The Conservator's Hands

In 2019, conservator Eliane Dotson spent fourteen months restoring Artemisia Gentileschi's seventeenth-century painting at the National Gallery in London. Every morning she arrived before dawn, washed her hands three times, and worked under magnification so precise she could see individual brushstrokes laid down four hundred years earlier. When asked why she was so meticulous about her own physical habits — her diet, her sleep, even the lotion she used on her hands — Dotson explained simply: "These hands don't belong to me when I'm working on a masterpiece.…