In the northwestern Spanish city of Palencia, an amateur restorer has completely messed up the restoration of a Biblical sculpture on an old facade of a bank’s headquarters.
–
It was a local news medium that first noticed the failed restoration, then the photos quickly circulated on social media where people laughed hard at the result. One person even said that the female figure now looks a lot like Donald Trump, another man talked about a cartoon figure.
Even on well-known art websites, experts cannot hide their anger at so much amateurism. “The result is like a failed facelift undertaken on a poor, ignorant snowman. It’s almost as if a child has been given the job of restoration. But which child could cause such a nightmare ”, someone wonders on Artnet. “The head of the female figure, once tilted down, is now smooth, ovoid and with crooked, mismatched eye sockets glued to it. The figure’s nose is a soft mound and the mouth is formed by two thin lips, slightly curved upwards, her cheeks and chin are nowhere to be seen. ”
Not the first, hopefully the last time
The professional association of restorers and curators in Spain already noted on Twitter that “this is NOT a professional restoration”. The professional association previously argued that more professionals were needed, because the profession was marred by amateurs. In Spain, several restorations have gone completely wrong, to laughs all over the world. “Can you imagine that just anyone is allowed to operate on other people? Or that someone can sell medicines without a pharmacy license?
The first and most famous failed restoration was an age-old painting of Jesus on the wall of a church in Borja. After an eighty-year-old parishioner attempted to restore the peeling paint, the result became known as “Monkey Christ” or “Potato Jesus”, and has since been embraced by Borja as a tourist attraction.
In June of this year, Spanish media reported that a furniture restorer had restored a copy of the Immaculate Conception painted by renowned 17th-century artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo so badly that it looked nothing like the original.
