Has the Crossing of the Red Sea been restored before? Certainly. You could say that most Old Master paintings have been cleaned at least once during each century of their existence, so it is quite possible that our painting has been cleaned at least four times.
Do we know when and how it was cleaned? Not entirely. The thorough documentation of conservation treatments is a rather recent phenomenon. Only a handful of art museums around the world have concise records of treatments carried out before World War II, and many do not have much in the way of reporting before the 1960s. For works in private collections, conservation records have been almost non-existent.
