The missing word on the banner

Text: an original contemporary conservation-memoir-style practice extract.

I helped prepare an old procession banner for an exhibition. Its painted slogan crossed the whole width of the cloth, but a tear had removed one word from the centre. An exhibition leaflet printed many years later quoted the slogan with the word ‘neighbours’ in the gap. For our first display plan, I produced a digital image in which the tear had vanished and the missing word appeared in matching gold letters. The completed sentence looked entirely convincing.

Convincing was not the same as proven. The leaflet did not say whether its writer had seen the banner before it was damaged. Along the torn edges, only parts of three painted letters survived, and they did not confirm the full word. Once I had copied ‘neighbours’ into the gap, visitors would have no reason to distinguish those new letters from the original ones.

We placed plain backing cloth behind the tear so that the banner could be displayed safely, and the label gave the leaflet’s suggested wording without presenting it as certain. Another curator argued that a completed digital version would help visitors understand the slogan immediately. She may have been right about clarity. Even so, restoring an object should not allow a reasonable guess to borrow the authority of what has survived.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that honest restoration should distinguish evidence from reconstruction.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.