The Anorexic Home

A few years ago, while researching a magazine article, I began having conversations with Michael Daley, a self-styled art conservation watchdog. Daley has used the term “blockbuster restoration” to describe our era’s increasingly common practice of over-cleaning and touching up master works by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci or Titian in a way designed to create exciting “before and after” shots, and thus excitement around major exhibits—Vermeer as you’ve never seen Vermeer, and indeed also Vermeer as Vermeer had never seen Vermeer. Every few weeks Daley would send me another example: a Renaissance madonna who looked as if she’d had a nose job, a 17th-century nymph whose face had been made whiter and more lineless, her surrounding putti more perfectly pastel. The Old Masters had entered the obsessively seamless era of Botox and computer-generated imagery, and, said Daley, were coming out looking more new than old. “There is some disordered practice going on,” said...