AN INEXORABLE STRUGGLE
AGAINST
THE RUTHLESSNESS OF
TIME

Professional restoration appeared at the time of accumulation of private art collections, when it became necessary to prolong the life of art objects. The first information about restorers dates back to the Middle Ages; serious schools of professional restoration began to emerge in the XVII-XVIII centuries.

There are many types of restoration, which are divided according to different characteristics. In all types, the main purpose of restoration is to restore the loss of the monument (defects resulting from use – chipping, bumps, breaks and many other things), as well as to preserve the monument.

Restoration is commercial and museum restoration. In the first case, the goal of restoration is to restore functionality, while in the second case the main goal is conservation, i.e. preservation of the condition without altering the monument. As a rule, museum restoration involves only conservation, and intervention in the object is applied only in cases of extreme necessity, for example, when there are obvious signs of reversible processes of destruction.

All types of work carried out on damaged works of art are usually referred to by one general term – restoration. However, this generalised term encompasses three essentially different sets of works: conservation, restoration and reconstruction.

In restoration practice, these types of work can coexist as different stages of a single process, or they can be independent, with specific methods and tools appropriate to each.

“The present preserves the past for transmission to the future”. Conservation and restoration are as old as the work of art itself, since the process of destruction is already inherent in its creation. Art, like man, cannot escape aging.

Restoration has existed since antiquity: Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius describe the relocation of frescoes. In the 3rd century AD, the first criticism of restoration also appeared. In the Middle Ages, the restoration of religious paintings was done either to preserve praying images or to bring them into line with modern tastes. This was their good fortune, for the indifference of later eras, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to medieval paintings caused many of them to perish. We know from sources that the care of improving the works of their predecessors was entrusted to famous artists; thus Lorenzo di Credi corrected the paintings of Paolo Uccello and Fra Angelico. In Ghent in 1550 Jan van Scorel and Lancelot Blondel were commissioned to tidy up an altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, to which they added some of their own elements.

During the Counter-Reformation, after the decisions of the Council of Tridentine

(1545-1563), religious paintings and murals began to be brought into line with the new piety. Nudity and secularism were little suited to the clergy; thus, in 1564 Daniele da Volterra was commissioned to drape the nude figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel. In 1576 IV the Provincial Council of Milan recommended to the bishops not only to burn badly deteriorated prayer images and place their ashes in churches to avoid desecration, but also to “renew” those that were better preserved in order to strengthen piety. Church paintings were to be restored, which meant, in effect, “rewriting” them anew. In Rome at the end of the seventeenth century, the famous artist Carlo Maratta was in charge of restoration. In particular, he restored Raphael’s Stanzi and Loggia and the Carracci brothers’ gallery in the Palazzo Farnese. He was known as a great master, and when the Pope asked him to cover the neckline of the Madonna by Guido Reni, he used pastel colours that could be easily removed – one of the earliest attempts at ‘reversibility’.

In France, the first references to the conservation and restoration of paintings are associated with the arrangement of the collection of Francis 1 at Fontainebleau: paintings were “washed”, “cleaned” and “refreshed”. Primaticcio, who played a major role in the Fontainebleau murals, was obliged to keep the paintings in good condition as well.

In that era, the restoration of famous works was usually entrusted to equally famous artists; sometimes it was done by skilful copyists who could imitate the master. In the 17th century, a whole group of conservator-restorers emerged at Fontainebleau. Paintings were details of interiors and so were often enlarged or reduced according to the setting in which they were to fit. From the second half of the seventeenth century, the “duplication” of an original painting became a frequent procedure.

In the seventeenth century, Charles Lebrun, the king’s first painter, was given the title of “keeper of paintings” and was obliged to keep in order the collection of royal paintings housed in the Louvre, for the care of which he employed “skilful men”, as sources attest.

But from 1699, with the appointment of Paillé as curator, charged specifically with the maintenance and restoration of paintings from the royal collections, a genuine doctrine of restoration developed, developed by the directors of the Royal Buildings and culminating in the sensible and careful conception of the Comte d’Angiville at the end of the 18th century. In 1701, Paillé’s place was taken by François Stimart, and in 1740 by Joseph Godefroy, a restorer already working for private collectors and the Regent. Between 1741 and 1775, the widow Godefroy carried out the restoration of the royal paintings with the help of two artists, François Louis Colin and Guillemart, and then her son Joseph-Ferdinand Godefroy. With the death of Godefroy’s widow (1775), Count d’Angiville abolished the post and created a special team of artists who duplicated and restored the canvases. Thus, the profession became at the service of the Crown; there was no longer a monopoly of one master, but there was selection.

Restoration was separated from canvas duplication. The secret of operations was abolished, every new method was studied, and prices and methods were supervised. It was under these conditions that an important technical innovation appeared in France in the middle of the eighteenth century – the transfer of the colour layer from one base, from which it flakes off, to another. It is known that this technique was invented in the first quarter of the eighteenth century in Italy and came to France via Brussels.

Thus, in France on the eve of the Revolution, restoration utilised the latest technical discoveries – duplication, transfer, the sliding parquetage technique. All of these were related to the restoration of the painting’s foundation

1780-1815 was a period of considerable activity, especially with the influx of paintings from Belgium, Holland, Italy and elsewhere into Paris as a result of Napoleon’s campaigns. French restorers gained a great deal of experience. In 1797-1802, J.-B.-P. Lebrun was appointed an expert to determine the condition of all foreign paintings imported into Paris, supervising restoration and controlling the price of restoration work. He fought to improve traditional restoration methods and to organise a competition to select the best specialists. An advocate of the prudent purification of paintings from later records, he was in some ways the initiator of the French method of restoration.

A significant event in the history of restoration took place in 1802 when Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (Vatican Pinacoteca) was transferred from wood to canvas.

In Italy (Bologna, Rome, Florence, Naples) there were local traditions of restoration. In Venice, beginning in 1770, the English artist Peter Edwarde created and directed the Laboratorio di San Giovanni e Paolo (a workshop for the restoration of paintings from public collections). In these workshops, specialists worked according to scientific theory and with great care and respect for the work, on the basis of the reversibility of alterations, guided by modern principles and requirements. In nineteenth-century France, the transfer of a painting to another base and the technique of sliding parquetage were widespread; these operations were carried out by canvas duplicators and cabinetmakers. Restorers renovated the work like true painters. Their knowledge was empirical and kept secret. Their work was considered “illusionistic” – the painting gave the impression of being intact. In the 20th century, restoration moved more and more away from empiricism, becoming a scientific discipline. To respond to the growing interest in the thorny problems of museum restorers, the International Intellectual Co-operation Service studied the restoration of paintings; the report was published in 1939.