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In his long life, Antonio Paolucci experienced at the forefront the entire range of work on artistic heritage in Italy. Protection officer since 1969, a few years after graduating with Roberto Longhi, he was Superintendent in Venice, Verona and Mantua before arriving in Florence, where he had the highest responsibilities in the sector, up to the General Directorate of Tuscany. For just over a year, in the short life of the Dini government (1995-96) he was minister for Cultural Heritage, the only true technical minister in the half-century of life of that Ministry, and since 2007 vice-president of the Superior Council of Cultural Heritage . In the same year he took over the management of the Vatican Museums, which he then held for almost ten years. There are countless honors and roles he had in prestigious academies, or in the role of Commissioner (Assisi, Pisa) and in a hundred other circumstances in which balance and competence were required to identify problems, suggest solutions, evaluate results. Even the honors (from the Grand Cross of Merit in Italy to that of Saint Gregory the Great in the Vatican, to the Legion of Honour) were not the standard crowning achievement of a career, but professional recognition of a style of work that never deviated from solid principles of background, not exhibited but experienced. He conducted his work with intensity, torn between an unshakable passion for art and history and the practical need, so to speak “ex officio”, to come to terms with political contingencies and particular situations that required a some diplomatic approach.
He knew how to dialogue and sometimes mediate with professional politicians, but without any cynicism. He experienced the continuous restructuring of “his” Ministry with skepticism and suffering, sharing until the end with the majority of “historic” officials, but also with the younger ones, the dismay at the obstinate marriage, from government to government, between reduction of resources and nominalism of reforms. A man of institutions, he had a rare ability to welcome real or presumed innovations (not only ministerial reorganizations or management proposals, but also technological or historical-artistic hypotheses) with a true interest but tinged with irony if not distrust.
A great disseminator of knowledge (also on the pages of this newspaper), he was perhaps at his best when in front of an interested public and a monument that was dear to him, from the Malatesta Temple in his native Rimini to the Michelangelo of the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, he had the opportunity to condense history and meaning with admirable clarity, calibrating each adjective on the keyboard of emotions but also on those of history and faith. “It’s important to let others share in your emotion,” he said to Claudio Sagliocco a year ago, in what was perhaps his last interview.
Over the years, he had developed, in crescendo, a sort of personal disdain that allowed him to challenge the complexity of concepts and problems without ignoring it, but finding the words to make it understandable even to the less experienced. And speaking, instead, in a more specialized context, he called for reflection on those same complexities without making them an excuse to avoid difficult choices, but using them as an argument to arrive at operational proposals, even when they were controversial. Among his verbal inventions, perhaps the most successful is that of Italy as a “widespread museum”: not to envelop the city and landscape within the same indistinct fog, but to affirm their intimate unity, with an exquisitely political discourse of which it was an essential part. the belief, expressed until the end, that one should enter public museums without paying any ticket.
In that same interview he said bluntly that «the more we grow up, the more we realize in our profession that restoration is above all a political operation. The problem is not so much whether to carry out a good restoration or not, but rather to protect the whole, the context, the environment, and preserve it over time, so that the artistic heritage can be guarded and preserved in that environment. This is the real problem, as Giovanni Urbani taught us with his theory of restoration; restoration as a political intervention rather than a technical-operational one”. Lamenting, as he often did, the devastation of the Italian landscape, Antonio Paolucci regretted its decline because he knew that by destroying that landscape the works of art in museums lose meaning. His “Italian museum” therefore signed the intimate union of landscape and artistic heritage: and with it the coordinates of an ethical and civil commitment, his, which today deserves memory and regret.