Botched Art Restoration Renders Virgin Mary Unrecognizable. The failed makeover—one of several to surface in Spain in recent years—has prompted calls for stricter.regulation of the field.
“Should the facts be confirmed, we would have to regret, once again, the loss of a Cultural Asset and, under these circumstances, we request not to take this instance as a social … media source of fun, as happened already formerly,” the statement notes in a likely reference to the memes that took social media by storm when the botched fresco of Jesus debuted in 2012. “Moreover, we all must be alarmed to think that our Heritage disappearing because these disastrous actions.”
“Can you imagine just anyone being allowed to operate on other people? Or someone being allowed to sell medicine without a pharmacist’s license? Or someone who’s not an architect being allowed to put up a building?” he continues . “ … We need to invest in our heritage, but even before we talk about money, we need to make sure that the people who undertake this kind of work have been trained in it.”
More recently, the Navarra regional government spent $34,000 on an “unrestoration” project aimed at reversing a local teacher’s attempt to spruce up a sculpture of St. George with thick layers of plaster and paint, reported Meilan Solly for Smithsonian magazine in June 2019.
Many failed attempts to fix old paintings result in irreparable damage. But in Borja, at least, the story took a happy turn: Public interest in Jesus’ disfigured likeness was so high that thousands of tourists traveled to the site just to see the artwork up close. The spike in tourism proved to be a windfall for the small town.
“It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, driven by the media into a phenomenon,” Andrew Flack, who co-wrote a comic opera about the failed fresco, told Doreen Carvajal of the New York Times in 2014. “God works in mysterious ways. Your disaster could be my miracle.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/another-botched-restoration-surfaces-spain-time-virgin-mary-180975170/