Cesare Brandi

Cesare Brandi (8 April 1906 – 19 January 1988) was an art critic and historian, a specialist in conservation-restoration theory who was born in Siena and died in Vignano.

[4] His broad practical experience and his phenomenological references ranging from Plato to Kant, passing through Benedetto Croce, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bergson and especially Edmund Husserl and Hegel, culminated in what became known as Theory of Critical Restoration.

In 1930 Brandi was commissioned by the Superintendence of Monuments and Galleries of Siena to rearrange, catalogue and arrange the collection of paintings of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Tuscan city in the new headquarters of Palazzo Buonsignori.

The assignment lasted about three years; during this period he spent in the city he took care of organizing the first restoration workshop and the "Exhibition of Riminese Painting of the Fourteenth Century" (1935).

In 1938 he was recalled to the Ministry of National Education in Rome and, on the proposal of Giulio Carlo Argan he was assigned in 1939 the task of directing the Royal Central Institute of Restoration[7] For his work as a critic, Cesare Brandi has twice obtained the Feltrinelli Prize, conferred by the Accademia dei Lincei: in 1958 and in 1980.