ABSTRACT
My exploration of this question first appeared in a much shorter form as a contribution to an edited collection of essays in a book on the ethics of conservation.2 In it, the authors addressed the issue of how conservators contribute to the social process by which the material and values associated with objects, buildings and sites are transmitted through time. One of the most long-running and impassioned debates in conservation relates to the removal, or not, of patina.3 Until the 1880s, at the Louvre and elsewhere it was the policy to make the old new; restorers filled in missing pieces, concealed broken edges
* I would like to thank Bert De Munck and Ilja Van Damme for inviting me to give this paper at their ‘Location of Value’ session at the World Economic History Congress in Utrecht in 2009. Greatest thanks go to Bert De Munck and Bruno Blondé for making me persevere with the paper, and for suggesting so many improvements.
