«La personalità del restauratore si afferma nella pratica» : l’attività veneziana di Ferdinando Forlati tra cosciente misura ed empirismo eretico

The Forlati’s activities dedicated to the conservation of monuments mark more than sixty years of the Twentieth Century (1910-1972). Since the early interventions, first as Superintendent in Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions, second as Proto of the Saint Mark’s Basilica, his work rejects the idea of restoration practise as a mere technical operation and expresses confidence in the experimentation progress dedicated to the conservation field. If the reiterated beliefs to contain and control the interventions put the Superintendent in the “orthodox” sphere of the Italian restoration, since the Twenties a dual “heresy” outlines apparently more unconventional attitudes. The first “heresy” lies in the belief that the restorer’s activity could be expressed through the “designer personality” that cannot lack of an architectural language. The second one, lies in the extreme trust in the possibilities offered by reinforced concrete in strengthening interventions. As Proto of the Saint Mark’s Basilica, Forlati marks the essential nature of his scientific and operational legacy which never renounces technical experimentation. New impulses inspired by “heterodox” approaches comes to light from a constant and unresolved dialectic between architecture and image, materiality and figurative expression. In Forlati’s work, continuity and contradictions towards restoration’s shared criteria generally coexist. The paper is aimed to outline the balance between these two opposites, in which still useful fundamentals and suggestions for the conservation of architectural heritage lie.