EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT: WHEN PAINTINGS WERE ALLOWED TO CHANGE

LUCINDA FARRUGIA

December 11, 2025

For centuries, artworks were adjusted, tended, and subtly reshaped to suit changing eyes. This piece looks back at a world where touching up a canvas was considered a kindness, not a trespass. It follows the people who practiced this delicate craft and traces how their outlook gradually faded. What remains is a record of shifting tastes, the quiet labor behind them, and, perhaps, a lingering reminder that permanence was once a far more fluid concept.

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There was a time when no painting was truly finished. Not because the artist had faltered, nor because the work had suffered the injuries of centuries, but because the future assumed a claim over the past. A painting lived only to the extent that each generation could see itself in it, and if the passage of years clouded the surface, muted the colors, or rendered a face illegible, then the present simply stepped in and offered its assistance. The work of art did not belong exclusively to the hand that made it; it belonged equally to the eyes that inherited it. And so an entire culture accepted—quietly, confidently, without anxiety—the idea that art required periodic renewal, a subtle remaking calibrated to the sensibilities of the living.

This is the world in which restorers and improvers operated. They were not a profession in the modern sense—no guild, no accreditation, no institutional code of ethics. They were craftspeople, painters, and specialists who moved fluidly between repair and invention. To improve a painting was not to distort it but to complete it, to carry it forward into a new aesthetic climate. Today, surrounded by conservation laboratories, ultraviolet analysis, X-ray radiography, and an almost religious devotion to authenticity, it is difficult to imagine that such a worldview ever existed. But for centuries, Europe believed that a painting was a conversation across eras, and that each century had the right—perhaps even the duty—to add its voice.

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, c. 1503–19. The 2010–12 restoration revealed centuries of additions, subtractions, and debates. The painting embodies the struggle between old improvers, new conservators, and the modern anxiety around “touching” Leonardo.

The modern museum visitor often speaks of “originals,” as if paintings were pure, untouched, sealed in their historical moment. But the paintings we see today have often lived multiple lives: their surfaces cleaned, darkened, re-varnished, brightened, thinned, strengthened, reinterpreted. Beneath their present condition lies a palimpsest of decisions made by people who believed that beauty, not historical fidelity, was the supreme criterion. To understand this lost world is not to moralize about it but to recognize that art once existed within a different contract—one in which the past did not stand apart from the present but flowed into it.

We no longer live in the age of improvement. Yet its traces remain everywhere, hidden in plain sight.

Improvement was not a technical gesture; it was a cultural logic. It reflected an assumption that beauty is neither fixed nor singular, but adaptive. What we call the “original” was, until relatively recently, only the first iteration of a work—its initial state, offered up to the care of time and taste. A painting was not a sacred artifact but a living surface. If it darkened with age, as many did under oxidizing varnishes, or if its colors shifted toward the sullen browns of centuries-old oils, then it fell out of harmony with the expectations of contemporary viewers. A Madonna who seemed ethereal in 1520 might appear ghostly by 1820; a sky once luminous might, through age and chemical change, descend into a murky indigo. It was therefore natural to brighten, clarify, or refresh such passages. To leave the work untouched would have seemed neglectful, almost irresponsible.

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–23. A lightning rod for restoration controversy. Eighteenth- and nineteenth century “improvements” altered skies and drapery; twentieth-century cleanings further reshaped the surface. Few paintings better show how taste governs intervention.

This logic extended far beyond color. Compositional clarity was another value admired in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If a painting suffered damages—lacunae from flaking paint, scratches, warping of the wooden panel, entire missing sections—improvers filled the voids with new paint, matching tone and form as best they could. But “matching” was a generous term. Often the improver reconstructed what they believed should be there, guided by their own painterly training and by contemporary tastes. If a drapery fold seemed awkward or incomplete, it could be refined. If a figure’s expression appeared too severe for the theological sensibilities of the moment, a softer look might be introduced. And if a saint’s attributes were missing, the improver might quietly reinsert them.

Improvement was not deception. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that art owed something to the viewer, and if the passage of time compromised a painting’s legibility or beauty, then the painting required human intervention. Restoration and improvement were not distinct operations—they formed a continuous spectrum. The same hand that cleaned away centuries of grime might also brighten a shadow or reconstruct a missing hand. The task was to ensure that the painting achieved harmony, coherence, and presence. A damaged painting was not an archaeological relic to be preserved in its wounded state; it was a living thing deserving of renewal.

To modern eyes, this attitude seems astonishing. But to dismiss it would be to misunderstand the entire ecosystem of pre-modern taste. Authenticity was not yet a moral category. Originality was not yet fetishized. The idea of the “artist’s hand” as sacred, inviolable, and frozen in time had not yet ascended to its current dominance. What mattered was the integrity of the image as a whole. The restorer and improver saw themselves not as collaborators with the artist but as custodians of a beauty that must remain vibrant.

