August 24, 2012
The worst art restoration project of all time
Raphael Minder in the New York Times:
An elderly woman stepped forward this week to claim responsibility for disfiguring a century-old “ecce homo” fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns, in Santuario de la Misericordia, a Roman Catholic church in Borja, near the city of Zaragoza.
Ecce homo, or behold the man, refers to an artistic motif that depicts Jesus, usually bound and with a crown of thorns, right before his crucifixion.
The woman, Cecilia Giménez, who is in her 80s, said on Spanish national television that she had tried to restore the fresco, which she called her favorite local representation of Jesus, because she was upset that parts of it had flaked off due to moisture on the church’s walls.
The authorities in Borja said they had suspected vandalism at first, but then determined that the shocking alterations had been made by an elderly parishioner. The authorities said she had acted on her own.
But Ms. Giménez later defended herself, saying she could not understand the uproar because she had worked in broad daylight and had tried to salvage the fresco with the approval of the local clergy. “The priest knew it,” she told Spanish television. “I’ve never tried to do anything hidden.”
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 03:05 PM | Permalink
Comments
There are an awful lot of paintings featuring this person, so what's the big loss if one of them is redone in a rather touching, naive primitivist style.
Posted by: aguy109 | Aug 24, 2012 4:57:06 PM
This was pretty hilarious.
Posted by: Carlos | Aug 24, 2012 10:18:21 PM
I found this very touching. The vacuous original was neglected and she attended to it with love, even if she had no skill.I hope she is not too humiliated by the fuss her humble intervention has caused.
Posted by: Judith Mason | Aug 25, 2012 5:46:19 AM
I should probably feel bad, but there's something incredibly funny about this. I try to imagine the face of whoever first came upon this, then his listening to the explanation about restoration, and keep bursting into laughter.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 25, 2012 7:24:16 AM
Okay, now I actually do feel bad:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/24/spain-europe-news
Labors of love shouldn't end this way. I hope they don't press charges like they seem to be planning.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 25, 2012 7:34:26 AM
Judith Mason,
I think your assessment of vacuousness may be fair, in the sense that a portrait of Christ gazing to heaven is such a commonplace image that it is almost thoughtless. But empty? To a 19th century Spanish Catholic my guess would be no. And where precisely is the humbleness in her intervention? Try destructive hubris instead. There, that fits a lot better.
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 25, 2012 9:35:43 AM
Cecilia Gimenez should not be sued or persecuted otherwise! This is a fresco on the wall of the church, not a canvas she rolled and took home to restore in private. How come no one noticed her wielding the brush in the corner? She says that the priest and parishoners knew. Please leave her alone.
All the jokes and outrage about the restoration have already been posted on Facebook. Someone needs to make lemonade out of the lemon. The positive aspect of the endeavor is that she did not make a mediocre but boring picture. She really screwed it up beyond recognition. The artwork now falls in the "so bad that it is hilarious" category. If the people of her town had any sense (of humor) and business savvy, they would let the new but not-improved art work stand. Next to it, they should hang a copy of the original and market the art for all it is worth.
"Zaragoza, the Home of the Restored Ecce Homo."
The revenue from t-shirts alone would pay the priest's salary for generations.
Posted by: Ruchira | Aug 25, 2012 11:03:47 AM
I can imagine a really lousy trend of provincial religious art desecration arising in the hopes of a fifteen minute + meme being gained for the assassin's patch of the woods. Destroying art is not as light a matter as too many seem to think it is (and I laughed like hell at the Bob Ross photo shop, there absolutely is humor here, but it is separate from the iconoclastic dipshit glee that I'm seeing in many responses to this massacre). The fresco deserves to be restored, posters in the gift shop will be just fine for her efforts. (And no, I don't think jail or whatever is in any way appropriate, before I get accused of that)
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 25, 2012 11:30:15 AM
Is everyone a fucking toddler?
Posted by: John Henry Abbott | Aug 25, 2012 12:28:33 PM
But Jesse, she did not intend to destroy and desecrate. Her motivation was devotion to a beloved icon that was deteriorating before her eyes. She was probably sad to see that and took it upon herself to accomplish a task well beyond her abilities. What you fear will be calculated vandalism to generate revenue. There is a difference.
Also, those who are laughing - the glee is not of iconoclasts alone - are doing so at the well intentioned SNAFU and not the destruction of art. No one laughed when the Taliban took dynamite to the Bamiyan Buddha.
Posted by: Ruchira | Aug 25, 2012 12:40:12 PM
This is such a sad story beneath the belly laugh. Flaubert could have written it. It's found literature.
Remember a few years ago when an art lover got overcome and left a lipstick mark on a Cy Twombly canvas she had kissed? She hadn't been able to stop herself in time to realize what a bad idea she'd had. I understand well. When I was 20, I visited the Delacroix Museum in Paris. A big room on the 4th floor in the Place Furstemburg with a two story window wall looking out at chestnut trees. It was in those days arranged to look very much as Delacroix would have left it if he had gone out for a few hours. On a table lay his palette. I couldn't help myself -- I bent down to lick it. And did lick it. The guard saw me and smiled.
The next time I visited, the museum, while still wonderful, had been rearranged to have a didactic vibe, and the palette was under glass. Any later comer who got overwhelmed and had an irresistible physical need to touch the palette of one of the greatest colorists in the history of art would have to have to be ready to break glass, not just...lick.
I don't know what the French of that era would have thought was appropriate punishment for me. It was certainly a wrong thing to do, and doubtless illegal. What the guard saw was a schoolgirl in a very short skirt having an ecstatic communion with a god of painting. The diminished capacity of youth, he may have been thinking, the disinhibition. Ah, oui..!
