What a museum scan actually shows

Open a museum's own high-resolution scan of a four-hundred-year-old painting and the first thing you notice is not the composition. It is the damage.

Craquelure spiders across the varnish. A retouched tear from an 1870s restoration sits a shade cooler than the paint around it. The ground layer shows through where the artist scraped a figure out and painted a wall over him. None of this appears in the postcard version. All of it appears in the scan, because the scan was made for conservators, not for gift shops.

Reading the file before printing it

Before a work joins our catalogue, we read its source scan the way a conservator would:

• Resolution against size. A scan carries a ceiling. Where the file cannot

hold detail at our largest format, we cap the size ladder rather than sell a soft print.

• Color against the record. The institution's own color target, where one

was captured, governs; our proofing chain is managed to it.

• Damage as fact. We do not paint out the painting's history. The crack

that has been there since 1750 ships on the print, because it is on the work.

A reproduction that erases the object's age is a picture of a painting that does not exist. The one on your wall should be the one in the record — scars, scrapes, second thoughts and all. That is the whole excitement of the thing: it is real, and the file proves it.