cassanelli in the catalogue Gothic, neo-Gothic, hyper-Gothic: architecture and decorative arts in Piacenza, 1856-1915, published in 1984 by M. Dezzi Bardeschi. In an attempt to restore the Romanesque layout of the building, frescoes were detached, Baroque altars and stuccoes were removed, fourteenth-century architectural and decorative elements were rediscovered, paintings were commissioned, and the façade was worked on with demolitions, recoveries and integrations. The sources, projects and period images, the reading of contemporary newspapers, the comparison with works carried out in the province (in the collegiate church of Castell'Arquato) allow us to understand with what critical spirit the intervention, conspicuous for architectural reworking and ornamental revival, was welcomed by public opinion and professionals. Specifically, the almost unknown drawings and sketches for the decoration will be considered, due to Eugenio Cisterna (Genzano, 1862-1933), commissioned to create neo-medieval mural paintings, and to Luigi Morgari (Turin, 1857-1935), who restored and integrated the ancient paintings reemerged in the apses of the cathedral. The graphic proposals are part of the context of the re-proposal of the medieval imagery of the early twentieth century, which led to the detachment of the seventeenth-century frescoes from the sanctuary by the Steffanoni brothers of Bergamo.