The polychrome surfaces of Apulia’s monuments between the 19th and 20th centuries. The contribution of color to the spread of neo-medievalism and the creation of national identity

Abstract

As is known from studies published in recent years, starting from the second half of the 19th century, profound transformations affected the main monuments of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. In this revolutionary climate, the definition of national identity was pursued through cultural actions, including, for example, the completion of restoration works of religious buildings. Bringing back the features of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, distinguished in some cases by polychrome decorative surfaces and bichromatic marble cladding, a process of rediscovery of chromatic and ornamental aspects and medieval stylistic features was triggered, materialized in the representative restorations of neo-Medievalism and the design of neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic buildings.
Within this complex historical framework of artistic renewal, one can find the reasons that motivated the acquisition of a retrospective trend and the creation of a style, the reverberations of which were also manifested in Apulia, taking on a regional character. Real campaigns of “liberation” of monuments from Baroque facies were inaugurated to rediscover or reinvent the “Apulian Romanesque”, sometimes by simply peeling the wall faces from the rich Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century decorative apparatuses, at other times implementing modernization and “embellishment” operations with stucco and decorative plasters, now free from structural logic, but simulative of the polychrome and bichromatic wall faces made by alternating different materials or marble coverings differing in color.
Beginning with the earliest known examples of the “embellishment” of Apulian medieval liturgical environments with decorative marble motifs or with polychrome and two-color stuccoes and plasters, devised for the Cathedrals of Altamura and Troia by Federico Travaglini, and continuing with the later ones for the Cathedral of Conversano or minor buildings such as the rural Church of San Giorgio Martire in Bari and the Twentieth-century neo-medieval Churches of San Giuseppe and Immacolata in Bari and Sacro Cuore in Brindisi, this work aims to examine the contribution made by the color of architectural surfaces to the construction of regional and national identity and to illustrate the extent of the spread of an architectural expression inaugurated in the second half of the Nineteenth century and reaching maturity in the first decades of the Twentieth century.