Latest news with #EcceHomo
Metro
2 days ago
- General
- Metro
Work to fix ‘botched' restoration of Virgin Mary statue leaves her ‘even worse'
Spanish churchgoers have been left dismayed after a historical Virgin Mary statue which suffered 'botched' restoration work has returned from an emergency touch-up looking even more bizarre. The Macarena, a lifesized 17-century wooden effigy at the basilica of the same name in Seville, is considered a national treasure in the country. A routine restoration in June saw her take on a distinctly 'glamorous' look which sparked a protest of hundreds of outraged worshippers outside the basilica. Her eyelashes were lengthened to a point resembling false lashes, her skin was repainted paler and less swarthy, and various aspects of her dress and jewellery were changed. Worshippers told local media her facial expression 'completely changed' as a result, leaving her looking like a 'poor copy' of the original. One accused the lead restorer, 85-year-old Francisco Arquillo Torres, of 'murdering' the Macarena. Up Next The Brotherhood of the Macarena shared a lengthy statement asking for 'forgiveness for the moral and devotional damage' caused by the work. The church closed and reopened on June 21 after having the restorers shorten the statue's eyelashes to correct an 'undesired effect'. Technicians from the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH) were called in to supervise the process. But the new version immediately drew complaints from both churchgoers and officials on the church's board who thought it looked even worse. Jorge Pulgar Salgado, 35, a member of the church brotherhood, told the New York Times his first thought was: 'Mother, what happened to you?' One worshipper told Spanish newspaper El Pais: 'Her facial expression has completely changed. It pains me deeply to say it, but she looks like a poor copy of the original.' The restorers met again that night but changed her expression even more. Over the coming weeks anger built up among the congregation and other residents of Seville who saw photos on social media. At the end of the month the church leaders called a gathering of 1,800 brothers to church and apologised before announcing the statue would be withdrawn for major restorations. A leading figure from the IAPH suggested the restorers had bungled their work but that the statue had 'deeper' problems include a possible insect infestation and a crack across the Virgin's face. The latest restoration began last week and could last three months, according to sources who spoke to Spanish newspaper El Pais. 'Monkey Christ' and other botched statue restorations The Macarena's restoration has been likened to the infamous repainting of a painting of Christ in northern Spain – although arguably not quite as bad. The fresco was dubbed 'Monkey Christ' after 82-year-old restorer Cecilia Giménez left the 'Ecce Homo' (Behold the Man) fresco in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy church in Borja with a distinctly simian look. Although the painting was in dire need of TLC, her brushwork completely stripped the original of human semblance, creating an ape-like face widely mocked around the world. Last year locals and restorers in another Spanish city were outraged after an 18th-century church underwent a major makeover which left its cherubs looking like creepy homunculi. Locals said their facial expressions looked unnatural and 'permanently surprised', while their lips glowed a lurid red against their now ghost-white skin. Un detalle de los angelotes. — SoriaPatrimonio (@soriapatrimonio) July 28, 2024 Earlier this year an 1820 statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus in a village in Poland met a similar fate. The Blessed Mother was left with unnatural yellowish skin, exaggerated features and almost no chin. 'It looks more like Bart Simpson than The Mother Mary,' one user commented on a Facebook post by renovators unveiling the new figure. Jesus was also repainted with the same yellowish hue while the clothing on his lower half now resembled grey joggers.
