Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian, recently remarked, perhaps only partly in jest, that in today’s world a few thousand people earn their living touching works of art while earnestly preventing untold thousands of others from doing just that. This tiny minority of which van de Wetering speaks is busy, in museums and ateliers all over the world, in what Bernard Berenson with a tinge of contempt called “the kitchen of art.” He meant by this to describe that murky backstage frequented by scholars, technicians, and craftsmen where the pulleys, gears, curtains, and props of the art world are manipulated. “BB,” for one, was profoundly suspicious. Regarded more benevolently, this “off limits” terrain is generally known as the “restoration studio” or, alternatively, as the “conservation laboratory.” These two terms, though usually describing settings that are quite similar, refer, in fact, to very different traditions. A brief backward glance will illustrate this.

There is ample evidence that the specificity and singularity of certain man-made objects bearing artistic meaning have been recognized as being worthy of conservation since remotest antiquity. The need to preserve and maintain the special characteristics as they are represented in a “work of art” is already clearly evident in an account of the elder Pliny. He recounts how a painting by Aristeides of Thebes, a contemporary of Apelles, representing “A Tragic Actor and a Boy,” “was ruined through the ignorance of the painter to whom Marcus Junius as praetor [ca. 25