Is it wrong to restore deteriorated art? It is in my view an underrated ethical conundrum.
In the years since Michelangelo completed his glorious ceiling for the Sistine Chapel in Rome, grime, cracks, and animal fat had accumulated on it to the extent that Picasso said, “The Sistine Chapel looks like an enormous drawing by Daumier.” Playwright and poet Jean Cocteau called Michelangelo “a marvellous draughtsman but a poor painter”.1
In 1980, an ambitious and controversial restoration project was inaugurated to return the ceiling to its original grandeur. Controversial, because there were fears that in scraping away at the outermost layers of the fresco, restorers might have inadvertently destroyed some of Michelangelo’s more delicate details.
Should we risk irreversible damage to a historic artwork for the sake of preservation? The subject of art restoration may appear at first merely a scientific one, but episodes like this prove that it is also an ethical one.
Why do we restore art in the first place? The obvious answer is to reveal how the artwork was originally intended to look by the artist. Yet, we also have unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo. If we know what they were supposed to ultimately look like, should we finish them off?
This feels scandalous. Yet when this effort is made backwards in time, it is hardly remarked upon. What is the difference in principle? Is an artwork the same after restoration? And why does it seem natural to clean the Sistine Chapel to reveal its original colours, but not to, say, clean the Statue of Liberty to reveal its original copper?
These questions and more are discussed in today’s episode of Within Reason. I hope to expand upon these questions in depth for a future essay/video. But for now, I give you a conversation with Sheehan Quirke.
Sheehan Quirke is The Cultural Tutor — a writer with 1.7 million followers on X (and 810 on BlueSky), his work on art, history, and architecture is some of the most widely-enjoyed in the world.
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- Alex