Metro
2 days ago
- General
- Metro
Work to fix 'botched' restoration of Virgin Mary statue leaves her 'even worse'
Spanish churchgoers have been left dismayed after a historical Virgin Mary statue which suffered 'botched' restoration work has returned from an emergency touch-up looking even more bizarre. The Macarena, a lifesized 17-century wooden effigy at the basilica of the same name in Seville, is considered a national treasure in the country. A routine restoration in June saw her take on a distinctly 'glamorous' look which sparked a protest of hundreds of outraged worshippers outside the basilica. Her eyelashes were lengthened to a point resembling false lashes, her skin was repainted paler and less swarthy, and various aspects of her dress and jewellery were changed. Worshippers told local media her facial expression 'completely changed' as a result, leaving her looking like a 'poor copy' of the original. One accused the lead restorer, 85-year-old Francisco Arquillo Torres, of 'murdering' the Macarena. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The Brotherhood of the Macarena shared a lengthy statement asking for 'forgiveness for the moral and devotional damage' caused by the work. The church closed and reopened on June 21 after having the restorers shorten the statue's eyelashes to correct an 'undesired effect'. Technicians from the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH) were called in to supervise the process. But the new version immediately drew complaints from both churchgoers and officials on the church's board who thought it looked even worse. Jorge Pulgar Salgado, 35, a member of the church brotherhood, told the New York Times his first thought was: 'Mother, what happened to you?' One worshipper told Spanish newspaper El Pais: 'Her facial expression has completely changed. It pains me deeply to say it, but she looks like a poor copy of the original.' The restorers met again that night but changed her expression even more. Over the coming weeks anger built up among the congregation and other residents of Seville who saw photos on social media. At the end of the month the church leaders called a gathering of 1,800 brothers to church and apologised before announcing the statue would be withdrawn for major restorations. A leading figure from the IAPH suggested the restorers had bungled their work but that the statue had 'deeper' problems include a possible insect infestation and a crack across the Virgin's face. The latest restoration began last week and could last three months, according to sources who spoke to Spanish newspaper El Pais. The Macarena's restoration has been likened to the infamous repainting of a painting of Christ in northern Spain – although arguably not quite as bad. The fresco was dubbed 'Monkey Christ' after 82-year-old restorer Cecilia Giménez left the 'Ecce Homo' (Behold the Man) fresco in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy church in Borja with a distinctly simian look. Although the painting was in dire need of TLC, her brushwork completely stripped the original of human semblance, creating an ape-like face widely mocked around the world. Last year locals and restorers in another Spanish city were outraged after an 18th-century church underwent a major makeover which left its cherubs looking like creepy homunculi. Locals said their facial expressions looked unnatural and 'permanently surprised', while their lips glowed a lurid red against their now ghost-white skin. Earlier this year an 1820 statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesusin a village in Poland met a similar fate. The Blessed Mother was left with unnatural yellowish skin, exaggerated features and almost no chin. 'It looks more like Bart Simpson than The Mother Mary,' one user commented on a Facebook post by renovators unveiling the new figure. Jesus was also repainted with the same yellowish hue while the clothing on his lower half now resembled grey joggers. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Former mayor dies trying to save town from wildfires sweeping southern Europe MORE: Smoke from apocalyptic wildfires in Spain and Portugal causing overcast UK skies MORE: Venetians are up in arms after tourists expose 'secret' €2 gondola rides
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Virgin Mary 'glow-up' sparks outrage in Spain after statue's makeover 'left her looking like she got botched plastic surgery'
The restoration of an iconic 17th century statue of the Virgin Mary has sparked outrage among worshippers who claim it left her looking like she got 'botched plastic surgery'. La Macarena - a beloved 5ft 9in wooden effigy of the Virgin Mary in Seville, Spain - was sent out from her shrine back in June for some regular touch ups. However when she came back, furious devotees said they no longer recognised her face. Her glow-up saw her gain longer eye lashes, a changes to the colour of her complexion and tweaks to her skin and nose. La Macarena's usual restorer, Francisco Arquillo Torres, 85, is now in disgrace and lying low following the botched procedure. He had offered to do just a general check up, to remove the stains in tear duct and inspect her eyelashes. But Seville's faithful and those who travel from across the world to catch a glimpse of the figure during the city's Holy Week parades were left demanding answers. 'Her facial expression has completely changed,' one outraged worshipper told Spanish newspaper El Pais. 'It pains me deeply to say it, but she looks like a poor copy of the original.' 'It was like she got makeup,' another added to The New York Times. 'And the Macarena cannot be made up!' One woman even accused Mr Arquillo, a professor at the University of Seville who has worked on the figure for years, of 'murdering' the Virgen live on television. The makeover sparked huge protests in Seville and also triggered instability within the Brotherhood of the Macarena - the group entrusted with protecting her image. Hundreds of angry worshippers gathered outside the Basilica de la Macarena in June calling for the resignation of the brotherhood's leader. The church quickly issued an apology and closed for half a day while last minute touch ups were carried out. And when it reopened, the effigy, which is paraded around Seville every year during the city's historic Semana Santa celebrations, had shorter eyelashes. However, the changes did little to quell the unrest - with worshippers saying her facial expression had got even worse. Pedro Manzano, the Seville's 'doctor' to the divine, has now been entrusted to fix La Macarena's botched makeover. 'It's a big responsibility, there's nothing more dangerous than this job,' Manzano told The Times. 'If people don't like what you do, they can come at you on the street.' Nevertheless it is expected to be months before La Macarena reappears above the Basilica in Seville. The religious icon's controversial makeover has been likened to the botched art restoration of a painting of Jesus Christ, which resulted in the artwork being dubbed: 'Monkey Christ'. In 2012, Cecilia Giménez, 82, decided to touch up the 'Ecce Homo' (Behold The Man) fresco in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy church in Borja, northern Spain. However, her brushwork completely obliterated the face of Jesus transforming the painting into what locals described as more like a hedgehog or hairy monkey rather than Jesus. It also comes after a Polish village was left outraged earlier this year after a botched renovation of a 1820 shrine of Jesus and the Virgin Mary left the Blessed Mother looking like a 'Simpsons' cartoon character. Once described by experts as 'tall and slender', the Virgin Mary statue just outside the village of Stuszionka now has oversized mitten-like hands, exaggerated eyes and a crooked frown accentuated by bright red lipstick. The figure of Jesus, meanwhile, appears to be wearing grey underpants, and both figures have been repainted with an unnatural yellow hue. Posting a photo on Facebook, the Conservator of Monuments said: 'A rather rare depiction of the Virgin Mary looking upwards. 'Another example of good intentions... Let's hope that in the near future this valuable object will receive professional conservation, because it deserves it very much.' It added that the unknown restorer had also painted over the shrine's original German inscription, replacing it with the markings 'VII 2024, JC 2,' written in what appears to be a black marker pen. Locals vented their fury with the botch job, with some describing it as 'desecration'. Posting on social media, one outraged viewer said: 'The times of the greatest barbarity and ignorance of Spirit and Reason have come.' Another commented: 'I would take a risk and notify the prosecutor's office about offending religious feelings. Because this is nothing more than an example of desecrating an object of religious worship.'
Local Spain
28-06-2025
- General
- Local Spain
Inside Spain: 'Not my Virgin' and Booking.com crackdown
It may not be Holy Week in Seville, but the Virgin Mary is the talk of the town currently. That's because a restoration of an effigy of their patron Virgin - La Virgen de la Macarena - is not up to the standards of locals, who they say has been excessively beautified or 'yassified'. Yassification, for those not in the know (we weren't either) involves editing someone or something in a photo so that they are almost unrecognisable, with unrealistic beauty features. To be clear, this isn't a repeat of the notorious Ecce Homo restoration from a decade ago, where a fresco of Jesus Christ left the Son of God looking like a mix between a monkey and a character from a horror movie. Some heavier eyeliner yes, a bit more rouge perhaps, more contoured eyebrows even, but to the untrained eye not a botched job that deserves such rampant condemnation. Then again, who are we to judge? The fervent adoration Sevillanos have for their Macarena is deeply ingrained in their character, and if there has been such a furore over the restoration job perhaps it's for a reason. You only have to witness locals' weeping during Semana Santa as her effigy is carried through the streets to understand how important La Virgen is to them. Seville's Governing Board of the Macarena Brotherhood has issued a statement apologising to all its members and devotees for any "moral and devotional harm" that may have been caused by the restoration of María Santísima de la Esperanza Macarena, which was meant to improve her image after years of damage caused by candle smoke. Her original gaze, described as a mix of joy and sorrow, has been brought back, the 'fake eyelashes' ditched, the droopy eye lifted. Sevillanos are breathing a sigh of relief. To an outsider, especially those with Christian beliefs, the events of the past days showcase how different religious devotion can be here, and that Spanish or Andalusian Catholicism very much has its own idiosyncrasies that not all of us can fully understand. This comes after Spain's leftist government also ordered Airbnb to take down illegal 66,000 holiday let ads off its platform last May. For anyone who's used this comes as no surprise, as nowadays there are just as many if not more private property owners advertising their holiday homes on the site as there are hotels. For those hoping holiday lets in Spain to disappear as a means of addressing the country's housing crisis, the clampdown is unlikely to make much of a difference, although it still sends out a message to unlicenced holiday let owners. The Amsterdam-based platform has said that the 4,093 non-compliant adverts represent "less than two percent" of its 200,000 properties in Spain and that it had always collaborated with the authorities to regulate the short-term rental sector. Most of them were located in the Canary Islands, one of the regions hardest hit by overtourism and spiralling property prices and rents. "We're making progress in the fight against a speculative model that expels people from their neighbourhoods and violates the right to a home," far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy wrote on social network Bluesky. As positive as it may be to know that Spanish authorities are taking the rampant proliferation of tourism apartments a bit more seriously, it's still a drop in the ocean. It's also worth noting that it's not a black-white matter, there are thousands of people who rely on the revenue they make from their second home to get by in Spain. If anyone should be targeted, it's the big corporations that are buying up apartments and turning them into more remunerative Airbnb-style lets, reducing the stock of long-term rental properties and residential properties to buy. An article in Spain's Cadena Ser news website recently pointed out that 4 in 10 tourist flats in the country don't show their licence and that 'nothing happens'. In essence, town halls turn a blind eye because they don't their neighbours and/or voters to be negatively affected by the clampdown. "There's no will because they don't want to upset those who work in this field. Spain thrives on tourism, and hotels are no longer able to cope with the dramatic increase in demand in recent years," Alejandro Inurrieta, academic at Madrid's Complutense University, told Cadena Ser. However, this could be about to change in the coming days, as on July 1st all short-term and temporary lets in the country have to register with the Spanish government.
