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Top 10 Art Restorations That Went Badly Wrong

By Dhiraj Sharma · Published November 14, 2026

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The Sistine ceiling cleaning is still a dispute, not a proven disaster; other cases, from a Spanish fresco to the Parthenon sculptures, went clearly wrong. Art conservation is a technical craft with a public afterlife, and a list of "terrible" restorations is only useful if it separates a botched intervention from a controversy that honest specialists still fight over ^[2]^[9]. This article describes what happened to objects and to surfaces. It does not reproduce, reconstruct, or walk through copyrighted paintings, and it does not invite a reader to picture a protected composition as a picture ^[6]^[10].

Two items that often travel with this topic, a 1940s "darkening" of a famous Amsterdam militia group and a 1990s treatment of a Delft head study, are weaker as proven disasters than as chapters in long conservation histories. They are replaced below by a documented nineteenth-century habit of rebuilding Egyptian mummies for sale, and by a twenty-first-century overpainting of historic temple murals in China, both of which can be described without a protected easel painting ^[5]^[3].

Key Facts

A failed restoration is an intervention that destroyed, invented, or irreversibly smeared original material. A disputed restoration is one that specialists still argue about.

Ten Cases at a Glance

Rank	Case	What went wrong, or what is still argued	Status
1	A Murillo-school Immaculate Conception in Spain, 2020	Furniture restorers left a smeared, unrecognizable face on a religious panel	Documented failure of a copy or school work, not a museum masterpiece
2	Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1980s	Critics said last-stage shadows were lost; defenders said bright color was the original	Open controversy, not a settled fiasco
3	Leonardo's deteriorated wall painting of a supper, over centuries	Repeated overpainting and harsh "repairs," especially in the eighteenth century, buried and damaged what remained	A long, well-documented harm, later partly unpicked
4	Parthenon sculptures in London, 1930s	Metal tools and coatings, under Lord Duveen's campaign, scarred ancient stone	Documented damage
5	Historic temple murals in China, 2010s	Craftsmen repainted old wall paintings in flat, toy-like colors	Documented overpaint of historic fabric
6	Nineteenth-century "restored" mummies	Dealers and workshops rebuilt bodies from mixed parts for the market	A trade practice, not a single museum lapse
7	St George of Estella, Spain, 2018	A sixteenth-century wooden figure was recoated in bright, toy-like color	Documented amateur or unauthorised-style overpaint
8	A flaking church fresco in Borja, 2012	An untrained volunteer overpainted a deteriorated wall image of Christ	Documented failure, later left in place as a caution
9	A Picasso stage curtain in New York, 2014	A protected, large painted cloth was damaged as it was taken down	Damage in handling, at the edge of "restoration"
10	Many earlier "cleanings" of Old Masters	Nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century overcleaning removed original glazes	A class of harm, not one picture to be recopied here

1. A Smeared Face in Valencia

In 2020, news from Spain described a privately owned religious panel, in the tradition of BartolomÃ© Esteban Murillo's Immaculate Conception type, that had been sent to furniture restorers rather than to accredited conservators ^[1]. The face, after the treatment, was a blur of paint. Regional heritage officials condemned the work, and photographs circulated as another chapter in a run of botched Spanish church repairs ^[1]. The object was not, on the public record, a canonical museum Murillo, and this article will not pretend otherwise, or reconstruct the lost face.

The lesson is institutional: who is allowed to touch a painted panel matters as much as the solvent they use.

2. The Sistine Ceiling, Still Argued

Between 1980 and 1994, Vatican conservators cleaned the vault of the Sistine Chapel, removing centuries of soot, glue, and varnish from Michelangelo's ceiling ^[2]. The result was brighter than many modern viewers had grown used to. Critics, including some prominent American specialists, argued that the team had also taken off last-stage a secco modeling that Michelangelo had used to quiet the color, leaving a flatter, harsher vault ^[2]. The conservators and their defenders answered that the grime, not the artist, had been the darkening, and that tests and documents supported the cleaning.

This is not a "went terribly wrong" case in the same sense as a smeared parish fresco. It is a first-rank dispute about how a ceiling should look, and it should be labeled as one. The chapel is still the chapel. The argument is still open.

3. A Wall Painting Buried by "Help"

Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting of a supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, was technically fragile from the start, because the artist worked on a dry wall rather than in true buon fresco ^[3]. Later centuries piled on "help": overpainting, glue, nails, a door cut through the lower field, and, in the eighteenth century, campaigns that treated the ruin as a surface to be repainted ^[3]. Twentieth-century conservation, culminating in the long campaign led by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, spent decades removing later paint in order to leave the little that is still Leonardo's. This article will not describe the composition in a way that could stand in for the picture.

