What interests me about this story is the implicit division between original art and historical modification of art:

“Italian restorers working in a Roman church have unveiled two bare-breasted sculptures which have been covered for almost 150 years…They were designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini but covered by bronze ‘corsets’ in 1863 because religious leaders thought they were offensive. They were completed in 1662-63 by a Bernini disciple, and exactly two centuries later they were covered…”

I’m fascinated by the idea that by removing a subsequent but equally historical and aesthetic addition to the work - not twenty years old, but a hundred and fifty - they have transformed the statues from one form of artwork to another.

Last month they were a historical and social document, demonstrating how the public perception of art and aesthetics changed over time since the rennaissance. This month, the statues are once again as the sculptor intended - bare-breasted and voluptuous, neatly skipping over the public and religious censorship which took place a century and a half ago, which gave them a different meaning entirely. Now we know they were originally bare-breasted and brazen, our perception of what the statues mean has shifted.

The question for me is what will they now do with the cast-off bronze corsets? To hide them would be to deny that the statues had ever been contentious or political, and that art had changed over time from the point that they were created. To leave them on the statues would be to cover over the aesthetic statement originally intended by the artist.

It’s a tough one. How do you restore something to the way it was meant to be by the artist, without discounting the historical/artistic/social validity of changes made to it over time, especially if those changes on their own are equally valid and historically worthy?

The public imagination accepts an artwork in a particular state - the most famous, the most recent, the most persistant. Since King Louis XVIII decreed that the mystery of Venus’ missing arms should be left unsolved, the precedent has been set for leaving statues in their found state, without extensive restoration or reconstruction. The feeling for the last few hundred years has been that the essence of a work of art lies in the work of the original artist, and to correct, add or modify a work of art is to deny what the artist was saying or meaning.

But is that always the case? We look at a broken statue and declare that she is a work of art, without arms, almost as if she was originally intended to be that way. We don’t say “nice statue, but would be better with the arms” because the statue-without-arms has become the artwork itself.

If we found out today that the Venus de Milo’s arms were originally designed to be doing the hand jive, would we pop them on? And would it still be the same work of art, or something else?