Il lessico di John Ruskin per il restauro d’architettura: termini, significati e concetti. | John Ruskin's Lexicon for Architectural Restoration: Terms, Meanings and Concepts

The contribution aims at investigating John Ruskin’s lexicon in the writings regarding the field of architectural restoration, enclosed in the texts elaborated upon returning from the trips to Italy in the 1840s, which give a decisive impulse to the considerations on the subject of the ‘permanence’ of material testimonies of architecture. In this frame, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) are taken as reference with the aim of identifying the lemmas chosen for the considerations related to “restoration”, togeth- er with other writings which contain references to the same theme and some drawings, in which there are remarks and annotations that provide further documents to be studied. From this picture it emerges how, if some words more closely related to operation appear ei- ther rarely or not at all – conservation, restoration or repair –, they are words related to the microscopic and analytical investigation – fissures, dashes – to form those judgment crite- ria of the restorative action – injury, deprive –, which shift the attention towards the diversi- fied attitudes aimed at the existing buildings – care, destruction –. The analysis provides an essential key to the interpretation of John Ruskin’s peculiar meth- od of elaboration: actually, the correspondences between specific elements, from time to time differently put in connection, constitute the network of relationships that will contri- bute to define key concepts – character, time – for the subsequent development of thought regarding restoration, which in the mid-nineteenth century began to see the theoretical re- flection comparing with operation, in significant tasks both in the Italian and in the Euro- pean scene.