A Sunday sermon in the form of Potato Christ, art history’s favourite botched restoration, and the lesson it can teach us about making mistakes. The makeover-gone-wrong was, you might remember, the handiwork of eighty-one-year-old Cecilia Giménez, a resident of Borja in Spain, who accidentally transformed a local church’s fresco of Christ (painted by Elías García Martínez in 1930) into a monk-like version of Mr Potato Head. The before and after shots of the attempted restoration went viral, causing initial distress for, and then an onslaught of tourists to, the small Spanish town, finds Louise Benson in her musing on the subject for Elephant. The result was a surprisingly uplifting cautionary tale about “human folly, well-meaning initiative and big dreams”. Read the full story here.
