An obsolete term: unity

One of the considerations that restoration critical theory has heavily emphasized is the concept of unity. Unity, always misunderstood and relegated to the background, as Paul Philippot criticized, is linked to the way of understanding the intervention and the historical awareness from antagonistic perspectives:

[…] one claims the respect of the sensitive traces of time, of what has been recently called “historical depth” or the part an object has already lived as intrinsic to the authenticity of its historical substance. The other is actively trying to abolish the effects of time in order to restore the unity of the pimordial piece ^{[Philippot, 2015, p. 20]}.²

Although Philippot recovers this concept and links it to the conflict between historical and aesthetic instances, ever since that moment, the importance of thinking about unity has been prefigured. It is a concept that, in theory, has had several definitions and considerations, but, in practice, is not always applied when making decisions.

As it can be seen in the transcription, it is impossible not to think of the perspectives of John Ruskin and E. E. Viollet-le-Duc, but also of the Brandian mediation between the previously mentioned historical and artistic instances. Furthermore, in the case of the position of Viollet-le-Duc, it is understood that the unity is related to the moment a cultural object is created, when the authors, architects, builders, and producers end-in that very moment, where its authenticity resides (even if to the restoration critical theory is nothing more than the sum of events throughout its history)-the cultural good.

On the other hand, the unity in an intervention is restructured based on the reconstitution of the potential unity,

[…] whose aesthetic awareness reclaims the re-establishment, and whenever this is possible through a work of open integration of all falsification. In these cases, it is not about re-establishing a complete piece, but rather of reducing the inconveniences caused by the lacunas in order to grant the original, still persisting, the maximum possible presence and unity ^{[Philippot, 2015, p. 26]}.³

Although it is specifically linked to the reintegration process here, how many times did we repair the concept of unity when proposing a cleaning or a reintegration? Without any doubt, this should be one of the reference frameworks regarding decision-making about the cleaning of a cultural object because reducing visual harm also deals with the problems produced by stains, dirt, and some pictorial aggregates that seeped into it throughout its history, even if they show signs of their use and reintegration in current cultural systems.

We found the version of the most relevant unity magnitude in Philippot work: when he considers it an initial element and vital for the methodology that a restorer must apply during an intervention. This refers to a prime example, an altarpiece where sculpture, painting, and relief are usually seen independently from each o ther, rather than as parts of the unity of the cultural heritage; or the architecture, where structure and decoration, plaster and relief are analyzed without visualizing their evident interdependencies, eve rything cooperates as a single undivided system ^{(Philippot, 1973, p. 6)}. The same happens, from our perspective, with the pieces sculpted or decorated with the same decorative, formal, and material characteristics. Beyond the identification of the properties of certain sculptures and defining them as a unit, the possibility of comparing the similarities among them helps us think and recognize a wider unit, which, in turn, is essential to understand stylistic, artistic, and mode tendencies and, thus, the circulation of ideas associated with social and cultural aspects that are intrinsic to a space-time.

However, the interventions do not tend to cling to unity as a metaconcept; or, even worse, it is hinted at without considering the practical implications that it would bring about in the decision-ma king process. Thus, we have seen how paintings, sculptures, and furniture of a same altarpiece are worked on in an isolated manner. These are actions that, at the very least, are underpinned in a dialogue between work teams in order to achieve the same objectives and intervention criteria, as well as levels of action; or rather, restorations of a singular sculpture that, since its two parts were not considered as a unit, were solved by means of independent reconstructions of each part. In the case of San Elías, the unity was recog nized beyond the sculpture itself. Thanks to the support of other fields, it was possible to know that the piece is one of the links in a chain of sculptures manufactured by the same craftsmen or carvers, or painters, or both, which allows for the identical execution of lacunas treatment in the sculptures that we have been able to intervene in the STREP (Figure 7). In every single case, we have intended to retrieve the potential hampered unity, using reintegration to recover the missing details that were found in the decoration of the rest of the sculptures. The possibility of doing this resides in the multidiscipline and a methodological task for its study and comparison with other pieces of the same period, which allows for the generation of consistent results, with no stylistic falsifications, by applying theory to the restoration practice.

(Photograph: Mercedes Murguía, 2021; courtesy: STREP-ENCRyM-INAH)

Figure 7 The unit: links in the artistic chain of a sculptor and a painter.