by Jon Lackman | 22 April 2009 | Books, Conservation
We belatedly note the 2007 translation by conservator Helen Glanville of Alessandro Conti’s History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (which Conti first published in Italian in 1973 at the age of 26 or 27, then re-issued in an expanded and revised edition in 1988). In her introduction, Glanville writes:
There never seems to have been a time when restoration has not been the stuff of controversy … Anglo-Saxon and Italian approaches have, since the cleaning controversies of the 1960s, been especially at odds, to the extent that Conti and [Cesare] Brandi – both authors of seminal works … have only just been translated into English. They fact that they have, is, I hope, an indication of a change of climate within the field of restoration … The original impetus for this translation was my increasing despondency at the fact that over the past twenty years, I have had fewer and fewer students with anything other than their maternal tongue.
In 2005, Cynthia Rockwell published the first full English translation of Brandi’s Theory of Restoration (written in 1963), which is now out of print.
