Amateur artist sued for botched sculpture restoration
Spanish amateur artist María Luisa Menéndez is being sued for failing to preserve historical artifacts after she painted a sculpture of the Baby Jesus and Mary in garish colours.
Most art needs to be updated to fit in with the current era, especially if it will be on display in a public area, but this latest incident out of Spain proves that all paintings or sculptures of scenes out of religious texts should be left just as they are.
Shop keeper and amateur artist María Luisa Menéndez remarked that her local church's sculpture of the Virgin Mary, Baby Jesus, and St. Anne looked "awful" and needed to be painted to look better. The priest could not have known how disastrous the result would be.
María used bright colours to paint the robes of the three religious figures, completing the look with thin eyebrows and pink lipstick for Mary. The new look of the sculpture was a shock to the professional art conservator who had worked on the piece before, but María claims she "painted them as best as [she] could using what [she] thought were the right colors. [sic]"
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María stands by her actions, saying she is "not a professional artist" and only wanted to do the work because she believed the sculpture "really needed painting".
Her bold and colourful reinterpretation of the religious scene has brought confusion and anger to those who lay their eyes on the sculpture.