[imagesource: here]

You wouldn’t ask a car mechanic to perform heart surgery, so why someone would ask a furniture maker to restore a priceless work of art is beyond me.

More on that in a second.

We’ve seen a seemingly growing group of unqualified people taking on art restoration lately.

The sheep in The Ghent Altarpiece, housed at St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, was repainted to reveal the lamb’s “intense gaze” and “large frontal eyes”.

Instead, it ended up revealing what would probably happen if you combined animal and human DNA.

Observe, with the post-restoration look on the right:

Then there’s the painting formerly known as the Elias Garcia Martinez fresco of Christ, which was converted into ‘Monkey Christ’ when a devout parishioner of Santuario de Misericordia de Borja church in Zaragoza, Spain, tried her hand at a restoration.

Image: Associated Press

Spain’s troubles weren’t over yet, either.

After a year’s exile and hundreds of hours of painstaking work, a 16th-century polychrome statue of Saint George and the Dragon from northern Spain was carefully reduced, by a schoolteacher, to something that suggests George was seeing that dragon with the help of a few hallucinogenics:

Image: Luis Sanz/ Flickr

The schoolteacher and the parishioner were not given permission to restore these artworks, but did it anyway.

Which brings us to The Guardian and the latest artwork to go under the brush, this time at the hands of a furniture restorer.

A private art collector in Valencia was reportedly charged €1,200 […] to have the picture of the Immaculate Conception cleaned. However, the job did not go as planned and the face of the Virgin Mary was left unrecognisable despite two attempts to restore it to its original state.

Image: Photograph: Cedida por Coleccionista/Europa Press

Fernando Carrera, a professor at the Galician School for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, said such cases highlighted the need for work to be carried out only by properly trained restorers.

Image: Carmon Report

“I don’t think this guy – or these people – should be referred to as restorers,” Carrera told the Guardian. “Let’s be honest: they’re bodgers who botch things up. They destroy things.”

Carrera, a former president of Spain’s Professional Association of Restorers and Conservators (ACRE), says that current laws allow people who aren’t properly trained to restore artworks.

He makes a similar comparison to the one I used above:

“Can you imagine just anyone being allowed to operate on other people? Or someone being allowed to sell medicine without a pharmacist’s licence? Or someone who’s not an architect being allowed to put up a building?”

While restorers were “far less important than doctors”, he added, the sector still needed to be strictly regulated for the sake of Spain’s cultural history. “We see this kind of thing time and time again and yet it keeps on happening.

Apparently, amateur restorations are more common than we think. We generally only find out about them when they make it into the press, but María Borja, one of ACRE’s vice-presidents, says that the number of botched artworks out there is actually much higher than those the general public is made aware of.

Actual experts in the field of restoration are now calling on the Spanish government to put laws in place that stop schoolteachers, devoted churchgoers, and furniture restorers, alongside everyone else without a licence, from trying to ‘restore’ priceless artworks.

Sounds like a good idea.

[source:guardian]