Soru

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a profound paradigm shift in the conservation of Renaissance frescoes, a transition catalyzed largely by the devastating damage inflicted on Italian cultural heritage during the Second World War. Prior to this period, the prevailing methodology among European conservators was distinctly "purist," prioritizing the recovery of what was presumed to be the artist's unadulterated original intent. This imperative often entailed the aggressive removal of subsequent overpainting, centuries of accumulated grime, and historical restorations. While logically straightforward, this approach frequently yielded fragmented images interspersed with jarring expanses of bare plaster, or inadvertently exposed the underlying *sinopie*—the rough preparatory sketches drawn directly on the wall beneath the final fresco. Consequently, purist interventions often fundamentally compromised the aesthetic unity of the work in their zealous pursuit of historical authenticity.

In response, Italian art historian Cesare Brandi pioneered a theoretical framework, formalized in his 1963 *Teoria del Restauro*, that systematically rejected the purist fixation on an often-unrecoverable original state. Brandi asserted that a work of art possesses a dual polarity: the aesthetic (its artistic value) and the historical (its continued existence and alteration through time). The purist methodology, in Brandi's view, erroneously elevated a theoretical aesthetic ideal while obliterating the historical dimension, functionally erasing the artwork’s passage through time. Instead, Brandi advocated for a methodology dictating that any necessary intervention to address missing areas (*lacunae*) must be immediately distinguishable from the original at close range, yet harmonious enough to restore the potential oneness of the image from a normal viewing distance. This theoretical requirement led to the development of *tratteggio*—a method of filling losses using a system of fine, vertical hatched lines. Crucially, Brandi's theory insisted that only the material structure of the artwork, never its creative image, should be subject to restorative intervention; attempting to reconstruct lost forms based on conjecture rather than documented evidence was, in his assessment, tantamount to historical forgery.

Based on the passage, which one of the following can be most reasonably inferred regarding the "purist" approach to fresco conservation?