{"id":296327,"date":"2025-11-17T03:51:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T03:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296327\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T03:51:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T03:51:08","slug":"amateur-destroys-spanish-painting-in-failed-restoration-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296327\/","title":{"rendered":"Amateur Destroys Spanish Painting In Failed Restoration \u2014 Twice"},"content":{"rendered":"

A private art collector said they paid a furniture restorer $1,350 to clean up a copy of a 17th-century artwork by Bartolom\u00e9 Esteban Murillo.\"Virgin<\/p>\n

Public Domain\/Private Collection\/Europa Press 2020The Virgin Mary figure on a copy of a 17th century painting was destroyed after two failed restoration attempts.<\/p>\n

Art experts are calling for a reform of current Spanish laws after a disastrous restoration job left a painting of the Virgin Mary\u2019s angelic countenance completely distorted.<\/p>\n

According to the Guardian<\/a>, an unidentified private art collector in Valencia was charged 1,200 euros by a furniture restorer who claimed they could clean and restore the collector\u2019s copy of the Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables.<\/p>\n

The original artwork was created by baroque artist Bartolom\u00e9 Esteban Murillo, who was a famous artist of the 17th century.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the restoration job was a complete failure. After the first failed attempt, the same amateur restorer tried to fix it \u2014 only to make it worse.<\/p>\n

The Immaculate Conception painting, in its rightful form, is a full-body portrait of the Virgin Mary dressed in a white and blue robe standing atop a cloud with a pack of little angels at her feet. As she gazes up toward the heavens, Mary wears a hopeful look on her delicate-featured face.<\/p>\n

\"Monkey<\/p>\n

APBefore and after of the distorted Jesus painting infamously known as \u2018Monkey Jesus.\u2019<\/p>\n

After the botched restorations, however, the Virgin Mary was rendered unrecognizable. After the first attempt, Mary had lost all detail in the tendrils of her hair, and the contours of her face had morphed to resemble the ghostly figure in The Scream. Worst of all, her facial features had gone flat. <\/p>\n

After the second try, her face was completely changed again, except this time her face looked quite demonic. It\u2019s unclear why the private art collector had entrusted their art piece to an amateur restorer \u2014 or why they let them \u201crestore\u201d it again for the second time \u2014 but, according to art experts, this kind of debacle is unfortunately not uncommon in Spain.<\/p>\n

Fernando Carrera, a professor at the Galician School for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, said the case was more proof that art restoration should only be legally allowed to be carried out by properly trained art restorers.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you imagine just anyone being allowed to operate on other people? Or someone being allowed to sell medicine without a pharmacist\u2019s license? Or someone who\u2019s not an architect being allowed to put up a building?\u201d Carrera offered. <\/p>\n

While those might be extreme examples, Carrera admitted, the point stands that Spain\u2019s law needs to ensure that art restorations are properly carried out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think this guy \u2014 or these people \u2014 should be referred to as restorers,\u201d he continued. \u201cLet\u2019s be honest: they\u2019re bodgers who botch things up. They destroy things.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turns out, current Spanish laws regarding art restoration don\u2019t require projects to be performed by certified or trained art restorers, meaning anyone with cleaning utensils is legally allowed to \u2018spruce up\u2019 an art piece. This is especially troublesome for a country with such a rich history of art spanning centuries.<\/p>\n

\"El<\/p>\n

DSF\/AFP\/Getty ImagesBefore and after of the failed restoration of the Figures of Ra\u00f1adoiro sculpture in 2018.<\/p>\n

Because of this loophole in Spanish law, Mar\u00eda Borja, a vice president of the Association of Restorers and Conservators (ACRE) called the restoration an act of vandalism and said that such incidents were much more common than people think. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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\u2019t trained,\u201d Borja told<\/a> Europa Press which was the first to break the news of the disfigured Virgin Mary before it went viral around the globe.<\/p>\n

Other cases of art restoration works gone terribly wrong include the hack job on the Figures of Ra\u00f1adoiro which rendered the 15th century art piece into an ugly Christmas ornament<\/a> in 2018 and the failed restoration<\/a> of the La Dolorosa de Arucas sculpture in June 2020.<\/p>\n

The most famous example is the unfortunate damage done to a century-old painting of Jesus Christ in a tiny chapel of the Sierra de Moncayo in northeastern Spain in 2012.<\/p>\n

The distorted Jesus eventually turned into an endearing symbol of religious devotion due to its elderly restorer, but it first became infamous as \u201cMonkey Jesus\u201d<\/a> and \u201cPotato Jesus\u201d because of its undiscernible shape.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, after this \u201cDemonic Mary\u201d situation there will be some action from the higher powers of Spain.<\/p>\n

Next, learn how a priceless 17th century Caravaggio painting was found behind mattresses in an old French attic<\/a> and read the story of a painting left inside a closet for decades that turned out to be worth millions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A private art collector said they paid a furniture restorer $1,350 to clean up a copy of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-296327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}