Lacuna. Conservation, Law, and the Ethics of the Incomplete

In conservation, a lacuna is a site of rupture—a gap in the painted surface where the material continuity of a work has been broken. By placing conservation theory into dialogue with other fields, the conference seeks to move beyond metaphorical uses of “absence” and “loss,” and toward a more precise account of how lacunae function as sites of decision, deferral, exclusion, and possibility. Following the foundational principles of Cesare Brandi (1906-88), conservation offers a model of how to inhabit incompleteness ethically: how to acknowledge a gap without either prematurely closing it or aestheticizing it into melancholy. What new analytical tools emerge when we treat gaps not as deficits to be overcome, but as conditions that structure knowledge, value, and responsibility?

PROGRAM

Wednesday, December 2
18:00-19:30 Opening Keynote: Irma Passeri (Yale University Art Gallery), That Mighty Lacuna! Theory and Praxis of Loss Compensation

Thursday, December 3
9:00-9:20: Welcome and introduction, Caroline Fowler (The Clark Art Institute) and Francesca Borgo (St Andrews/BHMPI)

BEYOND REPAIR
9:20-11:00
- Cathleen Hoeniger(Queen’s University), ‘Shaping Matter Back into a Work of Art’: The Scope of Painting Restoration in Italy in the Face of the Damage of World War II
- Franca Mader (Bern University of the Arts), After Detachment: The Causes and Consequences of Wall Painting Removal in Switzerland
- Fabian Jonietz (University of Basel), The Void in the Frame: Lorenzo Lotto’s Mystical Marriage in Bergamo, Early Modern Art Theft, and the Display of Fragmented Objects

Discussion

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

READING THE SURFACE
11:30-13:30
- Annika Svendsen Finne (Art Conservation Solutions, LLC), Within the Labyrinth of Premodern Painting Restoration
- Aviva Burnstock (Courtauld) and Sarah Grandin (Courtauld), Recovering the Work of Art and the Art of Work in Chardin’s Neglected Oeconome
- Cynthia Prieur (University of Victoria) and Lucia Bay (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), The Politics of Inpainting: 19th-century French Treatment of Perugino’s Looted Paintings

Discussion

13:30-14:30 Lunch break

LACUNAL AESTHETICS
14:30-16:15
- Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve University) and Reed O’Mara (Case Western Reserve University and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte), Material Ruptures, Linguistic Lacunae: Visual Violence and Medieval Sculpture
- Andrew Finegold (University of Illinois), The Intentional Lacuna of the Withheld Object: Engaging with Mimbres Bowls under New NAGPRA Rules
- Cleo Nisse (University of Groningen), Conservation Documentation, Lacunae, and Art History

Discussion

18:00-19:00 Symphony No. -1, a performance by Ethan Phillbrick, with Alberto Brutti and Milena Punzi

Friday, December 4
LAW’S VACANCIES
10:00-11:00

- Sarah Katharina Stein (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law), Neither Repaired nor Erased: Structural Lacunae and the Power of Legal Non-Decision
- Matthew C. Hunter (McGill University), A Right, Not a Charity: Insuring the Artistic Life in Imperial Britai
- David Isern (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), The Lacuna That Builds Spatial Non-Liquet and the Generative Gap in Peru

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-12:30
- Joost Keizer (Radboud University), The Clearing

Discussion

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

INCOMPLETE DATA
13:30-15:30
- Ella Klik (Bar-Ilan University), A Possible Theory of Letting Go
- Kristopher Kersey (University of California Los Angeles), Lacuna and Ellipsis: Figures of Absence in Japanese Painting
- Paula Muhr (Brand University of Applied Sciences Hamburg), The Lacuna as a Condition of Visibility: Black Hole Imaging and the Epistemology of Incomplete Data

Discussion

18:00-19:30 Capstone Keynote: Peter N. Miller (American Academy in Rome), The Judge and the Conservator

19:30 Reception