Giotto di Bondone, Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ), c. 1303–5. A masterpiece with centuries of overpaint and “corrections,” most heavily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fresco is one of Europe’s most visible palimpsests—an image composed of Giotto and a lineage of improvers.

Nowhere was this philosophy more fully embodied than in the Italian tradition of the nineteenth century, particularly in Milan, where Giuseppe Molteni emerged as one of the most admired restorers of his age. Molteni was not a marginal figure; he was a central presence in the Milanese art world and a respected painter in his own right. His restorations at the Pinacoteca di Brera reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to surface, tone, and atmosphere. Yet he worked not as a neutral conservator—such a category scarcely existed—but as a harmonizer, someone who rebalanced a composition according to the aesthetics of the moment.

Consider his work on certain Lombard paintings of the sixteenth century. Many had suffered from darkened varnishes and cracked passages that made them nearly unreadable. When Molteni cleaned them, he sometimes discovered abrupt transitions or awkward voids where paint had been lost. If a hand was incomplete, he might paint the missing contours. If a sky had lost its gradations, he reintroduced tonal movement. If a drapery fold appeared too abrupt, he softened its descent. His goal was not to mimic the original painter’s touch—though he often did so with remarkable skill—but to create a surface that accorded with nineteenth-century expectations of harmony.

This was celebrated work. Scholars, collectors, and museum directors praised Molteni’s ability to “bring paintings back to life.” A painting improved by him was considered enhanced, not corrupted. The Brera’s audiences often preferred the newly refreshed surfaces to the murky originals they had replaced. In some cases, Molteni’s additions became so integrated into the visual logic of the painting that subsequent generations mistook them for original passages. Today, technical analysis can sometimes distinguish his hand from the old master’s, but for much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Molteni’s improvements were considered part of the paintings’ identities.

Leonardo da Vinci (attributed, workshop involvement debated), Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version), ca. 1483–86. Jean-Louis Hacquin’s transfer from panel to canvas (1806) is a landmark in radical preservation. Losses were filled, textures changed, and the painting’s very material identity transformed. Nothing better illustrates the improver’s boldness.

In Molteni’s worldview, improvement was not an intrusion but a continuation. The painting and the improver belonged to a chain of care. Beauty was a communal project.

France offers another revealing example, though of a more dramatic and now unthinkable kind: the practice of transferring paintings from panel to canvas. This was primarily an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomenon, and one of its greatest practitioners was Jean-Louis Hacquin, who worked for the Louvre. The logic behind the transfer was simple: wooden panels warp, crack, and split over time, whereas canvas is flexible and durable. To preserve a threatened painting on panel, one could detach the paint layer itself—sometimes mere millimeters thick—and mount it onto new canvas.

Today this sounds like radical surgery. It was. But Hacquin was a master of the procedure, and his work saved numerous paintings from further structural damage. Yet the transfer process inevitably required significant invention. When a panel was thinned from behind, minute fragments of paint could detach, necessitating retouching. When the transferred paint was remounted, small losses needed filling. In some cases, the transfer altered the surface texture itself, requiring the improver to soften, glaze, or reconstruct passages to restore visual coherence.

Take, for example, a damaged seventeenth-century religious painting undergoing transfer in Hacquin’s workshop. After cleaning and removal from the panel, the faces might appear mottled, their flesh tones fragmentary. Hacquin would not hesitate to unify these passages with careful inpainting. If the background had suffered abrasion, he might reintroduce architecture or drapery folds based on stylistic inference. The goal was not to deceive but to return the painting to a harmonious state suitable for public display. It was assumed that a museum painting should appear complete. Improvement was embedded in the very notion of preservation.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables, 1678. One of the most heavily “beautified” Spanish paintings. It went through successive waves of retouching, cleaning, re-glazing, and color enhancement. Its modern restoration shows the tension between devotional clarity and historical fidelity.

Spain, too, cultivated its own lineage of restorers and improvers, whose interventions subtly reshaped the appearance of Baroque paintings to suit the expectations of the nineteenth century. Figures such as José María Galván worked on major pieces destined for royal or museum collections. The Spanish tradition was rooted in a deep respect for dramatic chiaroscuro, yet nineteenth-century taste often demanded greater clarity in faces and fabrics. Improvers responded accordingly.

Consider a hypothetical but historically typical case: a Spanish Baroque painting depicting a saint, its background darkened to near invisibility and its drapery so compromised by age that the figure barely emerged from the shadow. A nineteenth-century viewer would find the work too somber, too opaque. Galván might clean the surface, but cleaning alone rarely sufficed. The face, likely partially eroded, needed reanimation. The eyes might be clarified, the contours of the cheek refined, the mouth softened to restore a readable expression. Fabrics—particularly crimson and ultramarine—were reconstructed where losses had diminished their richness. The result was a painting that appeared simultaneously true to the dramatic spirit of the Baroque and adapted to the clear, descriptive preferences of the nineteenth century.

