Single correct option
Summarise the passage in one sentence:
The restoration of an old painting is as much an act of interpretation as of technical skill. Removing centuries of accumulated varnish can reveal colours the original artist intended, but it can also strip away later, historically significant additions, or expose damage the varnish had been quietly concealing. Conservators today increasingly document every intervention and leave some alterations reversible, treating restoration less as a return to an imagined original state than as one more layer in the painting's ongoing history.
The restoration of an old painting is as much an act of interpretation as of technical skill. Removing centuries of accumulated varnish can reveal colours the original artist intended, but it can also strip away later, historically significant additions, or expose damage the varnish had been quietly concealing. Conservators today increasingly document every intervention and leave some alterations reversible, treating restoration less as a return to an imagined original state than as one more layer in the painting's ongoing history.
- A. Modern conservators avoid restoring paintings entirely, preferring to leave them exactly as found.
- B. Restoration inevitably destroys the historical value of a painting and should be discontinued.
- C. Restoration is an interpretive act with real risks and trade-offs, and contemporary conservators respond by documenting and often reversibly making their interventions rather than claiming to recover a single original state.
- D. Removing varnish always reveals the artist's true original intended colours with no loss of information.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (C) Restoration is an interpretive act with real risks and trade-offs, and contemporary conservators respond by documenting and often reversibly making their interventions rather than claiming to recover a single original state.
The passage highlights restoration's interpretive risks and states conservators 'document every intervention and leave some alterations reversible,' treating it as 'one more layer' rather than pure recovery — matching C. Option D is too absolute given the passage's mention of risks (stripping historically significant additions).
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