It is not yet known whether the damage can be recovered. A Spanish collector had the very bad surprise to see one of his precious paintings, a copy of a canvas by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, altered after having been entrusted to a restaurateur.
"The face is totally disfigured"
According to the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia , the collector asked this furniture restorer, in whom he had "the greatest confidence", to restore a copy of the famous "Immaculate Conception of the Escorial", itself kept at the Prado Museum in Madrid. But on recovering the painting, he realized that the face of the Virgin Mary had been "disfigured". "At first (...) he completely denied that he had done anything, only that the painting was dirty and that he had cleaned it, but the face is totally disfigured," explained the owner of the work at La Vanguardia.
Se me había olvidado lo mucho an indignant anoche con la nueva restauración estilo Ecce Homo de una Inmaculada de Murillo en Valencia.
Me he vuelto a indignar. pic.twitter.com/2RsIJBy62O
To try to make up for the damage, he then entrusted the canvas to "specialists" of his acquaintance ... and ended up with an even worse result than the first time. "The only solution is to try to remove what they painted," he says. Not sure, however, that this is possible.
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The case is not an isolated one, and the Professional Association of Conservative Conservators of Spain (ACRE) once again denounces the use of private conservators to non-sworn restaurateurs, inflicting sometimes "irreversible" damage to historical works.