La prassi operativa lacuale tra fine dell’Ancien Régime e Restaurazione. Continuità, mutamenti e nuove prospettive

The paper aims, with a methodological approach, to highlight continuity and changes in the good practice – already codified by Lake Artists during Medieval times and improved through the Modern Age – in the period between the end of the Ancien Régime and the Restoration. The analysis focuses especially on the root causes of the partial crisis of their working system both in Italy and Europe and their new diffusion in different international settings, primarily considering the continuation of their presence in Russia, but also, between XIXth and XXth century, their penetration in the American continent and in South-East Asia. The suppression of the religious orders, the secularization, the break-up of family unity ratified by the adoption of Napoleonic Code, the foundation of Canton Ticino and the progressive phenomenon of globalisation contributed, on one hand, to the loss for Swiss-Lombard Lake Artists of some historical cornerstones territories where they determined the fortune of their modus operandi through centuries; on the other one, using pragmatically the widespread of classicist patterns at first, and later of historicist eclecticism they could ensure new working fields, connected with new artistic and craft activities (ceramic, porcelain, engraving, theatre scenography). A new start which, in practice, determined the renewal of a working system which reaffirmed the operational capacity of Lake Artists until the first half of the XXth century.