This conversation took place between the editors of this special issue of Journal18: Maarten Delbeke, Noémie Étienne, and Nikos Magouliotis.
Nikos Magouliotis (NM): How did “cleaning” become a topic or angle for your research?
Noémie Étienne (NE): While writing my first book on the history of conservation in France more than a decade ago, I was struck by how intense and significant the process of cleaning paintings had become during the 18th century. Previously, royal administrators often postponed or avoided cleaning altogether. Conserving artworks didn’t seem like a priority. We know that many of the French king’s storage facilities (such as those in Versailles, for instance) were not always in the best condition. Many of the paintings stored there were covered with dust.
However, beginning in the 1740s, cleaning emerged as a means of demonstrating power. The French term used in the archives during the 18th century is actually restauration (restoration). From the 1770s onwards, I believe this word “restoration” had multiple meanings. It was a matter of restoring confidence in the monarchy and also of restoring the National School of painting. The royal administration claimed that cleaning and exhibiting French artworks in particular would inspire new great works by contemporary French painters.
Maarten Delbeke (MD): “Cleaning” was never an explicit focus in my work, but when we began to discuss the theme of this issue, it struck me as an interesting and relevant lens through which to examine and compare several phenomena in 18th-century architecture. A previous research project on origin myths of architecture in 18th-century France drew my attention to the obsessive attempts of writers on architecture to clean and purify the discipline, in terms of its principles, its purposes, and its outcomes. Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut is probably the best-known example of such an attempt. In the Preface to his Essai sur l’architecture (1753/55), Laugier makes it clear that he intends to liberate architecture from the flotsam of history and to reestablish it on pure and rational principles, rooted in nature. To some extent, the ideal realm of “theory” that Laugier intends to open up with his speculations, is actually defined by its disembodied cleanliness.
This program goes hand in hand with a new architectural aesthetic that privileges transparency, tectonic expression, and purity of line and whiteness over ornament and color—a tendency that led to the whitewashing and emptying of church interiors. I thought it could be interesting to frame these well-known concerns in terms of cleanliness for two reasons: on the one hand, they emerge at a historical moment, from the middle of the 18th century onwards, when both domestic and ecclesiastical interiors were in the grip of the ornamental frenzy of the rococo. Around this same time, there emerges an increasing awareness amongst architects of building traditions outside of the Greco-Roman, which these architects perceived as potential contaminations of the purity of the classical canon.
NM: And could you comment on some of the words used at the time for “clean/cleanliness”? How would you describe it in your research? Also, who did the cleaning and the “dirty work”?
NE: In my research, I often use the term “care” to highlight a complex movement connecting politics and the material conservation of art: in the second half of the 18th century, for instance, the conservation of paintings became one of the King’s many gestures to take care of his heritage and the French people.
This care for paintings had to be made visible. In archival records from the 1750s, I even discovered a remarkable case in which the King’s restorer—a woman named Marie-Jacob Godefroid—was explicitly instructed to clean only part of a Peter Paul Rubens painting, intentionally leaving a visible contrast between the “before” and “after” states of cleaning.
Much like today, house cleaning was mostly done by women. This applied also to the art therein: many domestic manuals offer guidance on cleaning paintings in private residences. The gendered dimension of such cleaning extended to the field of professional art restorers: during the 18th century, female picture restorers were often responsible for the surfaces of paintings, whereas men were in charge of their frames and supports (i.e., the wood, canvas, and so on). In my view, restoration history also provides an opportunity to consider the invisible work of women in the 18th century and beyond.
MD: Reframing well-established questions in architectural history through the lens of cleaning draws attention to questions of actors and agency. The age-old debate about the place of the visual arts amongst other arts and sciences, and about the relative merits of painting and sculpture (the paragone), can be read as a discussion about which form of art involves getting one’s hands dirtier. As Noémie points out, the next question then is: whose hands? With that question come considerations about expertise, workshop practice, division of labor, and the visibility of actors in the historical record about the built environment. As we know, the 18th century debated professionalism and expertise in design and construction: the question of who has access to which aspects of the profession, and the design, manufacture and maintenance of the built environment. This debate put forward “purity” as well as “beauty” as the marks of good design and craftsmanship. In the Avertissement of his Observations, Laugier praises the “purity of contours” and the beautiful “forms” of Greek architecture. With the notion of “purity,” the discourse on professionalism intersects with increasingly prominent concerns about hygiene and city planning under the umbrella of “embellissement,” or embellishment. Much like modernist designers who borrowed some of their aesthetics from the sanatorium, the concern of 18th-century architects for aesthetic purity allows them to position themselves as experts in the cleaning up of the city.
