It is a little sad as well as hilarious. If it can’t be restored, they were talking about replacing it with a photo of the original, which sounds like a good idea to me.
Well, it is the kind of situation that’s described in Spanish as me río por no llorar; I’m laughing because the other option is weeping. The woman did it with the best of intentions (and I’m sure she didn’t imagine the permission), it’s completely different from someone destroying a painting on purpose. And it’s not as if professional fixers haven’t screwed up before: species of trees and animals which were introduced into Spain as part of reforestation schemes are now considered “kill on sight invaders”; a lot of the damage in the old cathedral of Vitoria (the one which inspired Ken Follet’s World Without End) was caused by well-intentioned, mistaken restoration attempts.
Would it have been better if she’d skilfully painted a very faithful rendition of the original over the top? Would that still have been desecration?
If there’s a mural on a wall somewhere that gets maintained every few years by the original artist, then he/she passes on the mantle to a successor, who continues to retouch the mural, and so on, for several generations, is that artwork any more or less valuable, intrinsically, than one that was painted once at the start, and left to flake and crumble until today?
I don’t have any kind of point to make, I’m just trying to unpick in my own mind what I think it is that seems to mean that the longer something is left untouched, the more important it is that it remains untouched.
Familiar with it already, but it’s not really the question - what I’m wondering is why it’s OK to do something continuously, but not OK to start again after stopping.
“And, you know, the thing about Our Savior… he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’…”
No, and neither was this. Desecration involves intent to desecrate, which was never there.
Not a complete “second layer”, but many restorations consist of touch-ups to the damaged areas. And I’m remembering the fuss when some idiot left Philip IV with four legs: Velázquez had started work on a full-body portrait, didn’t like the legs and changed them; the restorer found the first set of legs and left them on. Eventually the “are you correcting Velazquez’s corrections? Really? What’s next, straightening La Pedrera?” mindset won over “oh but this way you can see the whole process”.
The aforementioned old cathedral of Vitoria has a light show at the main gate: analysis discovered that it had been painted and re-painted many times through the years, always in bright colors but never trying to re-copy the previous version. Rather than “let’s preserve this priceless work of art”, the original mindset was “this is starting to look like shit, let’s redecorate”. So how do you pick which layer to re-paint now? The answer is: thanks to modern technology, you don’t. The light show projects different color compositions on the gate, each of them one of the layers found by the analysts.
Somewhere there sits medication untaken.