Il Journal “Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage” per i prossimi anni: un impegno per il “Sistema Cultura”
10.6092/issn.1973-9494/17365
application/pdf
1973-9494
17365
en
Mauro Mantovani
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage
The journal “Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage” in the coming years: a commitment to the “Culture System”
Text.Serial.Journal
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/
22
Editorial
2023-07-20
2023-06-23
2023-07-20
2023-07-20
21-31
CSCH
Mauro Mantovani
2022
10.6092/issn.1973-9494/17365
21
Dean, Faculty of Philosophy, Salesian Pontifical University, Rome, Italy
1973-9494
en
31
The journal “Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage” in the coming years: a commitment to the “Culture System”
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/article/download/17365/16509
22
I used to say that:
“If you think of something as a novelty, it leads again to the hard
law of innovation: if you change something it doesn’t mean it is
innovative, to be innovative you have to change”.

In 2000, when I meditated on the creation and realization of a
journal whose intentions deviated from what had always been
accepted and proposed in the field of science, in the study and
research of Cultural Heritage, it posed a dilemma for me:
“If you think of something as a novelty, it leads to the hard law of
innovation: if you change something it doesn’t mean it is
innovative, to be innovative you have to change”.
Then came 2001, with the first issue of the Journal “Conservation
Science in Cultural Heritage”, which was published at that time in
Italian, and was called “Quaderni di Scienza della Conservazione”;
the English version came out in 2007. By that time, its initial
intent had been scientifically achieved and validated, a fact which
can be attributed to its interdisciplinarity, which then became
transdisciplinarity or crossdisciplinarity and internationalization.
But during the twenty years the Journal has been published, and
which has now reached number twenty-two, I have learned, from
the number and variety of the authors’ scientific papers, with
pleasure and conviction, the following undisputed truth, inspired by
the freshness of the above themes regarding heritage protection
and valorization.

Now I can say that:
“Without beauty there is no life. Every single life is made to come
to light, to be word and action, to be the pro-creation and salvation
of the world. Without beauty, which is also life that has been
conceived, saved and accomplished, there is nothing to do in the
world: no inspiration, no beauty”.

                                                 Salvatore Lorusso
E    DITORIAL


THE JOURNAL “CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL
HERITAGE” IN THE COMING YEARS: A COMMITMENT TO THE
“CULTURE SYSTEM”

Salvatore Lorusso
Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

Mauro Mantovani
Dean Salesian Pontifical University, Rome, Italy


   1. A wish for the coming years

     Giving without asking, donating and thanking, engaging and sharing: if you are suc-
cessful, if you are lucky to go through years that are uncertain and full of questions, as
well as undergoing the viral aggression of Covid 19 and achieving positive results: that
is the path to take to bring back certainty, open up new perspectives and invest in culture.
     From multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, canons that have been pursued and
achieved, from communication to relationships between scholars and institutions: this
exchange is reflected in everything we have worked for, constituting an investment that
always gives returns, even though at times it goes well and at other times less so.
     Hence a conviction that is also a wish: “Over the coming years, we want to be even
more accessible, and closer to the authors of the papers that are published, do more
for culture understood as knowledge of both historical-humanistic and technical-exper-
imental themes, all of which are needed so as to correctly face and solve the problems
of heritage protection and valorization: therefore, giving without waiting for gain or
gratitude for our work, but ready to share the results feeling proud of the seriousness
that characterizes the Journal”.
     Indeed, the challenges we face today are “epochal”.
     As stated by Pope Francis: “Today we are not only living in a time of changes but
are experiencing a true epochal shift, marked by a wide-ranging “anthropological” and
“environmental crisis”. Indeed, we daily see “signs that things are now reaching a
breaking point, due to the rapid pace of change and degradation; these are evident in
large-scale natural disasters as well as social and even financial crises” (Veritatis
Gaudium 8 December 2017, Foreword, 3). The situations we experience today there-
fore pose new challenges that are sometimes even difficult for us to understand, yet
the present day stimulates us to see problems more as challenges rather than obsta-
cles, opening up before us unprecedented and unexplored opportunities.
     And this can also be done effectively through a Journal.
     If you have reached a position of privilege after so much work, now is the time to
repay the benefit derived from it. Even in this way we are closer to that native intent
we believed and defined “Culture System”. We are referring to those synergies from
cultural backgrounds, experiences, and skills from different academic schools, as
well as the institutions, research centers, companies, territorial forces involved in the
                                       “Culture System”. This is an acquired and functional strategy to be proposed as a model
                                       in other cultural realities.
                                            With these intentions the Journal, after its first twenty years from 2001-2020, traces
                                       its future path with a new impetus and with the aim of applying and diffusing, in the
                                       study and research of cultural heritage, a common theory and methodology of the
                                       scientific principles on which both the humanistic and experimental sciences are based:
                                       this is, therefore, the transition that is needed to go from generic interdisciplinarity to
                                       transdisciplinarity or crossdisciplinarity.


