The Judge and the Conservator: Carlo Ginzburg and Conservation

The late Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026) explicitly addressed conservation from time to time in his work, as in his essay on the restoration of past sound. But this paper argues that Ginzburg’s “The Judge and the Historian,” which does not name conservation, actually offers something important for conservators to reflect on. For, like the historian, the conservator must understand how an object has changed over time; like the judge, the conservator must also decide and act. The comparison is not far-fetched: the Encyclopédie listed “judge-conservators” among its legal offices. The scientists who study objects, by contrast, are closer to historians: they too study change over time, but their archive is the object itself, and their language that of molecules and atoms. Drawing on Ginzburg’s readings of Marc Bloch, Arsenio Frugoni, and Siegfried Kracauer, the paper explores what conservation and historical scholarship share: the reformulation of questions, the layered history of evidence, the “game of scales” of microhistory, and techniques for marking uncertainty, from the historian’s “perhaps” to the restorer’s tratteggio. Even the condition report, the most common form of conservation writing, can be read as a microhistory: one object, one narrative, one writer, gathered over time into an object’s biography. And Bloch’s idea of “permeability” to the beliefs of others suggests that imagination and empathy, virtues rarely associated with conservators, belong to their practice too. The paper argues that conservation belongs among the human sciences, and that judging is closer to the work of both historians and conservators than either usually admits.

Peter N. Miller is President of the American Academy in Rome. He was a professor and dean at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City between 2001 and 2023. He is the author of a series of books on the early seventeenth-century antiquarian, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, on the history of antiquarianism, and on the modern study of objects as evidence. He co-curated Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margarieta van Varick (BGC, 2009), Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? (BGC, 2022) and Conserving Active Matter (BGC, 2022). His most recent work rethinks conservation (On Conservation as a Human Science, Princeton University Press, 2026), explores historical thinking (The Weather on 9/9/01: Newspaper Weather Maps and History, MER Books, 2024) and defines the importance of research (Research: A Manifesto, Princeton University Press, 2026). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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Scientific Organization:Francesca Borgo and the Lise Meitner Group