The Belvedere Torso has no head, no arms, no legs below the knee. Michelangelo refused to restore it. Every attempt since has made it worse, and every attempt has been technically competent.

The reason is not mystique. It is that a completed figure specifies a single posture, and a fragment specifies a space of postures, and the viewer resolves it continuously and never settles, and the not-settling is the experience.

Restoration collapses the wave. It replaces a live process in the viewer with a dead fact in the marble, and the trade is always bad, and it is always made by people acting in good faith with excellent references.

Ruins, redactions, the cut-off tape, the sentence that stops. The unfinished object is not damaged. It is a machine for producing the viewer.

Which is why nothing in this lattice terminates, why there is no last plate, no summary, no page on which the argument closes and you may put it down having received it. That absence is not modesty about the conclusions. There is a conclusion. It is deliberately