ABSTRACT
Towards the end of her book The Ravished Image Sarah Walden sensibly observes that ‘Schools of restoration continue to contend fiercely amongst themselves…. But there ought to be more common ground between them’ (p. 143). At first sight her text hardly seems calculated to forge mutual understanding. Sensationally subtitled How to Ruin Masterpieces by Restoration, it frequently adopts a strident and exaggerated tone. She imagines Leonardo seeing paintings in a modern conservation studio, lying ‘prostrate like patients, surrounded by technicians and machinery and bleeding slowly to death under the scalpel and the corrosion of fierce chemicals’ (p. 7). Some reviewers responding to this high-impact style have been most critical. Others, especially in the daily press of Britain, have tended to take at face value the self-projection of the author as a sensitive aesthete battling against hordes of white-coated technicians. Very little space has been given anywhere to discussing her arguments about conservation practice. Within the profession we should reverse this emphasis. For the time being let us put to one side questions of style and accuracy, and focus instead upon the themes of the book.
