Abstract
This article explores an important aspect of artworks overlooked by art historians: their gradual material deterioration and the measures taken to slow this process of decay. It focuses on one extraordinarily detailed set of maintenance instructions set down by an early sixteenth-century English bishop. Drawing out some of the key themes from this maintenance program (its ritual performance, its analogies with medicine, its philosophical stakes) and placing them in dialogue with surviving artworks, I argue that maintenance work offers an instructive new perspective from which to consider the material turn, as well as a deeper point of connection between art history and conservation.
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