This painting is quite sketchy.
A copy of famous artwork was botched beyond recognition during a repair job — in a case that could change laws covering restoration work in Spain.
An anonymous art collector enlisted a furniture restorer to clean a copy of “The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables,” a renowned work by Baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Europa Press reported.
But the results were ‘draw’-dropping — and not in a good way.
The blissful face of the Virgin Mary came back looking like a misshapen lump, with smudgy red lips and crooked eyes, following two attempts to restore it to its original state. The job cost around $1,350.
The shady restoration drew comparisons to the infamous “Ecce Homo” fail of 2012.
In that case, an amateur art restorer in the small village of Borja, Spain, turned her attention to a fresco of Jesus Christ called “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”), painted in 1930 by Elías García Martínez.
But her “fix” rendered the face of Jesus wholly unrecognizable — becoming a global laughingstock and drawing comparisons to a blurry potato and a monkey.
Now, conservation experts in Spain are calling for a tightening of the laws covering restoration work.
Fernando Carrera, a professor at the Galician School for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, told The Guardian he thinks restoration should be left to the professionals.
“We need to make sure that the people who undertake this kind of work have been trained in it,” Carrera said.
“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?”
María Borja, a vice president of the Valencia chapter of the Professional Association of Conservative Restorers of Spain, said that while social media has brought attention to a couple of cases, messed-up restoration jobs may be more common than people know.
“There are a multitude of situations where the works are intervened by people without training… possibly causing irreversible change,” she told Europa Press.