Pic of the Day: How not to restore a classic painting

Seeing that a classic nineteenth century Spanish fresco was ageing badly, an elderly woman did her best to restore it to its former glory. She shouldn’t have bothered.

Now we’re no experts in how to restore classic works of art and would struggle to complete a stickman if it was presented in front of us, but we reckon we could do at least as good as a job as the well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided woman who attempted a restoration of the fresco known as ‘Ecce Homo’, which was first painted by Elias Garcia Martinez in the nineteenth century.

According to a report in the Independent, the elderly woman in question spotted the gradual decline in quality of the painting, which is housed in the Santuario de Misericodia church in Borja, near Zaragoza in north eastern Spain, and endeavoured to do her best to get it looking back to normal. Needless to say, she failed

The painting’s new look was revealed when Martinez’s granddaughter went to check on the painting recently and was no doubt horrified to find that it resembled the work of a child working with watercolours for the first time.

Pic and main pic via The Independent

The picture above shows what the painting looked like in 2010 (far left), last month (centre) and finally, after the amateur artist in question was finished with it (right), although in fairness she did admit to having caused the damage after her restoration attempt “got out of hand”.

The painting isn’t terribly important and everyone accepts that there were no ill-intentions on the elderly woman’s part, but we don’t think they’ll be calling on her to restore the Sistine Chapel anytime soon.