Le affinità di Dufourny

As Architect, Director of the first Museum of Architecture in Paris at the beginning of the XIX century, Professor and Editor, Léon Dufourny, because too busy in his many-sided and smart activity, looks like a scholar without his own book, so to say. Drawings and graphic surveys, mixed with written sources and observations, collected in many years spent on the spot, never printed and unknown after Dufourny’s death, have been published incidentally in modern studies. Matter of the present paper is the Tome VII in the Recueil (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France) as a study case, to be compared to scholars’ books sometimes in debt with Léon (from Séroux d’Agincourt to Hittorff). A topic of those drawings is to be executed by the most advanced technologies of that time; actually they are necessary in order to study Norman architecture in Sicily, but despite this graphic accuracy Dufourny’s opinion is far from giving a correct age of medieval monuments. Dufourny’s intellectual role can be defined ‘cultural translation’, in the same time using the words ‘cultural hybridity’ in its peculiar and correct methodology context based on Peter Burke’s studies, applying ‘cultural history’ to XII century as well as to the end of XVIII century.