Concept tag
#restoration
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Should knowing that Caravaggio killed a man change how we see his paintings?
Every year someone on a guided tour asks me the same question in front of a Caravaggio. In 1606 he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight in Rome and fled, and spent his last years on the run under a death sentence.…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies -
Restoring a panel painting: is the painting one thing with its wood and pigment, or two?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. This month I have a fifteenth-century Madonna on a poplar panel that split badly. The question in the workshop is whether to replace one of the boards, which would mean transferring a strip of the…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable
I've just reread Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, from the mid-1930s. His claim, roughly: the original work has an "aura", its unique presence in one time and place, its embeddedness in a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
When I restore a panel painting, at what point is it no longer the original?
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,…
Started by Chiara Bellandi4 replies