When Restorers Forget How to Paint: A Cry for Artistic Literacy in Conservation

Art restoration is supposed to be a delicate, respectful craft, but recent disasters suggest a shocking truth: some restorers might be experts in chemistry and cleaning—but hopeless at painting. And when you touch centuries-old masterpieces without understanding the language of paint, the results can be, well… tragic.

Take Piero della Francesca’s The Nativity at the National Gallery. After three years under the conservators’ care, what emerged was a botched painting that looked more like a cheap app filter than a 15th-century masterpiece. Shepherds who once conveyed quiet wonder now appear cartoonish and ruddy, their constipated expressions awkward, their humanity gone.

Art connoisseurs didn’t just notice—they recoiled. Jonathan Jones rightly described it as “clumsy and plodding, if not downright comical.” And yet, this is not a one-off.

Verone's original nose and mouth changed shape... four times!

The Louvre has its own cautionary tales. In 2010, a restoration of Veronese’s Supper at Emmaus went so awry that the nose of a central figure was altered, leaving the composition unbalanced and emotionally off-kilter. Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne fared no better. Overzealous cleaning stripped away layers of grime—but also glazes with nuances of light, shadow, and expression that only Leonardo could have painted. The two top art restorers in France, Ségolène Bergeon Langle and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, quit the project in an act of protest. They claimed the solvents were too aggressive and applied without adequate testing.

Even Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling has been criticized: the 1980s cleaning removed centuries of natural patina, leaving the frescoes vibrant but arguably alien to the artist’s original vision, by removing facial features that had been painted a secco.

And let’s not forget the extremes: the Spanish fresco Ecce Homo, lovingly “restored” by an amateur in 2012, became an internet sensation as “Monkey Christ” or "Potato Jesus", a cautionary tale of what happens when restoration meets ignorance. While professional institutions would never allow such a blatant disaster (one hopes), the principle is the same: without true painting skill, restorers risk transforming masterpieces into caricatures.

Here’s the problem: restoration is often treated as a science, but it’s also an art. You can understand chemistry, solvents, and varnishes until you’re blue in the face, but if you cannot blend a shadow, balance a composition, or capture a subtle expression, you are not qualified to intervene in a masterpiece. The tools of science can prevent some of its decay—but they cannot protect the soul of a painting if it gets visually deformed.

What happened to the eyes during the cleaning of this fresco at the Sistine Chapel?

The solution is obvious. Restorers must learn to paint. They must practice the techniques of the masters they are preserving, understand how colors interact, and feel the brush in their own hands. Institutions should foster collaboration between conservators and skilled artists that had adequate classical training, ensuring that every stroke added—or removed—honors the original intent.

The message is urgent. Every poorly executed restoration is not just a mistake; it’s a theft of history, a distortion of artistic intent, a permanent scar on our cultural heritage. As we care about the masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci, Veronese, della Francesca, and Michelangelo, then we must demand that restorers know the art of painting itself. Anything less risks gradually turning our artistic treasures into cartoons, and our history into a joke.

Because at the end of the day, a restorer who cannot paint is like a musician who cannot play: they might know the notes, but they cannot make the music come alive.

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