                                          2. Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity-crossdisciplinarity

                                            In this regard, it is fundamental in the study and research of cultural heritage to
                                       underline, as already evidenced in a previous Editorial of this Journal, the clear distinc-
                                       tion between the conceptual terms: multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisci-
                                       plinarity ‒ crossdisciplinarity. Three different concepts which include different starting
                                       points, paths and objectives, and hence achieve different results.
                                            Multidisciplinarity, in the sphere of knowledge deriving from specific disciplines,
                                       represents a simple summation of the said, which as such, remain connected to the in-
                                       dividual contents and results.
                                            Interdisciplinarity, which stems from the need triggered by multidisciplinarity, is not
                                       limited to juxtaposing the disciplines, it reflects and is open to different disciplines that
                                       necessarily interact with each other to reach a common goal and confirm the corre-
                                       sponding scientific content.
                                            Transdisciplinarity-crossdisciplinarity is the successive step to take after the previ-
                                       ously mentioned one, involving and dealing with the foundations, validity and limita-
                                       tions of the different sciences, and successive competences and relative contributions.
                                       It thus confirms the result of a common theory and methodology, on whose principles
                                       the humanistic sciences and experimental sciences are based, and which ultimately
                                       acquire a unique value and result.
                                            What follows, therefore, is a gnoseology based on a new epistemological philoso-
                                       phy with respect to the epistemologies of the single disciplines which merely collabo-
                                       rate with each other. In this regard, a distinction should be made between these con-
                                       cepts and their meanings.
                                            Gnoseology (from gnosis = knowledge through perception and logos = word or
S. Lorusso, M. Mantovani - Editorial




                                       speech) studies the principles, validity and limits of knowledge which is, therefore, re-
                                       vealed, intuited.
                                            Epistemology (from episteme = knowledge through study and logos = word or speech)
                                       is the study of knowing (learning) as a scientific act, a critical investigation into the meth-
                                       odology used by science which questions the validity of the scientific method, knowing
                                       what is above it and, to some extent, cannot be denied.
                                            Therefore, both epistemology and gnoseology are needed, especially when we
                                       begin to distinguish between subjective and objective knowledge, the latter being spe-
                                       cifically scientific knowledge.
                                            In our case, therefore, what derives from this observation is: “How can we know the
                                       correct and full solution to the numerous and diversified problems concerning cultural
                                       heritage if not by involving the scientific input deriving both from the humanistic sciences,
                                       with their corresponding subjective evaluation (historical, stylistic, aesthetic and icono-
                                       graphic), and from the experimental sciences with their corresponding objective eval-
                                       uation obtained through the use of diagnostic-analytical technologies?”


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     It seems appropriate here, to underline what Gillo Dorfles, an Italian art critic, paint-
er and professor of historical aesthetics and, one of the most multifaceted personalities
of the 1900s, said: “When you speak about aesthetics, you are speaking about the
philosophy of art, which is obviously right, but it is good to specify that aesthetics has
always been, not only philosophical, but also linked to other disciplines, such us anthro-
pology, psychoanalysis, semeiotics”.
     However, it is equally important to underline the fundamental contribution of the
historical disciplines and highlight, albeit with reference to the aforementioned group of
the humanistic sciences, that reciprocal need which characterizes artwork.
     And with the above-mentioned emotional and sensorial characteristics, denoting
emotive human qualities, together with those of a historical nature, referable to the
historical-humanistic and philological-philosophical-social area, the set of values con-
cerning other areas of investigation of art must also be considered: this refers to disci-
plines in the technical-economic-managerial area, as well as the legal-identitary area.
     This provides a concrete explanation of the meaning of the holistic value of cultural
heritage as a set of values, and of the consequent importance of dealing with the var-
ious problems of protection and valorization of cultural and environmental heritage in a
crossdisciplinary way.
     In universities and research centers the situation is very different with respect to
what was previously said regarding these concepts and their application in the corre-
sponding structures in integrating the different disciplines, due to historical-logistic fac-
tors and aspects which are at times irreversible.
     More specifically, in some places, non-acceptance confirms that the aforementioned
problems of protection and valorization are addressed by individual disciplines and skills.
In others, there are situations in which this integration is not concretely achieved with
belief and conviction, as they can be attributed either to their overlapping, that is, to mul-
tidisciplinarity, or to a formal interaction, that is, a weak form of interdisciplinarity.




