Renovation, overpainting, inpainting: strategies of the painter-restorer in Portugal, from the 16th to 19th century. Ideological reasons for the iconoclast and the iconofylic practices, or the concept of «utilitarian restoration» versus «scientific restoration»

The study of Portuguese art during the Modern Age, and the very recurrent activity of «painting restoration», concludes that the dominant practice then referenced as «retoque» (inpainting), «repinte» (overpainting), «renovação» (renovation) and even «restauro» (restoration), herein designated as «corrective and utilitarian restoration», was common to the best artists during the period between the 16th and the 18th centuries.Those interventions, which were commended by the church and the nobility, were nearly always considered a noble activity. The terminologies and the techniques then used are explained as well as the various reasons (moral, theological, aesthetic, decorous, and others) for undertaking that type of work, which is assumed as the precursor of the 19th century «scientific restoration». «Renovation» criteria, iconoclast and iconofylic practice related to this «utilitarian restoration» are discussed herein and important figures of Portuguese painting such as Francisco Venegas, Diogo Teixeira, André Reinoso, António Pereira Ravasco, Francisco Vieira Lusitano, amongst others, were also «painters-restorers» within those existing concepts. It is further reminded that to be a «painter-restorer», always in the perspective of an artistic «re-creation», was a motive for added pride for artists such as Pietro Guarienti,Vieira Lusitano, Pereira Pegado or Inácio Coelho Valente.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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