94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the work, and who began by cleaning the pictures carefully and put- 

 ting them all on new canvases.* In this state the new canvas showed 

 through all the holes like the skin of a pauper through his shirt, and 

 every one of these little islands of new canvas had to be colored up to 

 the tint of the surrounding paint, or rather to be colored like the paint 

 which had disappeared, the nature of it having to be guessed from 

 what remained round about it. When there is no detail, as often hap- 

 pens in draperies and backgrounds, this is not extremely difficult, 

 though it requires a well-trained eye to color ; but when detail has to 

 be invented exactly in the style of the picture, that is a different mat- 

 ter, which taxes the skill of the restorer to the utmost. However, 

 there can be no question that when a picture is so injured as to present 

 hiatuses, whether by holes in the canvas or by mere removal of the 

 paint, it is an absolute necessity to have them filled as well as we can. 

 Painting is not in the same position as literature in this respect. There 

 are numerous unfinished lines in the " iEneid," and after the death of 

 Virgil we are told that Augustus appointed a literary commission, em- 

 powered by him to remove those parts which were glaringly unfinished 

 and defective (as Virgil himself had died before his own intended re- 

 visal of the poem) ; but we are also told that Augustus strictly for- 

 bade the revisers to add anything whatever of their own. We all feel 

 that no hand but that of the author should add anything to a poem ; 

 we all prefer certain fragments of Coleridge and Shelley to any finish- 

 ing that would involve additions by a reviser. In a minor degree we 

 object to restoration in sculpture, though here we tolerate it to some 

 extent. When a nose is broken from a bust, it is generally restored, 

 and so is a finger on a hand ; but prudent conservators of museums do 

 not often attempt the restoration of an arm that has entirely disap- 

 peared. These distinctions, as well as our greater desire for the restora- 

 tion of paintings, are all perfectly logical. A hiatus does not make a 

 poem intolerable. The numerous small gaps in the " iEneid " have 

 but a very slight effect in diminishing the reader's satisfaction, the 

 reason being that they occur one at a time, and each little gap is for- 

 gotten in the interest of the next perfect opening of two pages ; but in 

 a picture all the gaps are seen at the same time, and distract our atten- 

 tion from the general beauty of the work. A Greek bust, however 

 lovely, is a torment to us without its nose, and though the restored 

 nose may not be so good as the lost original, it allows us to admire the 

 beauties of the brow and chin in peace. If we shrink from the restora- 

 tion of an arm, it is because we do not know enough about the arm 

 that has been lost to replace it satisfactorily, but the lost arm is not 

 spoiled ; it is simply absent, and though there are loss and mutilation, 



* When this is done the old canvases are entirely destroyed by friction without injur- 

 ing the paint, which is then fixed on the new canvas. A painting is removed from a 

 wooden panel by first planing the wood till it is very thin, after which what remains of 

 the wood is destroyed entirely by the use of sand-paper and scrapers. 