                                                                                                       CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
   3. The Journal: neither pyramidal, nor round, but … jagged

    What has been said up to now aims to fully understand the complexity that the
holistic value of the cultural artwork presents and, which, therefore, imposes that in the
pre-established intent, in the methodological path pursued and in the final result there
must be some form of integration. In this regard, the following describes a specific case
in which the Authors (of the present text) were directly involved.
    The difficult transition from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, pursued in 1989,
in the first, chronologically speaking, Faculty of Conservation of Cultural Heritage of
the University of Tuscia (Viterbo), in Italy, was continued in 1997, in the Department of
Cultural Heritage of Bologna University. This led to the afore-mentioned synergy of the
sciences, represented in research by the launching of the historical-technical Journal
“Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage” and in education by the activation of the
Master in “Planning, promotion and management of artistic and cultural events”: two
emblematic examples of the integration between art and science.
    What follows is limited to a discussion of the Journal.
    The Journal and the scientific papers from different countries that have been submit-
ted, evaluated and then published over the twenty years from 2001-2020, and up to the
present, represent the product of different schools and scientific realities, bearing wit-
ness to those principles of internationalization, as well as “strong” interdisciplinarity which
today has become transdisciplinarity, and on which the structure of the Journal rests.


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                                           Taking up the expression of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario
                                       Bergoglio, in the Latin-American Conference in Aparecida, in 2007 and replacing –
                                       perhaps disrespectfully but justified by the profound meaning inherent in the metaphor-
                                       ical term – “Church” with “Journal”, this is what was stated at an intercontinental level:
                                       The Journal “is neither pyramidal nor circular, but …jagged”.
                                           After all, the intuition according to which reality is not a “sphere” but a “polyhedron”
                                       is clever; a “jagged” reality cannot be fitted into a sphere or a pyramid, it has to be
                                       considered in its quality of being “jagged”: a perspective that is simple yet powerful in
                                       that it attributes and recognizes in everyone their uniqueness within an intrinsically
                                       relational context.
                                           The interpretation of these terms leads correspondingly to the following meanings:
                                           ‒ “pyramidal”, synonymous with top-down and, therefore, referable to a few, with
                                               implications that are in contrast with positions and statements and even less
                                               with openness, discussion and commonality of intentions and objectives;
                                           ‒ “circular”, synonymous with unclear, with implications that are open to interpreta-
                                               tion and, as such, questionable;
                                           ‒ “jagged”, synonymous with being in favour of, being diversified, being applied on
                                               a basis sanctioned by many and directed toward achieving a common truth.


                                          4. “Making” authentic culture

                                            This is how the commonality of a single scientific truth, the combination of cross-func-
                                       tional competences and the ongoing debate have resulted in the Journal’s transdiscipli-
                                       narity, also as regards the training and employment market for young people.
                                            Characterized over the years by a “conatus essendi” – a “struggle to live” – a desire
                                       to exist, to map out, to believe and, therefore, to demonstrate its role in the research
                                       and training of young researchers, the Journal can consequently pay back the benefits
                                       it has gained from the privileged position it has reached internationally by replicating its
                                       model in other cultural realities.
                                            Thus, offering a contribution to the indispensable task of promoting, through scien-
                                       tific training and quality research, the integral “human flourishing”, safeguarding and
                                       nurturing the talents of humanity and professionalism that are present, above all, in
                                       young people, they can effectively bear fruit.
                                            “One of the greatest joys that any educator can have is to see a student turn into a
S. Lorusso, M. Mantovani - Editorial




                                       strong, well-integrated person, a leader, someone prepared to give.” (Pope Francis,
                                       Christus Vivit, Loreto, 25 March 2015, 221).
                                            Indeed, we need people capable of living “in” society and “for” society, witnesses of
                                       a true and proper passion (studium) for culture, as well as for truth, goodness, justice and
                                       beauty. In this very concrete way, even a specialized scientific publication, such as the
                                       Journal, in promoting culture, manages to be authentically and brilliantly “popular”: if we
                                       speak of a people’s “culture” it is more than an abstract idea. It has to do with their de-
                                       sires, their interests and ultimately the way they live their lives. Therefore, to speak of a
                                       “culture of encounter” means that we, as a people, should be passionate about meeting
                                       others, seeking points of contact, building bridges, planning a project that includes every-
                                       one. This becomes an aspiration and a way of life. The subject of this culture is the
                                       people, not simply one part of society that would pacify the rest with the help of profes-
                                       sional and media resources.” (Pope Francis, Fratelli tutti, Assisi, 3 October 2020, 216).
                                            A winning commitment, which is also a shared responsibility, for the “Culture System”.



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