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Mauro Pelliccioli, Milan art professor famed for his restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper: "Today more art is destroyed than is rescued by restoration. There has been no epoch so dangerous, so catastrophic for painting as that through which we are passing. It is the duty of our civilization to prevent the continued perpetration of this crime against art."
Suzanne Sulzberger, art professor at the University of Brussels: "I can only compare restoration to plastic surgery for women. Wrinkles and other signs of age may disappear, but the overall impression is one of artificiality, of untruthfulness."
Count Joseph de Borchgraved'Altena, chief curator of the Belgian Museum of Art and History: "Until the day that the technical specialists have at their disposal infallible methods, unanimously considered as such also outside their own circle, we wish that the best paintings in our museums no longer be used as guinea pigs."
Among the few fence sitters:
John Coolidge, director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum: "I suppose my prejudice is in favor of doing it rather than against. But the question sometimes is, do you want a lady with red hair or with a bald head? If you make a wrong guess, you make a wrong guess."
Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, late director of Madrid's Prado: "Restoration is necessary. You have to do it with great care, but you have to do it. We can be proud of the work Spanish restorers do, but in most other European museums the work is not so good. For instance, I have been told of a Velasquez portrait of Philip IV in London's National Gallery which after restoration is a very bad picture. We have another Velasquez portrait of the same king, which originally was not so good as the one in London. Now ours is much better."
John Walker, director of the National Gallery in Washington: "Cleaning is one of the most delicate operations a painting can undergo—very like a difficult and dangerous operation on a human being. At the National it is held to a minimum."
Both sides of the restoration controversy made strong cases. That in itself seemed a good reason for slowing down art restoration in the world's great museums until some general agreement on methods had been reached.
Until that day comes, the art lover never can tell what happy or unhappy surprises await him on each new visit to his favorite museum. Sir Alfred Mun-nings, the late president of London's Royal Academy, once put the point in verse. On returning to a museum, wrote Mun-nings, a man "may discover, too late, alas! that a change has befallen
Some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster."