Yet again, Spain is getting slammed for a ridiculous restoration of historic church artworks, this time for a new paint job at an 18th-century church in the city of Soria.
The Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón church dates to 1725 and enjoys protected status under the Spanish government. Now, its Baroque and Rococo interior appears to have lost much of its historic charm with a garish new color scheme that left sculpted figures looking downright cartoon-like.
The local heritage group Soria Patrimonio was the first to point out the botched restoration. It shared before and after photographs on X, formerly known as Twitter, asking: “What have they done to the Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón?”
“We’ve ended up with the decorative elements being outlined and the cherubs—which were white before—becoming caricature-like,” Soria Patrimonio told Spanish online newspaper El Confidential. “The repainting of a church such as this one falls outside the good intervention practices that apply to buildings with heritage value.”
The heritage group believes that the work was carried out without the preliminary studies typically required for historic restoration.
Francisco Manuel Espejo, president of Spain’s Professional Association of Restorers and Conservators (ACRE), was even more damning in his assessment of the church’s controversial makeover.
“This wasn’t a failed restoration,” he told the Guardian. “A restoration—successful or otherwise—is carried out by a qualified, official restorer. This was an attack on heritage that wasn’t carried out by a restorer or a conservator.”
Elías García Martínez, restored by Cecilia Giménez, Ecce Homo (ca. 1930/2012).
Ridiculous restorations have become something of a sore spot for Spain since 2012, when a senior citizen named Cecilia Giménez went viral for what became known as “Beast Jesus.” She did such a terrible job painting over a fresco of Jesus that the resulting “Monkey Christ” became a meme and drove waves of tourists to the otherwise-obscure town of Borja.
The country also faced mockery for the Disney-ish makeover of the statue of St. George in Navarre’s Church of San Miguel de Estella in 2018 and a Baroque Virgin Mary painting that underwent not one but two absurdly bad renovation attempts in 2020.
A ridiculous restoration led to these absurdly cartoonish cherubs at Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón church in Soria, Spain. Photo courtesy of Soria Patrimonio.
“There needs to be multidisciplinary teams to avoid these kinds of efforts,” ACRE said in a statement issued after the most recent offense. “There needs to be weekly inspections to keep track of the works and to prevent invasive and disrespectful alterations.”
It’s unclear who is responsible for letting yet another absurd restoration fail come to pass. The Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón church reportedly isn’t significant enough to fall under the protection of the Castilla y León regional government.
“All I can tell you,” a diocese of Osma-Soria spokesperson told the Guardian, “is that the works on the church were carried out with the required permissions, and that some people like the end result, and some don’t.”