The frame goes through the war. From Albini to Brandi

Abstract

In leaving the Restoration Theory at the beginning of the sixties, Cesare Brandi faced the problem of frames. It was a matter that had been involved twenty years earlier, at the time of the restoration exhibitions carried out during the war by the nascent Institute of Restoration. Here, the Sienese scholar had claimed the abolition of the frames, according to a vision involving figures such as Giuseppe Pagano in that year as he qualified the debate on modernity. At the end of the conflict, the frame question persisted, featuring protagonists such as Albini or Scarpa. Otherwise, for Cesare Brandi, the journey began in the 1950s in an abiura, which apparently disowned the choices made before, while actually shifting them to a more complex plane, to explore new possible responses. At the threshold of the work, around the theme of the frame, thoughts infiltrated from the modern to the contemporary. The integrated presence of the spectator, the physical space in which he was immersed, the space of the wall and the inside of the work itself revealed the simultaneity of the here and now of a different fruition. The notion of contingency was insinuated. The edge of the frame was overcome when it conceptually recovered the possibility of its function.