Art Restoration

I read the article on Dr. Pinan Barmbilla Barcilon and her work on restoring Da Vinci's The Last Supper. It took her twenty years to pain stakenly remove hundreds of years of damage and other artist's attempts at restoration. Her eyesight has been damaged and she suffers chronic pain due to the tedious nature of her work. She is so dedicated that she continued for twenty years to work on the restoration, despite many other artists protests against altering the work of art.

After some research on art restoration, I learned quite a bit of work goes into becoming a restoration artist. It is a competive market for these artists. They must research the origional works and attempt to recreate something from hundreds of years ago. It has even been said that these artists approach the artworks with the skill of a surgeon, working carefully not to harm or damage the remaining paintings and fix what is broken. They use various techinques that are very scientific and measured. The main goal is to never alter the integrity of the origional peice with their attempts to restore it.

Restoration is controversial because the work is altered by someone other than the origional artist in the name of preservation. Sometimes the origional works are changed completely in order to make the piece look good and up to date.  If a peice is altered so many times that the origional doesn't remain, is it still an origional piece just because it looks like the origional? That is the big question and topic of debate.