Abito mentale e abito estetico : Una fenomenologia dell’ornamento tra medioevo e rinascimento

In the light of the Panofskian analogy between scholastic thought and Gothic cathe- drals, which share the same mental habit, and the interpretative problems it pre- sents, the article intends to investigate a possible way to lighten the architectural metaphor by shifting the discourse to the level of aesthetic habit through a phenom- enology of ornamentation, in order to achieve interesting results on a theoretical and aesthetic level. Starting from Giovanni Piana’s observations on chromaticism in music as a di- alectic between continuous and discrete, the theme of ornamentation in architecture is explored in this sense, focusing on two examples: the tiles of Giotto’s Campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and those of the intradoses on the facade of the Turin Cathedral. While in the former one notices, for example, a discretisation of the vertical continuum in grace of the horizontality of a narration of social practices (the liberal and mechanical arts), which have also become aesthetic habits, in the decorations on the portals of the Turin Cathedral, in some cases, one observes a fluidification of the discrete into a continuous narration. The idea of ornamentation as an aesthetic habit is thus outlined, an ornament in which the practices of a certain society are settled, in which the continuities of forms are discretised, or discrete relations are fluidised according to visual or sonorous consonant relationships.