Restoration is the best school ever for an artist who values aesthetics for the first place. You temporarily possess the actual piece of art that survived many generations, that in the other conditions could be seen in a museum only.
But here you can live with it, touch it, study it, then try to imitate its shape, color, and texture little by little approaching the ideal.
That process includes everything…
If you want to carve a missing hand of a statue it is not enough to know anatomy and how to use tools. You need to immerse in a certain epoch to understand the stylistic aspects of those days, how the sculptor thought, what kind of tools and processes he used.
It is a deep plunge in art history beside everything else.
This is a hard pass, and this is poetry.