"Almost as botched as Monkey Christ!" National Gallery masterpiece restored/ruined
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/dec/17/national-gallery-botched-restoration-nativity"The National Gallery has ruined Christmas. Or, to be more precise, it has had a very good go at wrecking one of the world’s greatest Nativity paintings. The fact that Piero della Francesca’s Nativity is back on view for the festive season, after a three-year restoration the London gallery vaunts as careful and revealing, should be glad tidings. But my joy turned to ash when I saw it. What in the name of God inspired the restorers to paint two completely new and distractingly moronic shepherd’s faces? Or a big white blob on the stable wall?
The Nativity, a mysterious and elusive work of haunting wonder, has been, oh so carefully and responsibly, rendered clumsy and plodding, if not downright comical. Almost every colour has been altered, every line re-emphasised. It’s like a garish digital reconstruction of what the painting may have looked like in 1475 when it was new – except, instead of offering this as a hypothetical, it has been physically repainted or, in the evasive language of restorers, “retouched”.
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Yet expertise without artistic soul has produced an idiotic botch. This orange-faced man looks vacant and gormless, even constipated, his barely human eyes unfocused and lifeless. It’s like he’s trying to remember where he parked the donkey. The rest of the face, too, is clumsily done, with coarse shadows that attempt to define the nose and cheeks. It’s like a pastiche of Renaissance art by a very cheap, very bad app. The adjacent curly haired shepherd, who points heavenwards, is barely any better. He looks like a very earnest teenager throwing shapes at a school disco.
The reason why it is such a scandal to fabricate faces in Piero’s Nativity is that he painted expressions with a grave psychological truth. I don’t believe for one second this restoration is true to the original. There simply isn’t a more moving image of a company of singers, joined in their song. Or a more human Madonna. Compare their expressions with the inchoate ones added to the shepherd and you immediately see the problem."...(more, including pictures, at link)
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but then replicated in (fire resistant) bronze.
... And putting words into the mouths of people who never to any degree said what you purport is dishonest.
Do better!
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This what was referred to as ugly, etc. Maybe the sculptor is misogynistic?
Her bronze replacement statue:
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And then he doubled down. I think his intentions were good, the results are terrible.
Even has a red hat, 🤣🤣
"Conservation experts in Spain are once again calling for stricter regulations within the sector after yet another work has been irreparably damaged by an amateur restorer.
Adorning the facade of a high street bank in the north-western city of Palencia, the statue, first unveiled in 1923, once depicted a smiling woman carved among a pastoral scene of livestock. But following a disastrous restoration attempt, its face has been crudely reduced to "a cartoon head", writes local painter Antonio Guzmán Capel, who first brought the story to attention in a Facebook post.
The altered work has been described as a "potato" and has drawn comparisons to the US president Donald Trump. “Seeing as he has to leave the White House, he’s moved in here,” commented Victorio Macho Rogado in response to Capel's post.
The potato head of Palencia now joins a pantheon of other botched jobs in Spain, the most infamous of which still remains the 2012 "Monkey Christ" restoration of Elías García Martínez’s Ecce Homo fresco in the town of Borja. More recent incidents include a failed attempt in Valencia earlier this year to treat a painting of the Virgin Mary—which is a copy of a 17th-century work by the Spanish Baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo."....(more)
but after 7 years now of his followers doing insane things beyond imagination, why would it not surprise me that someone would think it possible and appropriate to surreptitiously insert his image into a painting like this? Recall that he is seen by his worshipers as a Christ like figure already, so why would it surprise us that they would see him as appropriate for this scene? Not only does the face appeared to by shaped like drumpf's but it is done in a deeper orange hue than all the others, including the other restored shepherd standing next to him.
and yes i am WELL AWARE this restoration took place in London but drumpf's cult extends far beyond our borders.
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What a change to the psychology of the painting. 
Oh, that's too good. Got to add it to my repertoire.
