“I do not doubt the good intentions of both the pastor and the person in charge of desecrating this work of art through inappropriate techniques,” he writes, but then adds “the negligence of both is very serious and can not be excused by good intentions alone.” Gianluca Mezzofiore at CNN reports that Leoz acknowledged in a tweet that the aim of restoration was not malicious. They’ve used plaster and the wrong kind of paint and it’s possible that the original layers of paint have been lost…This is an expert job it should have been done by experts.” “It’s not been the kind of restoration that it should have been for this 16th-century statue. The council wasn’t told and neither was the regional government of Navarre,” he tells Jones. “The parish decided on its own to take action to restore the statue and gave the job to a local handicrafts teacher. Koldo Leoz, mayor of Estella is livid about the amateur restoration. It takes years to acquire the skills necessary to carry out these kind of restorations, so imagine the frustration when something like this happens.”Įven more frustrating? The work was a rare example of polychrome sculpture in which the statue is carved then painted using special techniques. “As a professional, I feel disconcerted and very offended. “I saw photographs of the atrocity they were committing,” she tells Mark A.
In need of preservation or restoration, it’s believed that a local parish priest decided to take matters into his own hands, hiring a teacher at a local handicrafts school to spruce up the work of art.Ĭarmen Usua, a restorer in the Navarre region, was one of the first people to bring the incident to the public’s attention. The wood had darkened with age and the paint was flaking off. George was not in good shape before it was painted over. Sam Jones at The Guardian reports that the statue of St. The botched restoration has already drawn comparisons to the infamous 2012 “Monkey Jesus” incident, in which an elderly painter in the town of Borja decided to restore a flaking fresco of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns with very simian results. George charging a dragon now better resembles a Pixar character. As Natasha Frost at Atlas Obscura puts it, the 16th-century carving of St. His armor, horse and saddle were slathered in thick monochromatic swathes of grey and red. George was given a fleshy peach face and wide brown eyes, one of which seems to have wandered a bit too far to the right.
Instead, obliterating any of the detail and subtlety of the original composition, the wide-eyed St.
Michael in Estella, a town in the Navarre region of northern Spain. But that high-tech process was not in the cards for a recent restoration of a wooden statue of San Jorge, aka St. These days, art restoration is a highly scientific affair with advanced non-invasive techniques available to bring a work back to its former glory.
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