The Renaissance Restored, a recently published study, bears as its subtitle “Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” a qualifying phrase that sets it apart from a rapidly expanding bibliography on the subject of the care and preservation of art.1 The story it tells is of how Italian Renaissance art fared in the decades-long period when it was at the zenith of popular appeal and critical study. Italian Renaissance art was, in this charmed moment, the undisputed worldwide main event: for the scholars in academe, the dealers in their galleries, the curators in the museums, and the robber barons in their opulent salons. Classical, Far Eastern, ethnographic, and even contemporary art were regarded as undercards to the big show. The principal distinction of this carefully researched and dense account of the subject is that its author, Matthew Hayes, is a practicing paintings conservator. Rather more unusual is Hayes’s keen and abiding interest in his profession’s philosophical intent and historical evolution. This is not a “how-to” book, but rather a “why and when” one. Hayes would, undoubtedly, be the first to agree that this “profession” might, more suitably, be described simply as an “activity”; unlike “real” professions (architecture, medicine, law), conservation requires no license, certification, or other proof of competence or integrity.

Caring for paintings had been, since early modern times and even in antiquity, primarily the purview of other artists. The chronicler Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–96) has left us perhaps the fullest