"Restorer" in Spain Destroys Priceless Madonna

Edit: this strikes me as a kind of metaphor for the destruction of the West. Did the immigrant day laborer who executed the restoration expect to be paid? This could easily be classed along with other kinds of vandalism by barbarians now ongoing in the West. Has everyone seen Bergoglio's new invocation to the Blessed Mother of the Migrant, or whatever they try to call her? The first attempt looks like Cher and the second one looks like an attempt at a family portrait by one of Dick Masterson's cousins in Los Angeles. 

An art professor calls for laws to regulate art preservation, but the thought of Spain's Marxist government presiding over Spains cultural heritage more than it already does, doesn't sound like a solution, either.

A UK tabloid discovered the story:

[The Sun] A private art collector is said to have been charged €1,200 (£1,084) by a furniture restorer to have Bartolome Esteban Murillo’s painting of the Immaculate Conception cleaned and repaired.

However, things did not go as planned and the face of the Virgin Mary was left unrecognisable even though two attempts to restore it to its original condition were made.

The botched restoration job has echoes of the “Monkey Christ” eight years ago when a devout parishioner attempted to restore a painting of Christ on the wall of a church in the north-eastern Spanish town of Borja.

The Ecce Homo Jesus fresco was 'restored' by the untrained artist Cecilia Gimenez in 2012.

Initially painted around 1930 by the Spanish painter Elias Garcia Martinez, the altered fresco was widely slammed for making Jesus look like a monkey.

AMDG

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, washes the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday

In 1850, Franz Joseph participated for the first time as emperor in the second of the traditional Habsburg expressions of dynastic piety: the Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, part of the four-day court observance of Easter. The master of the staff and the court prelates chose twelve poor elderly men, transported them to the Hofburg, and positioned them in the ceremonial hall on a raised dais. There, before an invited audience observing the scene from tribunes, the emperor served the men a symbolic meal and archdukes cleared the dishes. As a priest read aloud in Latin the words of the New Testament (John 3:15), “And he began to wash the feet of the disciples,” Franz Joseph knelt and, without rising from his knees, washed the feet of the twelve old men in imitation of Christ. Finally, the emperor placed a bag of twenty silver coins around the necks of each before the men were led away and returned to their homes in imperial coaches.

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