What the Varnish Knows

There is a particular smell in the moment before you remove four hundred years of varnish from a painting, a smell of old linseed oil gone amber and slightly bitter, like tea steeped too long, and I have come to think of it as the smell of a held breath, because that is what the varnish has been doing, in its way, for four centuries: holding something in, protecting a surface from air and light and touch, at the cost of slowly yellowing, slowly obscuring the very thing it was meant to protect, until the painting underneath is visible only as a suggestion, a ghost of colour under amber glass, and someone like me is called in to decide how much of that held breath to release.

I do not think of myself as a religious person, not in the way my grandmother was, who went to Mass every morning of her life and would have found it strange, I think, that I have never once in thirty-nine years felt what she called the presence of God, and yet I have spent seventeen years alone in rooms with paintings of the Madonna and the saints and the crucified Christ, cleaning them millimetre by millimetre under magnification, closer to these images than any priest, closer than the painter's original patron probably ever stood, and I have come to believe that whatever it is my grandmother felt at Mass, I feel something adjacent to it at four in the afternoon with a swab of solvent in my hand and a sixteenth-century face slowly returning from under the amber, and I want to try to describe it honestly, without dressing it up as more than it is.

The painting I think about most is a Madonna and Child from a small parish outside Arezzo, unsigned, unremarkable by any art-historical measure, the kind of painting that will never hang in a museum, that exists to be prayed in front of by people whose names are not recorded either, and it took me four months, working most days, to clean it, and somewhere in the second month I stopped thinking of the work as removing dirt and started thinking of it as something closer to listening. Every painting holds, in its surface, the record of every hand that touched it badly, every well-meaning restoration from a century that didn't know what we know now, every candle that smoked too close, every winter of damp and every summer of heat that made the wood panel move beneath the paint until hairline cracks opened like old scars, and to clean a painting properly you have to read all of this before you touch any of it, you have to understand what damage is truly damage and what damage has, over centuries, become part of the object's actual history, worth preserving rather than erasing, and that distinction — between what should be removed and what should be kept even though it is technically a flaw — is, I think, the closest I come to anything I would call a spiritual practice.

Here is what four months with that Madonna taught me, and I offer it as observation rather than doctrine, because I don't trust myself with doctrine. The painting was not, in the end, made more perfect by my work. It was made more true. There is a difference, and it took me years in this profession to understand it. Perfection would have meant restoring it to how it looked the day the painter finished it, erasing every trace of the four hundred years between then and now, and that is not what conservators do, or not what good ones do — we remove what obscures and we leave what has become, through time, part of the object's actual being, and the result is a painting that shows both its original intention and everything that happened to it since, visible at once if you know how to look, and I think this is true of people too, though I resist saying it too plainly because it risks sounding like something embroidered on a cushion. But I have sat with a face on a panel of poplar wood for four months, watching it slowly stop being a brown-gold blur and become a specific woman with a specific, slightly asymmetrical mouth that some painter I will never know the name of looked at directly, once, five hundred years ago, and decided to record exactly as he saw it, asymmetry and all, rather than correcting it into an idealized symmetry the way lesser painters of his period often did, and there is something in that — in the choosing to record a true thing rather than a perfect one — that I have started to understand as the closest thing I have to a faith: not a belief in anything beyond the object in front of me, but a discipline of attention so complete that the object eventually tells you what it actually is, if you are patient and humble enough to let it, rather than what you expected or wanted it to be.

My grandmother prayed to images like the one I spent four months with. I do not pray. But I have sat close enough, long enough, to enough of these faces that I no longer think the difference between us is as large as I once assumed, and when people ask me, as they sometimes do, whether all those months alone with old religious paintings have made me believe in anything, I tell them the truth, which is that I believe in attention, in the specific discipline of looking at something for so long and so carefully that you stop seeing what you expected and start seeing what is actually there, and if that is not a form of prayer, it is at least, I think, a form of the same hunger that makes people pray.

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