English text
The curator inherited a portrait whose subject had been confidently misidentified for almost as long as it had been displayed.
Removing the name was straightforward; deciding what to put in its place was not.
The museum's publicity team favoured a dramatic story about a mystery finally being investigated.
The researcher responsible for the correction preferred a quieter account of uncertain evidence.
Neither approach seemed likely to satisfy visitors expecting a name beneath a face.
The curator asked the conservator what she had noticed while examining the canvas.
A faint outline suggested that the sitter's hand had once rested in a different position.
No document explained why the artist had changed it.
The curator began to see how much of the portrait remained interesting without a secure identity.
The new label described the materials, the visible alteration and the limits of the surviving records.
Where the confident name had stood, a short sentence acknowledged that the sitter was unknown.
The publicity team feared that this sounded like institutional failure.
The curator replied that maintaining an attractive error would not constitute success.
A month later, visitors were spending longer before the painting.
The museum could not establish whether the label alone accounted for the difference.
One child, however, had drawn the altered hand in the comments book.
Beside it she had written that a person could be worth looking at without being famous.
The curator resisted turning that observation into a slogan.