What the Restored Painting Loses
On the ethics of cleaning off five centuries of varnish.
Every restoration is also an erasure - of dirt, yes, but also of the centuries the dirt was quietly recording.
The newly restored painting is, by every technical measure, closer to what the artist originally intended: brighter, cleaner, the colors returned to something like their first vividness.
It is also, undeniably, a different object than the one that hung in that gallery for four hundred years, because the accumulated grime of those centuries was itself a kind of record, however unintentional, of time actually passing.
I do not think restoration is wrong. I think we should be more honest about what it costs, which is not just money, and not just risk to the pigment, but a specific kind of historical evidence that, once cleaned away, does not come back.
