worst art restoration from this list

oh lmao here's the link: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fails-1591327

ada castle restoration is soooo fucking funny to me, they turned it into an emoticon

I love this one, lol

https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2019/07/turkish-castle-restored.jpg

Difficult to see past Beast Jesus, but tempted to vote for ‘Mary and Baby Pazuzu statue’ for the chutzpah of the artist.

I voted for the Castle Restoration because, as was said on the show Coupling, there are some places you don't expect to see a face

I'm voting the destruction of the Leonardo drawing as the actual worst. wtf

yeah imagining the panicked conversations as the ink dissolved brings me lols

between one of the technicolor buddhas and the mosaic for me.

matrera castle is good imo

i like the buddha the villagers restored

barbara eek

antony padua one assumes was a troll

Think the buddhas and some of the Catholic statues shd be thought of as objects with function and therefore the fan upgrades are OK

Matrera seems fine to me, preserve the remains without creating a pretence that the original is intact

Erasing the da Vinci feels pretty inexcusable but idk this whole thing should be a meditation on the contingency of the canon, human frailty and decay as inescapable element of all endeavour

Ada Castle looking surprised does make me lol tho

ada thought

maybe I have terrible taste bit most of these are fine. I’m especially having a hard time understanding what’s wrong with the Louvre painting restoration.

Spain seems uniquely unqualified to handle any kind of art restoration.

The Anthony of Padua one is good, I'd say.

matrera castle is good imo

love the principle, not sold on the design of the roof

a cantilevered modern glass roof would have looked better bit maybe it wasn’t technically feasible or within budget. I can’t find who or what financed the restoration but they probably had a limited budget.

Dying laughing at this thread, thank you. Ada castle and Lisa Simpson Jesus have me in hysterics because of their utter wrongness, but St. George is more subtly ridiculous. He looks like a character in a Davey and Goliath puppetoon.

The one that for some reason broke my heart the most was the twelfth one, headed as "Religious sculptures (ca. 15th century) Ranadoiro, Spain" in the article and in the poll listed as "Hot pink religious sculptures". The original was a superb piece. The paint job was pure horror and once done, cannot be fully undone. RIP.

I’m especially having a hard time understanding what’s wrong with the Louvre painting restoration.

Yeah there's nothing wrong with that one except that the restoration looks a bit drastic I suppose

Old paintings like this look yellow because they were intentionally coated with varnish (which back then was made of tree sap iirc) at the time of their creation and over time that stuff yellows. The restoration work involves removing that old varnish and then applying a new coat (which in time will itself need to be removed). There's a whole science to the work of doing this without damaging the painting and re-varnishing with something that will withstand time.

people getting upset when statues get restored to their original garish colors -- that's conservatism for you. not surprised by the many daily mail links.

Those carved wooden figures I voted for were neither painted nor garish. In fa

(grumbles) As I was about to say, most of the examples weren't a matter of 'restoring' garish colors, but of erasing what was left of the original by blunders (like utterly destroying a DaVinci drawing) or making the work into something it never was.

people getting upset when statues get restored to their original garish colors -- that's conservatism for you. not surprised by the many daily mail links.

like the Victorians/Twitter retvrn types who fetishize(d) greek statuary for its supposed white-white-white purity

I like this 2001 usage of 'cancelled'.

Prof Federici added: "Here we have material damage that is absolutely irreversible. It is very grave: they have cancelled Leonardo."

Every time I look at Ada Castle i think of the King of All the Cosmos

This castle is all anime expressions.

https://arkeofili.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/%C5%9File-son.jpg

tempted to vote for ‘Mary and Baby Pazuzu statue’ for the chutzpah

Pazuzu chutzpah

Pazuzu chutzpah

Pazuzu chutzpah

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

The mosaic is particularly unfortunate given that it shouldn't be too difficult - time-consuming, but not technically demanding - to make a perfect restoration of a mosaic, given that it's basically a collection of irregular pixels. As long as the restorers have a colour-accurate, perspective-correct image of the original it shouldn't be difficult to make a perfect reproduction. The only creative element would be working out whether it should have the original colours, or a weathered look, or a blend.

The restored castle puts me in mind of Astley Castle in Warwickshire, which has a similar concept - the original stonework is now attached to a modern frame - but it's much subtler:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/26/astley-castle-restoration-wins-stirling-prize

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53cbc77ce4b0f4361f8a7fbd/1408362277371-YR45O487WQU5LESOMOKX/Astley-Castle-exterior2-Design-Hunter.jpg

It strikes me that the sculpture of St George probably looked ridiculous when it was new. There are a bunch of images online of what ancient Greek sculptures would look like if they still had the original paint, and they're pretty off-putting. Like Kraftwerk. I don't want to offend Ralf Hütter, but you're a weird-looking man. I'm sorry. But perhaps that kind of thing was hot in ancient Greece, and our view of classical beauty - and by extension our very perception of what is beautiful or not - are perverted lies built on layers of falsehoods.

our view of classical beauty - and by extension our very perception of what is beautiful or not - are perverted lies built on layers of falsehoods.

yep

and Astley Castle looks well
done. Never gonna give that house up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I think the modern reconstructions of painted Greek statuary are just not painted very well. There are plenty of examples to be found in Greek mosaics and paintings of that time showing the general approach to colouring figures, and even some depictions of statues, and they're all painted very delicately, with large expanses of pale white skin, realistic skin tones showing sun burned shoulders etc. So I think those lauded academic reconstructions could really have been included in the poll!

I forgot what I voted for.