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This restoration was anything but immaculate.
A furniture restorer attempted to clean up a copy of baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables” for an anonymous collector in Valencia, Spain. Unfortunately, the beatific face of the Virgin Mary was disfigured in the process — and now professional restorers and conservation experts are demanding tighter laws covering restoration work.
See the before and after here:
“I don’t think this guy — or these people — should be referred to as restorers,” Fernando Carrera, a professor at the Galician School for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, told the Guardian. “Let’s be honest: they’re bodgers who botch things up. They destroy things.”
The painting’s owner was reportedly charged almost $1,400 to have the Baroque painting of the Immaculate Conception cleaned. But both attempts reduced the Virgin Mary’s face to a misshapen lump with red lips. Now the anonymous collector has hired another specialist — who is trained for this sort of work, the Europa Press reported — who will try to save it.
The botched job is reminiscent of the “Beast Jesus” debacle of 2012. That’s when another amateur restorer, 82-year-old Cecilia Gimenez, attempted to touch up an almost century-old fresco of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns for her Borja, Spain church. Her touch-up of “Ecce Homo,” aka “Behold the Man,” didn’t go well. It was so bad, in fact, that local authorities first suspected someone had vandalized the church. And the image of the misshapen holy figure, which had a somewhat simian appearance, inspired a slew of memes and parodies across Twitter TWTR, -0.77%, Facebook FB, +1.23% and art blogs.
There was a happy ending to that story, however: the free publicity drew thousands of tourists to the church to see the viral work of art, which helped resurrect the local economy, the New York Times reported. The “Ecce Homo” restoration was even stamped on the town’s lottery tickets, and was printed on T-shirts, cellphone covers and coffee mugs.
Other infamous restoration hatchet jobs of late have included a 500-year-old carved-wood sculpture of Saint George at the Church of San Miguel de Estella in Navarre, Spain two years ago. The restoration resulted in a cartoon-like Saint George with a pink face and garish red and gray suit of armor.
María Borja, a vice president of Spain’s Professional Association of Restorers and Conservators, told Europa Press that these sorts of mishaps are “unfortunately more common than you might think.
“We only find out about them when people report them to the press or on social media, but there are numerous situations when works are undertaken by people who aren’t trained,” she continued, adding that “artworks suffer and the damage can be irreversible.”
