Gargoyles and Restoration

The concept of restoration is rapidly falling out of fashion in favour of conservation. The days of Viollet-le-Duc's personal re-imagining of medieval architecture seem relegated to the past, and now conservators are often explicit in the ways in which they conserve a building or work of art, revealing the modern conservators hand rather than attempt to disguise it.

Gargoyle by Viollet-le-Duc at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

There are many questions at the heart of the resoration/conservation debate. Firstly, to restore a building assumes restoring it to an 'original' form, which does not account for the way buildings age, develop, grow or shrink. To take an example from painting, many oil painters knew that the varnish on their paintings would darken over time, and thus would compensate to adjust for this change over time by brightening the pre-varnished paintings. Restorers would then remove every layer up to and including the original varnish to reach 'the artists hand', i.e. his true intention. This completely ignores the painting's life beyond the point of creation. The same can be said for buildings. 

Secondly, with decaying and crumbling buildings, intervention is often unavoidable and parts need to be rebuilt, sculptures replaced, etc. The question then is whether a viewer wants to be fooled into imagining the restored building to be completely aesthetically 'original' in style, in the manner of a Viollet-le-Duc or should modern additions be explicitly obvious?

                                                              

Chichester Cathedral, 

exterior view of the south side aisle, south transept, and tower

This question has resonance for Chichester Cathedral where I observed these two guys peering down at me from an exterior side-wall:

Sculptures from Chichester Cathedral

They are delightfully humourous scultures, and although modern in relation to the building in both age and style, they represent the type of whimsy and humour, and also vulgarity, often at play on medieval buildings:

Examples of Romanesque 'humourous' sculpture

Perhaps some may view the Chichester gargoyles as jarring in the context of a medieval cathedral, but surely it is better to have something there representative of the spirit of medieval carvings instead of either a crumbling sculpture or modern fake. In the case of Chichester, I admire the medieval whimsy and playfulness at play in the sculptures, but I am under no illusion that they are by the hands of a modern sculpture. I enjoy not being duped into reading medieval authenticity and originality when there is none, and I enjoy the enduring skill of sculptors to the present day.

To end on a fun note, we may not have developed much further in style from our medieval designers. Any fan of Kilpeck Church and/or vintage early 90's LucasArts video games may appreciate this:

Left: Sculpture from The Church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck, Herefordshire, 12th century

Right: Sam and Max Hit the Road [LucasArts]