Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Ars longa, vita brevis -- but even art doesn't last forever. At least, not without a lot of help.

The ephemerality of art does, of course, depend on what you're doing. Performing arts are fleeting by nature: there's notation or (nowadays) recording, but when we talk about preserving something like music or dance, we tend to mean the art form as a whole, making sure there continue to be practitioners and audiences. In this sense it's much like a craft, where you need an ongoing series of teachers and students to inherit their wisdom -- which includes passing on the specific details of a song or a dance, an oral story or an epic poem, if you don't have a way of committing those to a more permanent medium. If that chain of transmission gets broken, then skills or entire works of art may be lost.

Physical art is more fixed, but that doesn't mean it's lasting. I've talked before about how much literature was destroyed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut down on the availability of papyrus: that stuff isn't durable, and so anything written on it has to be copied and recopied, over and over again, as the original version decays. Many kinds of wood-pulp paper have a similar problem with acid; unless it's specially treated (acid-free paper), it succumbs to what's poetically known as "slow fire," gradually turning the paper more and more brittle until the slightest touch causes it to disintegrate. Modern science has ways to stabilize and de-acidify the paper, but for these kinds of artworks, "preservation" usually consists of continually making new copies, so that the content survives even if the container does not.

Some things you might think don't need conservation. Fired clay has survived for thousands of years; surely it's perfectly fine, right? Not necessarily. Depending on how the clay was treated, it may still contain salts that can expand and crack the material, even to the point of it disintegrating into useless fragments. Salt and other chemicals can also attack stone, accumulating either through rain (which is rarely entirely pure), through wind, or through dampness rising from the ground. Heat and cold also create stress on the stone which can lead to cracks: microscopic ones at first, but as the strain continues, and especially if those cracks are infiltrated by substances that expand and contract at different rates, entire pieces can break off. This is why so many ancient statues are missing noses, hands, and other protruding bits.

Even if it's less dramatic than that, weathering takes a gradual toll. Erosion from wind and water scrapes away infinitesimal layers of detail from the surface, year after year. Iron obviously rusts, but nearly any metal can corrode in one fashion or another -- sometimes damaging not only itself, but everything around it. Wooden elements not only rot but warp, placing stress on anything they connect to. Pigments fade and discolor, perhaps from the mere touch of light; textiles combine the vulnerabilities of those pigments with the brittleness and decay of organic material. Insects may eat away at artworks or lay their eggs within them; moss and lichen, while picturesque in their own way, hasten the breakdown of whatever they've latched onto. The list of potential sources of damage is nearly endless.

The cruelest twist is that sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the very problems we're trying to address. Our efforts to preserve great works of art go back for centuries, but our knowledge of how to do that well is much more recent. Past conservators have worked diligently to clean dirt and overgrowth off statues or paintings . . . not realizing that the cleansers they're using are causing other kinds of damage, especially once the long term comes into play. Maybe it looks fine in the moment, but it's actually dried out the paint so that later on it begins to crack and flake away from the canvas or panels beneath.

Our efforts to halt or reverse damage can likewise become part of the problem. Adding metal brackets to stabilize some work of stone may seem like a good idea, but their corrosion or warping can destroy what they were meant to protect. (This likely contributed to the collapse of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, as the fire heated the iron supports added by the Victorians.) And have you ever wondered why so many paintings by the Old Masters look dark and yellow? That's because at some point, some well-meaning person gave them a coat of varnish to protect the paint beneath -- and then, in the decades or centuries since then, the varnish has aged and collected dust, distorting the colors of the painting and obscuring finer details. You can see this in a video by Philip Mould that recently made the rounds of the internet, showing him cleaning away a thick layer of discolored varnish to reveal a startlingly vibrant portrait beneath.

And finally, conservation sometimes includes touching up the original -- but where the line is between "touching up" and "adding your own ideas" may be in the eye of the beholder. Quite a few classical sculptures you might see in Italy nowadays were actually found as fragments, with Renaissance artists hired to "restore" the missing portions according to their own vision -- look into the famous grouping Laocoön and His Sons to see the replacement right arm Laocoön was given, versus the one found later that seems to have been the original. A portrait of Isabella de' Medici in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum of Art was so thoroughly overpainted that the curator actually thought it was a modern fake; only upon X-ray examination did she find the original was holding an urn and had a completely different face. And, most egregiously, the "restorers" Sir Arthur Evans hired for the frescos in the Minoan palace of Knossos exercised so much of their own creativity around the surviving fragments that they transformed what we now know was a depiction of a monkey into a young boy.

The key goals nowadays are prevention, stability, reversibility, and honesty. Prevention means producing art on durable materials like acid-free paper, keeping fragile materials in climate-controlled rooms, bundling up outdoor sculptures in wintertime to protect them from the cold, and otherwise trying to forestall problems from getting a foothold in the first place. Stability means leveraging our improved knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the materials we use to repair or protect works of art are less likely to cause damage later on. Reversibility means doing our best to guarantee that anything we add can be removed later on without harm: it's fine to put protective varnish on a painting or a sculpture, so long as we can also wipe it away. And honesty means that, if we fill in the gaps on some fragmentary relic, we let the seams show, instead of trying to pass off our own additions as the genuine article.

Do we succeed at adhering to these goals all the time, in all circumstances? Of course not. And even when we try, we may miss the mark, such that later generations curse us for well-meaning interventions that accidentally made things worse. But we do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have, which is all that anyone can promise.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/kvMTkk)