ETA: The Sistine Chapel's ceiling was restored to its original condition. That may or may not be an equivalent, but there it is.
Well, it would be physically impossible to restore it to its
actual original condition, and impossible to know for a fact what that exact condition was. But that is a good example to use in this discussion. Here's
Wikipedia's summary of the goals of that restoration:
- To study the frescoes progressively, to analyse any discoveries and utilise the appropriate technical responses.
- To record every step of the operation in archival reports, photographs and film.
- To use only those procedures and materials which were simple, extensively tested, not harmful, and reversible.
- To repair cracks and structural damage that threatened the stability of the plaster.
- To remove layers of grime consisting of candle wax and soot that had been deposited by the burning of candles in the chapel for 500 years.
- To remove repainting by previous restorers that attempted to counteract the effects of soot and other accretions.
- To remove oil and animal fat used to counteract salination of areas where water had leaked through.
- To remove crystalline accretions of salt that had whitened areas where water had leaked through.
- To conserve surfaces that were in danger of further deterioration because of bubbling, and flaking.
- To restore sympathetically those areas where deterioration of one sort or another had obliterated details and caused loss of integrity to the whole, for example, filling a bad crack and painting the plaster in a colour matching the original.
- To maintain in small defined areas a physical historical record of the previous restorations that had taken place.
So the main goals were to remove things that obscured the original work, like the soot and earlier repaintings; to do limited restoration as needed to preserve details that would otherwise be lost; to prevent further decay; and to maintain some physical and archival record of the history of the changes made to the frescoes over the centuries. Overall, to get as close to the original, unadulterated work as feasible and minimize any artificial substitutions of the type that past restorations had used. But that's inevitably going to be different from the actual original condition, simply because so much time has passed.
If they took a similar approach with the
Enterprise, that could adequately balance the desire to preserve its authentic appearance with the need to document its post-series physical history. It would mean the Miarecki restoration would be mostly removed, but maybe a small part of it and the prior two restorations would be preserved as a physical record, and there would be extensive photographic and video documentation of the conservation process, as
Warped9 suggests. But it wouldn't necessarily mean that the miniature would end up looking exactly as it did half a century earlier, because the physical materials themselves have aged. It might be as close as it was feasible to make it without the kind of aggressive restoration that brought down such criticism the last time, but it would still reflect the passage of time.
But it's worth noting that there are critics of the Sistine Chapel restoration, people who insist that it actually changed or damaged the work and failed to reflect what they believed Michelangelo's intentions to have been. That's the thing about history: There is no absolute certainty. What one person believes to be an authentic restoration, someone else will insist is wrong. I mean, heck, that's true in Trek fandom in general. There's nothing all fans agree on any more than there's anything all historians or art critics agree on. Whatever approach they take, someone's going to be unhappy with it.
But in theory, knowing what was done over the years could become useful if some weird new problem were to emerge. It might aid in the detective work.
