From Smiling Virgins to Complete Destruction: Regulating Art Restoration
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A few Qing Dynasty frescoes began to chip away in the 270 years it had been since their creation. A group of restorers, sympathetic to the plight of the waning quality of the art, performed an unauthorized fresco restoration, which produced the image on the right. A Chinese blogger revealed the product of the restoration, leading to an outpour of rage and sadness over the erasure of “the last trace of history." Weirdly enough, fixing valuable pieces of art has caused many an emotional outburst for the last couple of decades. This brings to mind the question: do we need to regulate the practice of art restoration?
Let’s look through a couple of the most famous botched art restoration jobs of all time:
In 2018, the Church of San Miguel in Spain hired art restorers to add some life back into the 500-year old statute of St. George. Done by a local teacher, the restoration job went viral soon after, with many concerned art historians and bystanders alike critiquing the paint job as the work of a cartoonist. The local government prepared a statement discussing the unprofessionalism regarding the statue, citing “showy paint layers [and] assessed damage inflicted by the use of materials and processes as completely incompatible with the restoration of works of art.” Thankfully, the museum paid roughly $35,000 to “unrestore” the work back to its original state, and St. George still resembles his 16th-century likeness.
Completed in the Byzantine era, the Sale Castle in Istanbul once functioned as a fortress looking out towards the sea. Upon restorations, the main opposition party in Istanbul’s parliament began to stir up criticism over the “new and improved” version. As this criticism leaked over to the social media world, users on Twitter began to anthropomorphize the new fortress, equating it to “a memorial for Spongebob.” Amid the amusing comments was genuine frustration and sadness from journalists and professors who saw it as a loss of an important part of historical advancement. The current town municipality, however, defended the restoration, and it remains standing today.
In 2016, one of the most well-known and viral failed attempts at art restoration and replacement was unsurfaced at Sainte Anne des Pins Catholic Church. The statue in the photograph was a routine target of vandalism, and the baby Jesus had been decapitated multiple times beforehand. Eventually, someone stole the head, and a local artist named Heather Wise offered to create a free replacement for the Church. Wise created this terra cotta placeholder, intending to create a stone version later in the process. Before she could start that process, however, this sensational piece erupted on social media. All the attention on the statue compelled the thief to return the original head!
The restoration that started it all. A private collector in Valencia commissioned this work of the Virgin Mary to be restored for over 1000 euros. The original piece, done by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, is shown on the left. The finished product is the image on the bottom right. The work is titled The Immaculate Concept of Los Venerables. The collector who owns the piece immediately got in touch with other restorers to fix the botched touch-up.
The public outburst that followed the restoration of The Immaculate Concept of Los Venerables lead the public to call for tighter regulation in the restoration industry. A group of Spanish conservation experts “emphasiz[ed] the need for restoration to be only carried about by professionals.” Essentially, if people are not formally trained in the skill, they should not touch the art. A professor at the Galician School for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage believes that “the sector needed to be strictly regulated for the sake of Spain’s cultural history…Paradoxically, it shows just how important professional restorers are. We need to invest in our heritage.”
However, many local governments are staunchly against strictly regulating the restoration profession. Some believe that further regulations in the market may be overkill; owners of historically significant art worth a lot of money should find restorers in the upper echelon of the art world. Other art that may need to be restored can be touched upon and tinkered with by those who may not have professional training in the process. Some believe that regulations may kill competition and innovation in the industry.
By looking at the history of botched restorations and understanding the cost-and-benefits to further regulating the market, what side do you stand on? Should we keep the Virgin Mary unrecognizable or risk further damage by hiring yet another restorer?
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