Nothing about this process was hidden. It was not a subterfuge, but a service. Patrons expected such work, and museums relied on it. Improvement aligned the painting with the aesthetics of the time, granting it a renewed presence.

The age of improvement ended not because its methods failed but because its underlying philosophy collapsed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, connoisseurship emerged as a powerful discipline. Scholars such as Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson reoriented art history around the minute analysis of brushwork, contour, and stylistic fingerprint. Suddenly the “hand of the master” became sacred, and thus its slightest alteration unacceptable. The painting was no longer a living surface but a document. The improver’s interventions, once celebrated, now appeared as contaminations.

Paolo Caliari (Paolo Veronese), The Feast in the House of Levi, 1573. A gigantic painting with a restoration history that reads like an anthology of European taste: brightening, clarifying, filling lacunae, strengthening architecture, adjusting flesh tones. A colossal example of “harmonization.”

Simultaneously, museums transformed from spaces of aesthetic experience into institutions of historical record. Their role shifted from presenting beautiful paintings to preserving evidence of artistic creation. Authenticity became a moral imperative. The smallest touch of a later hand—once encouraged—now constituted a breach. The rise of the art market accelerated this shift. As paintings became financial assets, their value depended on singular authorship. Any intervention risked diminishing the work’s worth. The improver, once a guardian of beauty, became a threat to the integrity of the object.

Scientific conservation sealed the profession’s fate. Technologies such as ultraviolet fluorescence, infrared reflectography, X-ray radiography, and chemical analysis allowed conservators to identify non-original passages with unprecedented accuracy. The improver’s contributions, previously invisible or accepted, became subject to scrutiny and removal. Conservation moved toward minimal intervention and reversibility. The improver’s work could no longer be justified.

What died was not simply a technique but an entire worldview—a belief that the past could be harmonized with the present without compromising its integrity. Yet the legacy of the improvers persists. Many paintings in major museums still contain passages by these long-forgotten hands. Their adjustments remain embedded in the visual fabric of the works, part of the images that generations of viewers have cherished. While technical studies sometimes distinguish these layers, they often resist separation. To remove them entirely would risk destabilizing the composition or erasing a chapter of the painting’s life.

In this sense, paintings are palimpsests—sites of negotiation between centuries. The improver’s touch reveals the history of looking, the shifting desires of viewers, the evolving concept of beauty. Their interventions remind us that art does not exist in isolation but in a continuum of interpretation and care. The modern viewer, committed to authenticity, may find this unsettling. But to deny these layers would be to deny the complex life of the artwork. The improver contributed to the painting’s survival, its ability to speak to successive generations. Their work, though out of step with current ethics, reflects a profound conviction: that beauty must remain legible, and that art must be continually renewed.

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), The Marriage of the Virgin, 1504 (restored by Giuseppe Molteni in 1857). Molteni’s restoration stabilized the cracked panel, hydrated the wood, cleaned the surface, and retouched select losses. It exemplifies the Italian “age of improvement” better than anything.

To reflect on the age of improvement is to reflect on the changing relationship between past and present. We no longer believe that the present has the right to intervene in the past. We have replaced confidence with anxiety, intervention with restraint. The improver accepted responsibility not only for preserving the painting but for ensuring its relevance. Today, relevance is left to the viewer, while the painting remains untouched. Something has been gained: historical fidelity, respect for authorship, a fuller understanding of artistic process. But something has been lost as well, namely the beliefs that beauty is a shared project, that the viewer participates in the life of the work, and that art is not a relic but a conversation.

In the age of improvement, paintings were allowed to change. They were living entities, not fossils. Their surfaces reflected the desires, anxieties, and sensibilities of the people who tended them. The improver was not a coauthor but a caretaker of beauty. And in their hands, art became not a fixed point but a moving horizon.

We no longer improve paintings. But perhaps we should remember that there was once a world in which the past was not inviolate, and beauty was not a matter of historical purity. That world is gone, yet its traces remain, shimmering faintly beneath the varnish, where old masters and improvers alike left their marks.

Lucinda Farrugia (b. 1984 in Valletta) comes from Malta, where forgotten icons gather like dust in chapels no one unlocks anymore. She trained at the University of Malta in restoring artworks so obscure that even their saints are uncertain, after being politely rejected by three monasteries for excessive enthusiasm. She now catalogues modest paintings that endure mostly because no one has thought to discard them.

Cover image: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), Madonna of the Goldfinch, 1505–6. The painting was shattered in 1547; seventeenth- and nineteenth-century restorers reconstructed entire missing sections. It is a paradigmatic case of “beauty as continuity,” where modern cleaning has exposed and partially reversed the improver’s work.