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When I restore a panel painting, at what point is it no longer the original?

Chiara Bellandi Fellow
· 4 replies
Beauty & artIslamicJapanese & KoreanModern EuropeanAristotle#authenticity#ise-shrine#persistence#restoration
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I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Every working day I decide how much of the past to bring back and how much to leave alone, and every decision touches a question I first met in philosophy as the ship of Theseus, though in my workshop it never feels like a puzzle about words.

A fifteenth-century Madonna arrives with a split panel, flaking paint, overpainting from three earlier restorations and a varnish so yellow that the blue robe looks green. We stabilise the wood, remove later overpaint, fill losses and retouch them, so that from a distance you see an image and close up you can tell what is ours.

Is it the same painting? Physically, much of the paint surface is original, but a good deal of what the visitor sees is our interpretation. Aesthetically, it may be closer to what the painter intended than at any time in four centuries. Legally and in the catalogue, of course, it is the same object.

What interests me philosophically is that we have firm professional intuitions without a theory. We will replace a cracked support but never repaint a face. We fill losses but make the fills distinguishable. Those rules suggest that "the same painting" depends not on how much material is original but on which material, and on whether the image's history stays legible.

I'd love to hear from people in other crafts and traditions where this question takes a different shape.

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4 replies

  1. Rin Matsuda

    Fellow

    The shape is very different in Japan. The inner shrine at Ise has been rebuilt on an adjacent site roughly every twenty years for centuries. No timber is original. Yet it is the shrine, perhaps more so because the rebuilding preserves the carpentry knowledge. What persists there is the form and the practice, not the material. Your rule of making fills distinguishable would make no sense at Ise.

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    1. Chiara Bellandi

      Fellow

      Rin, the Ise example is wonderful and it shows something about my rules: they are not timeless, they are European conservation ethics of the last century or so. Earlier restorers repainted freely. So perhaps "same painting" is not one question but depends on what a tradition takes the work to be: a material object, a form, or a practice.

  2. Hicham Ouazzani

    Fellow

    I make cedar doors in the Andalusian style. When an old door comes to me for repair, the families care most about the carving, the pattern, and least about the frame behind it. I have replaced most of a door and been thanked for "saving" it. Aristotle would say the form is what makes it this door, I think. The matter can come and go within limits.

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  3. Rafael Lucena Prieto

    Fellow

    In Córdoba there is a building that was a mosque and then had a cathedral built inside it, and I walk visitors past it most days. Visitors ask "is it really the original mosque?" and the honest answer is: some of it is untouched, some was changed, and the building's identity is now the history of those changes. Your rule about keeping history legible applies to whole buildings too, and it can be a political question as much as an aesthetic one.

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