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The reality is that restoration, like history and criticism, is subjective and partial

Michelangelo's statue of David survived almost four centuries standing in the open air in the political heart of Florence, exposed to riots, wars and rain, before being moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia in 1873. But now, after surviving all that bird shit, David must endure bullshit. The row over how to clean David has been reported around the world as almost comic, but it is not funny at all. It is frightening because, ultimately, those involved will do what they want. And if they permanently damage the greatest sculpture in the world, that will just be tough. David, say the placards on the fencing surrounding him, needs cleaning. He's a dirty, dirty boy. Having spent several days looking at David - such a sublime physical and intellectual mystery of a statue that it seems to breathe - I can honestly say the last thing that occurred to me was, "Look at that grime." But leaving that aside, let's consider the extreme nature of the dispute reported so lightly in the world's media. There is irreconcilable disagreement about how to spruce up the surface of Michelangelo's marble. Agnese Parronchi, the expert engaged to clean David, favours a "dry" method involving slow, methodical use of chamois cloth, soft brushes and cotton swabs, which she previously employed on Michelangelo's Medici tombs. Franca Falletti, director of the Academia, prefers something wetter and, claims Parronchi, more dangerous to the stone. Parronchi, who feels so strongly that she has resigned, says the more interventionist wash is favored because it is modern and glamorous. Her own method is conservative and gentle - Michelangelo's sculptures in the New Sacristy certainly don't look like they have been subjected to anything clumsy. The row has become international. A letter signed by 39 "art experts" calls for nothing to be done without an international commission. Antonio Paolucci, superintendent of such things in Florence, says, "Trust us, Italy is best in the world at restoration," thus implying that this is all anti-Italian prejudice. The row over David suggests that, far from careful custodians, the people responsible for protecting works of art are competitive, dogmatic and dangerously ready to intervene in things of immense fragility. Nationalism should be the last thing on Italian minds.

David is a global property, a defining achievement of humanity. Italy has no more right to damage its surface than the Taliban had to blow up Buddhist masterpieces. Anyway, this is not Italy-bashing; it is a Florentine who has sounded the alarm. This ought to be a moment of crisis for the restoration industry - industry being a reasonable word for a process that, in recent years, has seen radical changes to the appearance of Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel, Signorelli's Last Judgment and, in London, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. Simply by disagreeing so publicly and radically over something so important, the Florentines have exposed the secrets of a practice so apparently "scientific" that only a tiny elite feel qualified to comment. Those who do can easily appear paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is an unlikely way to characterize a professor of art history at Columbia University, but repetition undermines the arguments of the leading critic of restoration, James Beck, and his British ally Michael Daley. Their book, Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal, is the most comprehensive critique of what they see as a self-serving lobby of academics, curators and big business gaining advantage from assaults on defenceless works of art. But their blanket scepticism is only convincing if you agree that art should never be shored up against its ruin. Not all restorations are unnecessary, or catastrophic. Beck criticized the restoration of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, where, in the 15th century, Masaccio and Masolino painted frescos of unparalleled spiritual beauty. When I recently saw these frescos, "ruined" by restoration, I was awed by their austere passion - which suggests to me that in this case, Beck and Daley were barking up the wrong tree.

To which they might reply that they know more. But this is the problem with restoration and with its critics: everyone claims to know the absolute truth, when the obvious blinding fact is that we cannot know the final truth about what The Last Supper looked like the day after Leonardo painted it, or what The Last Judgment looked like when Pietro Aretino accused Michelangelo of painting pornography in the Pope's chapel. This is not an argument for postmodern scepticism, for saying it doesn't matter, or we don't have access to the art of the past, so let's treat it ironically. We can know plenty, but this will be interpretation rather than unarguable scientific fact. The restorations carried out on some of the world's masterpieces have been presented as scientific interventions, based on research so modern and up to date that it makes all previous restorations look like the amateur efforts they were. "Thanks to the progress of scientific and technical knowledge," says the official guide to the restored Last Supper in Milan, "it has been possible to make analyses and examinations covering the chemical, physical, environmental, static, structural and climatic conditions, besides an exhaustive and detailed photographic documentation." Clutching this guide, hot and sticky with anticipation, you buy your timed ticket, hang around Milan for a few hours, come back, and finally pass through a James Bond-style vacuum-sealed airlock to enter the presence of Leonardo's restored wall painting, and see... what? The ultra-scientific attempt to peel back the layers of five centuries of restoration of a painting that began to decay on the damp wall as soon as it was done has resulted in a deeply ambiguous and baffling image. Are we seeing something like the "real" Last Supper, or just a more flaky, scratchy and hence authentic-looking pastiche? There is no consensus at all. Leading Italian Leonardo scholar Pietro C Marani was involved in the restoration and wrote the panegyric above. The equally eminent British art historian Martin Kemp led the critical charge against what was done. Both these historians have a deep grasp of Leonardo - but their views on the restoration are irreconcilable. How could they not be? History is always up for debate. There are endless arguments over the causes of the English civil war. There will never be a final decision as to whether it was a social revolution, a political coup or a religious war. Knowledge of history is not positivist knowledge on a 19th-century model. And yet art history, when it enters the territory of restoration and starts fooling about with infra-red cameras, claims exactly that kind of definitive truth.

The reality is that restoration, like history and criticism, is subjective and partial. The least it should be, therefore, is careful. How can you have the temerity to insist that you so comprehend the art of 500 years ago that you can alter its appearance? Which brings us back to David. The art, rather than science, of restoration has to favour non-intervention except where to fail to intervene would be irresponsible. The Uffizi gallery recently demonstrated good practice when it called off, for now, a restoration of Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi after the Florentine company Editech discovered that the structure of the painting was more complex than previously thought. I don't accept the "scientific" status of the contention that only the drawing is by Leonardo and the layers of colour came later, but at least it saved this pictorial enigma from intrusion. There are good reasons to act when paintings have been damaged by previous restorers, and this is rectifiable (though The Last Supper is a counter-example), and even more so when a fresco is about to fall off the wall. But how does any of that apply to a sculpture so hardy and durable it survived centuries out of doors and still looks great? The public reasons given for cleaning David are slight. What is really being proposed is a stripping-away of history - because what marks are on Michelangelo's sculpture are the natural marks of time. The only serious damage to David has been the breaking of his arm in riots against the Medici. This is part of the history of a political masterpiece: the embodiment of Republican virtue and vigilance. I might have misunderstood, but the Accademia's presentation of the arm as one of the "problems" to be dealt with seems to imply actually concealing this ancient damage, and hence effacing history. The very insistence on cleaning has something hygiene-obsessive about it, suggesting sterilisation, blandness, a desire to make David accessible to people who don't want to be bothered with imagination. We can see David clearly; this is stone, not a painting lost under layers of varnish. Every crooked line - there are no straight, smooth lines - of his silhouette is visible, the "dirt" doesn't ruin the uncanny representation of muscles and bones. Cleaning him is depressingly of a piece with the misunderstanding that Michelangelo's art attains, or wants to attain, classical "perfection". David stands at the end of a vista of Michelangelo's unfinished Slaves, which shows just how wrong this is; Michelangelo was a poet, his art is poetry, and the movement he inspired was mannerism, not classicism; an art of introspection and emotional stress.

Michelangelo's David lives as art, as something that happens between the artist's mind and yours. Anyone who plans to unsettle this relationship had better think and think again, ask for a lot of advice and then perhaps not do anything. Report by The Guadian Group.

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