NM: You both partly touch upon this already, but could you define more concretely what qualified as “dirt” for each of these historical actors/contexts? Do you see a connection to religion, for instance?
NE: After the French Revolution, cleaning took on a new political and symbolic dimension. It became a procedure directed not only at preserving certain artworks, but also at asserting dominance over their former owners—particularly private collectors and the Church. For instance, artworks seized in Italy were meticulously cleaned to remove layers of accumulated grime—mainly candle soot and the traces left by the touch or the devotional practices of the faithful. This act of cleaning was more than mere maintenance; it was a symbolic erasure of past usage and ownership, both of which were equated with dirt.
Cleaning became a form of rewriting or even obliterating the provenance of an artwork. Whiteness and cleanliness were the goal. During the Revolution, ownership of heritage was suddenly transferred from the king of France to the nation. Since the 16th century, the king has owned two types of heritage: his property as an individual and that of the nation as a whole (his symbolic persona). Churches and private patrons also owned art. The situation changed after the French Revolution. Transferring collections seized from the monarchy and nobility to the collection of France’s newly founded national museum (today’s Musée du Louvre)—as well as the massive cleaning operation that followed—was a way of giving this art a new status.
MD: This Enlightenment rhetoric was applied explicitly to the design of churches with a general mandate issued in 1770 by Bavarian Elector Maximilian II Joseph to preserve “a pure and regular architecture, eliminating all superfluous stucco-work and other nonsensical and ridiculous ornament,” a decree often credited with bringing the German rococo to an end. The historical reality is a bit more complicated, as the mandate formed part of an attempt to gain state control over the finances of abbeys and monasteries, and the rococo continued to flourish for at least another 20 years. But this historical circumstance shows exactly how debates about stylistic purity are embedded in ethical, political, and ultimately religious concerns, which are, in turn, part and parcel of a struggle between religious and secular authorities that took place across Europe.
Interestingly, religious rococo art and architecture itself has been presented as a way of “cleaning up” sometimes poor or impoverished objects and sites. Origin myths of churches like the Wies in Bavaria explain how the ornate building originated from the devotion shown to an old and dirty statue. If the “dirtiness” of the statue signified the humility of Christ, the application of ornament illustrates the dedication and devotion of the faithful, and resonates with the purification of the soul that is obtained through sacrifice. In other words, thinking about architectural ornament in a religious context in terms of cleanliness helps to uncover the divergence between secular and ecclesiastical discourse about the same buildings.
NM: Do you also see a connection to politics?
NE: Focusing on the process of cleaning enables me to bridge the material dimension of art—its physical presence, surface, and condition—with the immaterial and often deeply political aspects of conservation and care. Cleaning is inherently political, frequently tied to narratives that serve ideological, national, or colonial agendas. I’m not referring solely to the metaphorical use of terms like ethnic cleansing—a very important topic in ongoing conflicts—but also to very concrete, material acts of cleaning. Removing dirt can also function as a means of distancing art from its religious origins, reframing it within secular, often Western, frameworks.
After the French Revolution, and in the context of Napoleonic imperial expansion, it also functioned, quite overtly, as propaganda. In some cases, I found evidence that artworks were cleaned by their original owners just before being seized by Napoleon’s troops—only to become soiled again during their transfer to France. Exhibiting a cleaned painting, then, signified far more than the removal of surface residue. It embodied the Enlightenment rhetoric of clarity, control, and the material construction of cultural superiority and power.
In the ERC project I currently lead, titled Global Conservation, we extend these questions beyond the 18th century to explore broader historical and cultural contexts. What—or who—is considered dirt? How can museums justify interventions on artworks under the guise of saving them from their original environments? Ultimately, what does cleaning actually mean—and who gets to decide?
MD: It is very difficult to dissociate any claim about the purity of cleanliness from politics, in the past as much as today. When French travel writers visited the territory that is now Belgium in the aftermath of Waterloo, they could not stop marveling at the widespread whitewashing of the interior and exterior of buildings. Whitewashing became a useful vehicle to characterize Belgians as pious, industrious, and materialist, and essentially dependent on France for their cultural and political elevation. It also signified to Romantic authors how Belgians were blissfully ignorant of the historical and artistic value of their own environment, a knowledge gap these authors were more than willing to fill. This example—perhaps one of the key tropes in travel literature—illustrates quite literally how the notion of cleanliness can become tied up with notions of identity, as it allows authors to differentiate between nations according to their preoccupation with hygiene. More metaphorically, cleanliness can refer to the very act of categorization and classification as well. As part of an ongoing SNSF research project I lead together with Sigrid de Jong, Building Identity, we explore how the notion of character emerges in the 18th century to articulate cultural, historical, and political specificity, and how this “characterization” inspires attempts to define what is essential not just to certain types of buildings, but also to people and nations. In this context, it is the energy invested in arriving at “clean” categories that testifies to ideological and political motivations.
