1. Building the Process of Knowledge

On the meaning of “context”, it would be necessary a long and articulated discussion. By the way of example but not exhaustive, the case of the archaeological context may be adduced, in which the term acquired a pretty wide meaning and it has often been used to connote some specific aspects of the discipline. In general, the word context indicates the circumstance in which an object or more objects have been found. The importance of the concept of context was underscored during the Enlightenment by Quatremère de Quincy and was later developed in Germany, in the field of ancient studies. In the discipline of the history of ancient art, the adoption of the historicist perspective by E. Löwy renewed the interpretation of the ancient works, by taking into account their conceptual frame. He also influenced the work and the activity of scholars such as R. Bianchi Bandinelli. Löwy, going from Croce’s positions to Marx’s, thought that the objects could be historicized only in relation to the cultural environment of the social class to which they were destined. A similar position can be found in the studies concerning the urban topography. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, C. Hulsen and R. Lanciani’s writings on the imperial Fora represented a clear break in the field of the ancient topography and an introduction to the new disciplinary fields of the landscape archaeology, with the reconstruction of whole urban landscapes in relation to the new contextual approach of the urban archaeology. The utility of the contextual approach which emerges in the field of big urban excavations at the beginning of the century, in Italy and in Europe, becomes more operative if applied to the reconstruction of the formative processes of the stratigraphic deposits in general. The complex work of investigation which leads to their reconstruction is based on the comparison between different kinds of information as well as on the correspondence between a single observation and a determined interpretation. In this scenario, even apparently insignificant elements may assume an informative value as part of a complex system.

Plato, Repubblica, I, 331a.

Written between 450 and 350 B.C.: Ippocrate, Arie acque luoghi (Hippocrates, On Air, Waters and Places) Venezia, Marsilio, 1997.

Aristotele, Organon, Torino, Einaudi, 1955.

Cfr Franciscus Junius, De pictura veterum, Amsterdam 1637, vol. III, chap. 8, par. 10, p. 91. He writes, “Statuarum tamen nullis colorum pigmentis imbutarum frequentior apud antiquos erat usus; tanquamquae non solum intra privatos parietes, sed etiam sub dio perdurarent, et veros exactissimae artis ductus colorum fuco minime celarent”.

See the argument between E. Panoksky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York-London 1972, and, Kauffmann, who argues that, until Vasari came along, the metaphor of Rebirth means the rebirth of the Art and not of the classic antiquity.

See Vasari G., Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri. Nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Tormentino. Firenze 1550, Torino, Einaudi 1986 (by L. Bellosi and A. Rossi).

Cfr. G. Vasari, op. cit. pp. 99–100.

Author of L’estetique des villes, Bruxelles, Bruyllant-Christophe, Van Oest, 1894.

See “Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova e Il diradamento edilizio nei vecchi centri”, in Nuova Antologia, giugno 1913.

Luigi Canina’s work is linked to the important role played by the representations of Rome realized by the ancient cartographers and designers who worked since the Middle Ages leaving marks of the imago urbis aeterna; these artifacts are now useful for the study of the transformations carried out in the course of time. See also the reference to the renowned Nolli map, whose iconographic transmission influenced the urban representation also in the symbolism of some key monuments.