An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

Some people talk to plants. The Carnegie Museum of Art’s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring. “You have to … tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to starting the laborious process of restoring years of wear and tear by inpainting with tiny brushes, aided with pipettes of varnish and solvent. Isabella had been waiting a …