Igor Grabar, “Restoration” (1932)

Igor Grabar (1871-1960) in 1942. Self-portrait from the collection of the State Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg.

Restoration in the domain of arts is the reconstruction of the monuments of architecture,

painting, sculpture, decorative or applied arts, as well of everyday life, which came to us in a
badly preserved or visibly distorted condition, to their original image. The monuments of art,
created long ago, almost never reach us in their original condition. Decaying with time, suffering
from different diseases that destroy them partially or completely, they require certain
maintenance and, from time to time, even repair. The longevity of an art object depends upon the
durability of the material, from which it was made, and from how favorable its living and
practical conditions were. However, in the course of the centuries, even the most durable
materials deteriorate: stones erode, metal deforms. The materials used in painting are particularly
fragile. As the experience has shown, the paintings, with rare exceptions, are repaired every 100-
150 years and therefore a painting of the 12th century master almost always has traces of at least

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five repairs from different periods. The paints get darker, crack, separate from the board or the
canvas, fall off together with a primer. The lacunas had to be filled in with the new primer and
the new painting, the cracks were also covered with primer and repainted again but these new
fragments of painting were soon getting dark, resulting in motley and thus occasionally requiring
to repaint the painting completely. The same was happening to sculptures. The excavated antique
sculptures did not have complete parts and previously the lost parts were usually reconstructed.
The monuments of architecture were even more altered; they were repeatedly repaired, rebuilt,
built on, and expanded – until it was impossible to recognize them. It is completely obvious that
no one should talk about the real reconstruction of the monuments of art, which have been so
distorted in the course of centuries. Therefore, RESTORATION, in the contemporary sense of
this word, is not the reconstruction of monuments to their original image, but only their
liberation from the centuries-old layers, or in other words their revealing. The primary demand of
contemporary theory and practice consists in simply revealing the monument, without ever
adding or reconstructing anything. The term RESTORATION itself therefore, to a considerable
extent, is an anachronism and is only habitually preserved.

Scientific RESTORATION of the monuments of art should be done strictly in accordance with
the following requirements: 1) before proceeding to revealing the monument, it should be
carefully studied both in its material aspect and through literature and archival sources if the
latter exist; 2) the conditions of its preservation should be established as well as the nature of the
disease if the latter is present; 3) the monument should be comprehensively documented (by
measurements, measured drawings, photographs, models, etc.); 4) the revealing should be done
layer by layer so that the layers are not removed all at once but one after another according to
their order; 5) the work process should also be continuously documented so that at the end of the
work the clear picture of the conditions of the monument in every stage of its long history could
be reconstructed; 6) no completions or additions should be permitted, if they are not dictated by
the preservation reasons; 7) every intervention should be covered in a detailed diary.

The main goal of the RESTORATION is the conservation of monuments. The simple curiosity,
even if dictated by academic reasoning, but limited only to the desire to learn what was the
image of a monument at the moment of its creation, cannot constitute a sufficient justification for

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the beginning of the works aiming at revealing the monument because the revealing in general
endangers the preservation of monuments.

Before the [Bolshevik] Revolution, the restoration [of the monuments of art in the Russian
Empire] were not directed by laws and, next to the Imperial Archeological Commission and the
Moscow Archeological Society, different organizations and private individuals restored without
any established rules. At the beginning of 1918, attached to the Department of the Museums and
the Preservation of Monuments of the Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment, which later
became the Main Museum Department [Glavmusei], the new special administration was created:
the All-Russian Commission for the Restoration Affairs renamed in 1924 into the Central State
Restoration Workshops of the Main Department of Science; the Workshops were required to
develop a theoretical foundation of the RESTORATION and to administer all the
RESTORATIONS of the monuments of art in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
In 1919/29, the Workshops organized more than twenty academic and research expeditions that
provided an enormous amount of material, which became the foundation of the list of
monuments of the whole USSR completed towards the end of 1929. The Workshops published
two collective volumes titled “The Questions of Restoration” that cover the problems of the
theory and practice of the RESTORATION.

From Granat [Encyclopedic Dictionary], vol. 36, part 1, pp. 559-561; translated from Russian by
Igor Demchenko.