Cesare Brandi and Gianfranco Contini. A (critical) understanding between aesthetics and philology with outcomes on restoration
In the context of a post-Crocian philosophical exploration, which unites in the dynamic consideration
of the artistic process, Cesare Brandi, with the formulation of the ‘phenomenology of artistic
creation’, and Gianfranco Contini, with the ‘critique of variants’, the ‘critical-philosopher’ and the
‘critical-philologist’ seem to conform precisely in the path of ‘auscultation’ of the text (figurative or literary);
a careful and scrupulous operation from which the presentation, or critical edition of the same text,
derives: ecdotics or, in the case of figurative art, restoration work proper, with the obvious differences in
execution, determined by direct contact with the textual materiality, but initiated by the same assumptions.
The recognition of this common path by Brandi and Contini makes it possible to place the current
relationship between the interpretation and the ‘presentation’ of the text, understood today in the broadest sense of the term, in the light of the most current cultural positions and to verify the results
on restoration.