Scoop
19-06-2025
- Science
- Scoop
How Much Of The Past Should We Bring Back To Life?
There is an incredible amount of scientific effort put toward understanding the past and bringing some of it back to life. Everyone agrees it's nice to have some old structures around—like the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China—but what about the living creatures we once lived alongside? With recent advances in genetic technology, de-extinction may be a possibility—but should we be doing it? Several scientific disciplines are currently geared specifically to provide us with realistic insights into what life would have been like in the past. Archaeology in particular has rank after rank of specialists tuned toward reconstructing the built environment—monuments, houses, caves, and even whole towns—and the ways people would have lived in those environments. We conduct these experiments to understand the choices our species has made as we evolved into the cultures and societies that exist today, and we conserve the walls and temples of our pasts because they mean something to the people who visit them. We have highly trained conservators who carefully rebuild, brick by brick, the great Mesopotamian temples of 5,500 years ago (alongside conservators who are not as well-trained but whose good intentions outstrip their abilities, as seen with the case of the Ecce Homo reconstruction in Borja, Spain). There are also an extraordinary number of experimental archaeology projects aimed at unraveling even the most intangible mysteries of the past—helping us see that the beautiful Paleolithic art in caves like Lascaux may have been an early form of animation when seen under a torch, or that making some stone tools requires special cognitive abilities. Advances in technology make the reconstruction of the past increasingly realistic. But what if we could recreate the living environment of our evolutionary past? What if we could bring back species that haven't been seen since the last Ice Age? This is exactly the question that a major new research effort is asking. The Colossal project is a private enterprise that wants to use advances in genetics to attempt the 'de-extinction' or 'resurrection' of an iconic Ice Age animal: the woolly mammoth. De-extinction has certainly grabbed imaginations (not to mention headlines), but as research funding is squeezed by economic conditions around the globe, scientists must ask themselves: what will this achieve? For Colossal, there are clear benefits. There is the wow factor of creating a cold-adapted elephant that has not existed for thousands of years, and of course, there is the potential of developing new and, possibly, incredibly lucrative bioscience tech based on modifying genetics. Perhaps these technologies could save animals from extinction and bring back the past, even if many scientists are concerned about the prospect due to ethical and technical reasons. However, as archaeology has learned, bringing back the past is never as straightforward as it seems. Something as obvious as preserving 1,000-year-old ruins for future generations to marvel at becomes less clear-cut when future generations might need to build their own monuments and walls (or even just roads). How much of the past should we bring back? The debate over how much of the Stonehenge prehistoric landscape should be sacrificed to build a tunnel for one of the most congested roads in England has shown that even trained professionals can't agree on what is 'enough' of the past to save. This makes for some tricky questions for those who want to rebuild and recreate the past. What will happen if we really do succeed in the 'de-extinction' of a woolly mammoth—an animal that will be born alone into a world that it is not adapted to? Will it help us save the elephants that are under threat today? Colossal is putting a lot of effort into elephant conservation, but how will creating a genetically cold-adapted elephant address the habitat loss that has led our big-bodied species to face extinction? Would we be better off spending our research efforts on recreating the environments of the past, or the charismatic animals who once roamed them? What parts of the past to preserve—and which to leave behind—remains a complicated tangle of ethical, practical, and even philosophical quandaries. The toppling of a historic statue of a slave trader into Bristol harbor in 2021 by outraged citizens is a clear example of how governments, citizens, and professionals are still grappling with how we bring the past into the present. As technology advances, we will be confronted with even thornier issues—like the ethics of bringing animals or even people back to life. If we cannot agree on the morality of preserving the past as a cold metal statue, how will we resolve the question surrounding the consequences of bringing something that lives and breathes back into the world? Author Bio: Brenna R. Hassett, PhD, is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. In addition to researching the effects of changing human lifestyles on the human skeleton and teeth in the past, she writes for a more general audience about evolution and archaeology, including the Times (UK) top 10 science book of 2016 Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, and her most recent book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood. She is also a co-founder of TrowelBlazers, an activist archive celebrating the achievements of women in the 'digging' sciences.
