ABSTRACT
The practice of reusing [ancient sculpture] as filling material was for a long time destined to coexist with the earliest interventions that might be described as “restorations”; that is, with interventions that sought to give back to ancient fragments the completeness that would enable an improved aesthetic appreciation and, more often than not, a subject matter without which the figure would remain illegible, in terms of a representation linked to the fundamental requirements of “history”. Fifteenth-century Venice was the city that presented the richest array of examples of the traditional reuse of materials, this reuse gradually turning into solutions that could be classed as restoration, at least in the sense of the word during the Renaissance.
