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26th Jun 2018

PICS: This attempted restoration of a 500-year-old statue looks absolutely woeful

Alan Loughnane

Poor St George, we hope they got their money back…

You’d think that on the back of the recent, and well-publicised restoration fails, extra care would be taken to make sure the correct person to do the job is selected.

But of course, it wasn’t, or this wouldn’t be a story.

For 500 years in the small town of Estella in the north of Spain, the painted wooden effigy of St George has adorned the door of the local chapel.

In recent years, the condition of the effigy has deteriorated to the point where a restoration effort became necessary.

But all did not go to plan…

An attempt to freshen up the 16th-century statue has left St George with a rosy pink face and a bold, red-and-grey suit of armour.

The Mayor of the town expressed his dismay at the result of the restoration and wondered why the restoration attempt wasn’t carried out by a professional.

“Today, Estella isn’t in the news because of its spectacular historical, artistic, architectural or cultural heritage,” he tweeted on Monday, above a picture from the local paper headlined: “Navarre’s own Ecce Homo.”

The restoration attempt is believed to have been performed by a local crafts teacher and has drawn comparisons to  infamous “Ecce Homo Monkey Christ.”

In 2012, an amateur art restorer in Borja, Spain, fixed her efforts on a fresco of Jesus Christ called “Ecce Homo”. But unfortunately, 81-year-old Cecilia Giménez’s “fix” rendered the face of Jesus completely unrecognisable. Ecce Homo became a global joke, and was compared to a blurry potato and a monkey.

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