Overshoot
The varnish had yellowed in the usual way. She mixed the solvent, tested a corner, watched the amber lift. Underneath: the blues she’d expected, cooler than the catalog suggested. She worked outward from the corner in careful swabs.
It was the third panel that stopped her. Under the varnish was an earlier restoration — someone’s attempt to match a blue that had already shifted. She could see the brushwork: confident, period-appropriate, wrong. The blue they’d matched hadn’t been the original. It had been the previous restorer’s blue.
She cleaned that layer too. Beneath it, another correction, older. This one had used a different binding medium that had yellowed on its own schedule, and the restorer after it had adjusted for a yellow that hadn’t been in the painting.
Four layers deep, she found what she thought was the original. But the ground beneath it showed retouching marks in a pigment that predated the attribution by thirty years. Someone had been correcting this painting before the painter was finished.
She sat back. What she was looking at wasn’t a painting with damage. It was a painting made almost entirely of corrections, each one responding to the last one’s residue. The damage hadn’t accumulated despite the restorations. The restorations were the damage. Each correction left an artifact in the shape of the thing it was correcting, and the next restorer, seeing the artifact, corrected for it.
She picked up her solvent and looked at the swab in her hand. Her cleaning agent would leave its own residue. Some future restorer would find it, identify it as damage, and correct for it. Her correction would become the next gap.
She cleaned the next section anyway. The painting needed to be seen, and seeing it required the overshoot. That was the job: not to remove the artifacts, but to add one more that let people look.