University of Virginia Library

I

Among the most important pieces of art restoration in progress at the moment is the work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Time has wreaked remarkably little havoc since the fifteenth century. Ceiling leaks, candle smoke, and the wine, animal glue, arabic resin and other substances used in the many earlier restorations dating from the sixteenth century are nearly all being removed. The dark and gloomy surface which suffocated the range of Michelangelo's tonality and fed the nineteenth-century myth of his being a black and melancholy artist is being stripped away. Dott. Colalucci, the Senior Restorer, has argued the 'necessity to recover all full chromatic effects intended by Michelangelo . . . without which [the fresco] would appear flat and without modelling'.[2] The aim is a total cleaning. One of the discoveries has been a piece of the original fresco which in 1517 was used to fill a crack which had already developed in the ceiling. The colours of this fragment, which had suffered only a few years of exposure, are extremely close to the colours emerging from the restoration process. Relatively little retouching

has been found necessary, and that has been done in watercolour, thus making it easily reversible by later generations of restorers. One result of this ambitious restoration—spanning nine years—is new knowledge about Michelangelo's working methods. In order to make decisions about methods of restoration, the restorers have had to reconstruct how Michelangelo actually went about his work. The surface of the paintings and the subsurface have had to be investigated thoroughly. Very little evidence of co-workers has been found; the ceiling was not therefore a workshop production. Michelangelo painted up to eighteen square feet per day. Painting a fresco, he had to work while the surface was still damp: it has been calculated that he did the whole ceiling in about 450 stints or giornate, each of up to a day in length.

An interesting parallel with bibliography emerges. The painting, we learn, has had to be analysed not just as image, for its iconic value and historical interrelatedness to the traditions of the period. It has had to be known, in the words of the title of a recent Australian conference of restorers and curators, as an 'articulate surface'. Restorers (or 'conservators' as they prefer to be called) and curators nowadays have available to them a battery of tests: X-radiographs which seek evidence of pentimenti (revisions) or earlier versions beneath the surface, the use of raking, ultra-violet and infra-red light, the microanalysis of cross-sections of paint, and the many other techniques of chemical identification. The building-up of the layers of paint from the 'ground' coating can be examined. These methods could be said to correspond to the collations and the methods of analytical bibliography employed by editors; and descriptive bibliographies could be paralleled to catalogues raisonnés. Indeed, if curators and conservators are archaeologists of the image—if they can make the surface articulate the painting's history—then editors are archaeologists of the printed or written text, of the history of its writing and production. But in both cases it has traditionally been felt that the primary upshot of this considerable effort is to present to the viewing or reading public a restored painting or a reading text of the literary work—the real thing, or as close to it as we can get. Just as, it is believed, accumulations of dirt and varnish can be removed to reveal the painting as it left the artist's hand, so ought editors to aim at recovering the text which the author (however one construes the term) intended. Through the glass darkly, we can—with conservators' and editors' help—espy, if not know in all its details, the thing itself: the work of literary or painterly art.

However, the following consideration of the activity of art-making—and the traces it leaves behind for the conservators to deal with—does not support the traditional assumption. This conclusion might be of only tangential interest for literary editors were it not that the evidence from painting conservation dovetails in some important respects with that provided by editors' examination of the traces of literary production. If the line of observation and argument in this essay is persuasive, then there are implications for editors' understanding of their practice because of the unavoidable questioning

of the traditional term, 'literary work'. Rather than a robust existential entity, it emerges as a creature of our own conventions.[3]