University of Virginia Library

II

As a professional activity, art conservation has emerged only since the Second World War, but in recent years a critical assessment of the theoretical bases of the activity has been in train. This is evident in the papers given by conservators and curators at recent conferences in Ottawa, London and Canberra.[4] Assumptions about the boundaries of the work of art are being contested—as are the roles which the viewing audience and the exhibition context should have in the definition of the work.

Even the case of the Sistine Chapel—which might have been custommade to illustrate the traditional view—has its refractory elements. Minor retouchings from previous restorations are being removed. Dott. Colalucci refers to them as 'unartistic'. But some additions done in 1565 as a result of the Council of Trent's finding the nudity in the painting disgusting are being retained, despite the fact that their removal would be a simple matter. Daniele da Volterra painted some small pieces of clothing over the offending portions. A copy in Naples shows how the painting originally looked in this respect. This, incidentally, is a familiar paradox to conservators: that because of more favourable conditions of hanging or storage, the use by the

copyist of superior materials, or a botched restoration of the original, a copy can be closer in some respects to the earlier state of the painting than is the painting itself.[5] But while the copy may repeat faithfully the original image and still approximate its original colours, its surface and subsurface will almost certainly not correspond. They will articulate a different process of production, a different conjunction of historical factors.

The decision, in the case of the Sistine Chapel, to retain what critical editors might think of as the Council of Trent's bowdlerisation is being done on the grounds of their historical value, despite the fact that the justification of the entire restoration is based on appeals either to Michelangelo's intention or to the recovery of the original state of the frescoes. This does not seem a consistent application of a principle, if the principle is authorial. If the principle is historical, then it is running together two historical moments within a third: the moment of late-twentieth-century restoration. The effects of time on the painting are not being eliminated; they are being packaged in a superb, though somewhat contradictory, act of artistic editing—an act that is happening in the present. Although there has been a long history of failed restorations of the Sistine Chapel and although Dott. Colalucci envisages the need for successors, the rationale of his team's activities is backward-directed. Yet clearly their restoration, which is an intervention of the most radical kind, eliminates the evidence on which generations of viewings and interpretations of the ceiling have been based. Essentially it refuses to acknowledge the role of the viewer or of time in the work of art. Instead, its authenticity as an act of painterly editing derives, or claims to derive, from Michelangelo—mostly, but with a little bit from the Council of Trent. The shuffle is interesting, acknowledging as it does a contemporary synthesis—an appeal to conventions in the present—while the rhetoric of the justification is an appeal to the past and to authorship (interestingly, curators use this latter term). In other words, the painting in the Sistine Chapel is an ongoing work which continues in the activities of Dott. Colalucci and his team.

The conclusion that the Sistine Chapel painting is an ongoing work may be felt provocative—or, at best, teasingly paradoxical. We normally prefer to think of the work and the conservation (or editing) as two separate things: the latter, we believe, is brought to bear on the former. The work is the quarry which, in all its details, the conservator and editor seek out. Such is Dott. Colalucci's aim, and we might assume it to be widely applicable. Leonardo's

Last Supper (1498) is, however, an immediate exception. Due to failures of adhesion, there have been extensive losses of pigment and priming across the whole surface.[6] Leonardo's work exists now only in fragments; the current restoration being undertaken by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon is intended to strip off the successive overpaintings to recover what remains of Leonardo's own work. Martin Kemp remarks that the resultant emphasis on 'the ravishing detail that will reveal the hand of the master' (p. 18) is often justified by close-up before-and-after photographs. The conservators' work is aimed at facilitating a form of reading the painting quite foreign to earlier generations of viewers and restorers, many of whom looked at it as a history painting and all of whom, according to Kemp, looked for the overall effect rather than to the fragment. In other words, modern conservational technology, justified by a rhetoric of authorial intent and authenticity, is re-presenting a Last Supper that is very much a product of the present. There can, therefore, be no 'real' Last Supper unrelated to the conservator. Kemp is quietly persuasive on the point:

The case of the Leonardo painting raises the question of how far the search for authorial traces should go. In the collection of the New South Wales State Library there is a painting of an important colonial figure, Elizabeth Macarthur, by an anonymous journeyman painter. Dating from about 1840, it had been overpainted in the Victorian period. Conservators removed the overpainting, thereby revealing a Regency-style bust but destroying a Victorian painting. The 'original' was uncovered, and it has welcome historical value; but the later work must also have had some which is now lost. Again, there is a large painting by Benjamin West from the 1790s, called Christ Showing the Little Children; it is in the Foundlings Hospital, London. It was subject to very early deterioration. West repainted it after ten years, and fifteen years later had once again to restore it. There are, thus, three versions of the work painted one on top of the other. All are authorial. Would there be grounds to remove one or both of the top layers? This would involve their destruction, but would reveal the original. Put another way: are there grounds, other than economic ones, not to remove the top layers?

Whichever way one answers the question, the need for the conservator and curator to assume an actively interpretative role is inescapable.[7]

Conservators then, rather like editors, do not occupy a neutral, ideologically innocent position that is legitimised by their scientific techniques. Post-structuralist theorists have repeatedly argued that we participate in what we know and that power inheres in the ways that we know. The application of this now-familiar argument is clear. Editors and conservators are not simply engaged in other-directed action. The artistic (or literary) work is not an object which of itself necessitates certain criteria in the restorative activity. One such criterion, authorial intention, is, according to Martin Kemp, too slippery a notion to be of use without redefinition in a way that deprives it of its capacity to encompass the wholeness or integrity of the work. Nevertheless, authorial agency remains of prime interest to most viewers and readers, and this factor can offer a justification for certain forms of editorial treatment of visual and printed artifacts where, at the local level, distinctions can often be made between traces that are probably authorial and those that are not. This justification is pragmatic rather than idealist: conservators and editors are interventionists, go-betweens, rather than scientifically disinterested technicians. In and through their activities, literary and artistic works continue to function—and function differently from before: editors and conservators broker workable solutions between documents and new readers, between artifact and new generations of viewers, on the basis of criteria which enjoy a currency and persuasive power in their day. Where this leaves the traditional editorial notion of the work (whose authorial text editors characteristically aim to isolate from the similar but variant texts produced by differently motivated copyists, printers and commercial publishers) is a question the remaining illustrations may help to clarify.