NM: What are the methodological challenges of this kind of research?
NE: As mentioned earlier, cleaning is a difficult process to grasp. One day, I was discussing the restoration of 18th-century Parisian paintings with the late conservator Olivier Nouaille in Paris. I brought up archival records from the period—contracts, correspondences, activity reports, and even polemical pamphlets—which offer a wealth of written documentation. “Perhaps,” Nouaille replied, sounding slightly exasperated, “but those sources aren’t reliable. They are, inevitably, written after the fact to serve the interests of patrons. What restorer is going to admit that a restoration went badly? Who would document the resistance, the delays, the errors? These written records are stabilized, prescriptive, forward-looking—they reflect intentions, not necessarily interventions.”
This conversation was a reminder of the importance of cross-referencing multiple types of sources—oral, written, visual, and material—to grasp how artworks and institutions were transformed, particularly within the discourse of impermanence that began shaping European museums from the 18th century onward.
MD: I totally agree. Any research involving notions that easily slip between the literal and the metaphorical, and are part of a larger semantic field, demands careful attention to who is speaking about what, and under which circumstances. I have been working on the case of an 18th-century relic—the bones of St. Rasso—that were robbed by thieves and then later retrieved and reinstalled in the late 19th century. The often very emotional reactions to these events recorded in a variety of sources again indicate the kinds of values that are attached to objects, their display, preservation, and protection, but also suggest to what extent notions of completeness or authenticity can be relative and become renegotiated as circumstances require.
NM: What do you think is the future of this research?
NE: I am currently writing a new book entitled The Impermanence of Collections. In it, I argue that since the early 18th century, museum discourse has promoted an ideal of stability and safety for artworks—an ideal that had no real precedent. Paradoxically, this narrative of permanence emerged at a time when artworks were being actively seized, displaced, and frequently restored. Museums, I suggest, have long upheld the illusion of stability through processes of continual change. Cleaning is a key part of this dynamic.
Since the 1990s, however, artists and activists have increasingly challenged this notion. Today, we find ourselves collectively rethinking what it truly means to conserve—and, just as importantly, who conservation serves. I don’t think we can define this abstractly. On the contrary, I believe that historical knowledge is essential to providing an answer. Moreover, most of my research team in Vienna comes from outside of Europe, and they are committed to a decolonial approach that is neither superficial nor trendy.
MD: Currently, we are initiating a research project on what we call Swiss Rococo Cultures, which explores the ways in which rococo ornament was assimilated and used by various confessional, political and social groups in Switzerland for the creation of anything from buildings to furniture to utensils and textiles to articulate their aspirations and identities. While not directly revolving around the concept of cleanliness, I think it is very productive to use this notion as a critical lens to investigate these phenomena, because the application of ornament does involve distinguishing what is more or less important, what should be set apart and protected, and what deserves care. Cleanliness intertwines the symbolic economy of representation with the material and economic realities of maintenance, investment, and patrimony. It is also impossible to think about cleanliness without taking into account the long history of objects and buildings, and especially the history of their maintenance and conservation. Here, I think our project intersects directly with Noémie’s work. The question is not just how everyday objects came into the museum, and whether or why they are classified as folk art or high art, but also to understand the political decisions that have carried these objects into the present. The same is true for buildings: today rococo churches in Switzerland are generally well restored and, for want of a better word, very clean, but this condition is the outcome of a long and most often very contentious historical process closely connected to the project of building the Swiss nation state. So it is necessary to interrogate this present cleanliness critically, to try and understand what produces it, and thereby what it means.
Cite this article as: Maarten Delbeke, Noémie Étienne, and Nikolaos Magouliotis, “The Grammar of Cleaning – A Conversation,” Journal18, Issue 20 Clean (Fall 2025), https://www.journal18.org/7972.
Licence: CC BY-NCJournal18 is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC International 4.0 license. Use of any content published in Journal18 must be for non-commercial purposes and appropriate credit must be given to the author of the content. Details for appropriate citation appear above.
