The fresco had been damaged in 1943 and badly repaired in 1961, which is a common enough history and, in restoration terms, the worse of the two events. Bombing removes material. Bad restoration adds it. Selin spent four months on the preliminary survey before touching anything. Ultraviolet imaging separated the original pigment from the twentieth-century intervention with humiliating clarity: whole passages of drapery, a hand, most of a face, all confidently invented by a restorer who had evidently decided that a coherent picture was preferable to an honest ruin. He had not been a vandal. By the standards of his training he had done competent work. The assumption then was that the restorer's duty was to deliver the artist's intention, and where evidence was absent, informed reconstruction was not merely permitted but expected. That assumption has since been reversed, and the reversal is more contested than the profession admits publicly. The current orthodoxy holds that intervention must be reversible, distinguishable on close inspection, and confined to stabilisation. You may prevent further loss. You may not supply what is missing. A gap remains a gap, and the viewer is trusted to tolerate it. Selin accepts this and has argued for it in print. Standing in front of the wall, she also finds it insufficient. The problem is that the 1961 hand is now itself sixty years old. It has its own craquelure, its own patina, its own history of being looked at. Removing it would restore an authenticity that no living person has ever seen, at the cost of destroying something that generations of visitors have understood as the painting. There is no neutral option. Leaving it is a decision. Removing it is a decision. Documenting the dilemma thoroughly and passing it to a future committee is also a decision, and the most common one, though it is usually described as caution rather than deferral. She removed the invented face and left the drapery, a compromise defensible on technical grounds and, she is aware, arrived at partly because the face had begun to look, to her, unmistakably like a man from 1961.