"Almost as botched as Monkey Christ!" National Gallery masterpiece restored/ruined [View all]

[Tanuki]

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”.
.....
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)