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Conservation and Restoration.
The distinction reflects social
pretension and moral anxiety about heritage. Restorers, second
cousins to forgers, work fugitively. Conservators write academic
reports of ancient artefacts, taking refuge in current science,
but can hardly sharpen a plane or visualise a foreshortened curve.
To love the vision of the makers and rightly use their tools,
is also an understanding. The tzimus is the ability to
care for what is not one’s own, what one couldn’t have
conceived oneself. Naturally, this is a moral question.
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Virgin and Child, German, ca. 1505:
limewood, school of Riemenschneider, private client. Cleaning
and repair.
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