Monday, January 26, 2015

Botched Restorations


When workers in Egypt were changing a lightbulb in a display case, they accidentally broke off the beard of King Tut.


 Then, when they glued it back on, they smeared a big blob of epoxy on the gold leaf. But that's not the only botched restoration job. The Telegraph mentions a few other notable cases.


Cecilia Gimenez's restoration of Ecce Homo

Yunjie Temple before and after.

The bungled nose job on Supper at Emmaus by Veronese (from the Guardian)

Read more: "King Tut's broken beard and other art disasters" at The Telegraph

5 comments:

  1. Well among all these the less serious is probably the first. It'll take time but one can very well remove the epoxy.

    Eventually people do their best, but the rest is also very dependent of the times. In the past it was considered normal to "repair" all damage. Now it's all about conserving the object as it is. And for buildings, about getting them back to their original conditions (often keeping some trace of historical changes)

    And in a hundred years it will be yet again something else.

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  2. Cecilia Gimenez's restoration has become so popular that the church has decided to keep it like that. Most of the people who saw the restoration on TV had a good laugh. A bit of Charlie's humor :o)

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  3. I still chuckle when I see the Spanish fresco, and I remember at the time lots of humorous Photoshop images on Facebook using the image of the face in other paintings. Good times! 😄
    Thank you for the postcard James :-)

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  4. Yes - clearly Cecilia Gimenez's restoration of Ecce Homo is the funniest of all

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  5. Not to mention the restoration at the Sistine Chapel, where the glazed subtle top layer of paint was taken off to brighten the colors leaving us with a comic book rendition of a once masterpiece.
    I thought the destruction of the painting Cecilia Gimenez "restored" was tragic.
    See the Mr. Bean comedy, Staining Whistler's Mother (1997) for laughs; you tube has some clips.

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