In 1993, the Getty Museum decided to purchase a fourteenth-century gold-ground painting, with one caveat: the acquisition was contingent upon the removal of a large painted baby from the work’s surface, which had been added by a later artist. The painting in question is attributed to the Florentine artist Bernardo Daddi and dated to near 1335. Removing this baby meant permanently destroying centuries-old paint. But from a different perspective, the addition was itself destructive, a “scar on the surface” of Daddi’s otherwise unusually well-preserved artwork, as one Getty conservator put it. But had the Getty’s new painting ever been “original” to Daddi?