What Senora Giminez did was also from an age related failure of judgment, and it was certainly wrong. But where is her malicious intent?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 25, 2012 12:59:31 PM
I'm noticing more of a "whoop-eee", but I do run in coarser circles than you Ruchira (I'm honestly guessing). I could easily imagine these American acquaintances, where they Afghanis, delighted with the Bamiyan fireworks display. I don't think this woman intended vandalism at all, but overconfidence, thinking she could paint as easily as one might patch a dress i.e. hubris was most definitely present. I'll be happy to put much of the blame on a century of appallingly bad art education, that would allow someone this incompetant to ever dream of re-tracing a skilled painter's steps.
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 25, 2012 1:03:42 PM
were not "where" - God-almighty this keeps happening.
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 25, 2012 1:08:56 PM
"The worst art restoration project of all time"? I beg to differ! I mean, think about what Ecce Homo means. It means "behold the man". Had you visited the church, you would have walked right past the peeling fresco of Jesus. The "restored" version however captures your attention; you behold the man indeed, even if it is accompanied by a shaking of the head and the thought, "What happened?! How can someone screw it up so badly?" The bottom line is that she was super successful in making the painting live up to its name. We are compelled to behold the man!
Posted by: Namit | Aug 25, 2012 2:06:16 PM
I don't think the woman had any 'grand' ambitions. She probably wasn't viewing it as art to begin with. This is an unremarkable work in the middle of nowhere. Her restoration was -devotional-, aimed at touching up an unmaintained-seeming portion of the painted wall. And that's how the priest and everyone else must've seen it, or they wouldn't have accepted her offer to do it. They were looking for a touch-up, not a restoration. I doubt she'd even seen the original - she wouldn't have got the scroll thing at the bottom so wrong otherwise. When she first realized she'd goofed it must have been because the face looked so silly, not because it didn't look like it once had.
And Hubris? Really? We're probably talking eighty-year-old devoted church woman, the person who's always there every Sunday, remembers that church going back several decades, is always helping organize stuff, and trying to do useful things for it, because it makes her happy and peaceful to be a productive member of her church community. The proper precedent here is people in the 18th or 19th C, before modern ideas about art preservation had taken off, who did any number of things to statues, paintings, monuments and archeological sites that we'd consider scandalous, motivated by nothing more than well-meaning enthusiasm. Hubris is less clumsy, not so stupid, and way more grandiose than that.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 25, 2012 2:21:25 PM
Prasad,
The likable portrait you've painted of this woman may, or may not, correspond to reality, but it is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. A nice person picked up a brush without an ounce of technical know-how, and destroyed a painting. I agree that pre-modern notions of art restoration seem to have been operating in this church, but that's not a good thing as some of us have known and all of us should be able to see now.
As far as the hubris quibble goes, I think the plan to restore her Savior's face was completely grandiose. If I imagined that I could slip into the shoes of someone highly trained and do the job they did (Chopin waltz, no problem, running CERN, hey got this guys!)well that's at least one word I'd say that I had earned. So there is an obvious detachment from reality or an absence of critical self-assessment. There may have been goodness and likely piety present too. But hubris covers this nicely I think, even if she's a rustic Spaniard and not an ancient Greek politician. But you can replace it with profound foolishness if you like.
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 25, 2012 8:33:52 PM
Well, Christ lives and has staying power as well. That's good, as this putative 'desecration' of his holy image stimulated a seeming endless round of intellectual upmanship.
Let's not forget that Spain, as the most catholic country in the world, has the only statue dedicated to Satan in The Angel Caido.
http://www.monografias.com/trabajos49/estatua-a-satan/estatua-a-satan.shtml
This is funny.
It reminds me of The Miracles of Santo Fico.
Cheers
Posted by: Félix E. F. Larocca, MD | Aug 25, 2012 8:57:05 PM
Elatia, you agent of desecration. What'd it taste like? Was there pigment on your tongue? Did red and gold pigment smear on your lips? Did you give the security guard a tri-color smile on the way out? I assume you were very pleased with yourself. Bravo! Encore! Uh, maybe no encore.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Aug 25, 2012 10:42:12 PM
One fine piece of cubist work. Better than the original.
Posted by: Bruno Müller | Aug 25, 2012 11:08:09 PM
Norman, Delacroix died in the 1850s, so by the time I was 20, the paint on his palette had had a very long time to dry. I AM glad I licked it, but I never thought to do it, I was only overcome with the need then and there. It tasted like rather mineralic house dust. I think the guard was probably a moonlighting writer, or an artist who never made it. He understood. Also the person I was with hit the ceiling when I did that, and groaned, and I am sad to say I did enjoy that. The guard probably wanted to be the good guy. And he was.
Let's see if I can post a url for a photo of the palette. http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/20a2c8/
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 25, 2012 11:29:16 PM
Elatia,
All one has to do is scratch and poke a bit, and the darnedest candid camera moments pop up. Also, I remember the story of the lipstick mark on the canvas. There is no denying love. I went back to your earlier comment and took note of Delacroix being the owner of "...the palette of one of the greatest colorists in the history of art...". I may not understand, but now I get it. And there is probably no other person in the world who can tell that story. Eugene Delacroix and Elatia Harris - each is one of a kind.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Aug 26, 2012 2:07:37 AM
Elatia, please don't tell us what you licked when you saw Michaelangelo's David in Florence...
Posted by: aguy109 | Aug 27, 2012 11:16:18 AM
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