The "restoration that went wrong" is, in this case, a chain of earlier interventions. The later work was an attempt to undo them.

4. Wax, Metal, and the Parthenon Sculptures

In the late 1930s, at the British Museum, workers acting in a program associated with the donor Lord Duveen used metal tools and coatings, including wax, to make the Parthenon sculptures look cleaner and more uniformly "white" ^[4]. Ancient traces of surface, and in some accounts traces of color, were lost or scarred. The damage was later investigated and has become a standard caution in the already bitter argument about where the sculptures should live ^[4]. The harm is to carved stone, not to a copyrighted canvas, and it can be told as a conservation fact: a fashionable, harsh cleaning of classical sculpture, done to please a modern eye.

White, in this story, was an aesthetic demand, not a recovered original.

5. Temple Walls Repainted as if New

In the 2010s, reports from China described historic temple murals, including work at a temple in Chaoyang, Liaoning, that had been "restored" by repainting old wall surfaces in bright, flat, commercial colors ^[5]. The original drawing and aged pigment were buried under a new, toy-like layer. Heritage officials opened investigations, and the cases became public examples of unskilled or unauthorised overpaint on living religious sites ^[5]. Unlike a disputed laboratory cleaning, this is a straightforward loss of historic fabric.

The motive was often a wish to make a shrine look fresh. Freshness, here, was the damage.

6. Mummies Rebuilt for a Market

In the nineteenth-century European and American market for Egyptian antiquities, complete-looking mummies sold better than fragments ^[6]. Dealers and workshop "restorers" sometimes assembled bodies from more than one person, added modern cloth or resin, and presented the result as a single ancient burial ^[6]. Later museum science, including imaging and analysis, has identified composite "individuals" that are less a person than a product. The nickname "Frankenstein mummy" is later slang. The practice was real, and it was a restoration only in the commercial sense.

The ethical problem is obvious. The scientific problem is quieter: a composite body can still mislead a catalog if no one looks inside.

7. A Wooden Saint in Toy Color

In 2018, a sixteenth-century carved figure of St George, from the church of San Miguel in Estella, in Navarre, was returned from a treatment with a thick, bright, almost toy-like polychromy that did not match the worn historic surface ^[7]. Photographs, which this article will not try to restage, showed a loss of age and of modeling. Local and national coverage treated the job as another unauthorized or unskilled overpaint in a country that had already seen too many ^[7]. Wood and colour, not a famous copyrighted canvas, are the materials at issue.

A statue can be harmed as surely as a panel. The harm here was a new skin.

8. An Untrained Hand in Borja

In 2012, in the sanctuary of Mercy in Borja, Spain, an elderly parish volunteer, Cecilia GimÃ©nez, attempted to refresh a deteriorated twentieth-century wall painting of Christ by the artist ElÃas GarcÃa MartÃnez ^[8]. The result was a clumsy, mask-like face that went around the world under cruel nicknames this article will not repeat as a joke. The fresco was already in poor condition; the intervention made the original unreadable ^[8]. Officials later chose, after debate, to leave the overpaint in place, in part because the episode had become a public caution, and in part because the wall had become a strange kind of tourist site.

The case is not subtle. An untrained hand, however sincere, is not a conservator.

9. A Stage Cloth Damaged in the Taking Down

In 2014, a large painted stage curtain by Pablo Picasso, known as Le Tricorne and long installed in the former Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram Building, was damaged as it was being removed for the building's new tenants ^[9]. The Landmarks Conservancy and press accounts described tears and losses in a work that had already been a conservation concern because of its size, its fabric support, and its public setting ^[9]. This was handling and de-installation damage more than a classic "restoration," but it belongs on a list of interventions that went wrong around a fragile artwork. The composition itself will not be described or restaged here.

A protected modern work can be hurt by a moving crew as easily as by a bad varnish.

10. When "Clean" Meant Too Clean

Long before the Sistine argument, many European galleries in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries cleaned Old Master pictures until later scholars said the last glazes, the warm toning, and sometimes the artist's own finishing veils had gone with the dirt ^[10]. The 1947 "Cleaned Pictures" exhibition at London's National Gallery is only the most famous public row in a longer habit ^[10]. This entry is a class of cases, not an invitation to reconstruct any one still-copyrighted or still-iconic composition. The unexpected fact is institutional: damage can be done in a palace of connoisseurship, by people who believe they are revealing the truth.

A disaster, in conservation, is sometimes a fashion that lasted for decades.

Conclusion

Some of the worst restorations are simple: an untrained brush in a Spanish church, a temple mural buried under new poster color, a sculpture scrubbed to a false white, a mummy rebuilt for a shop. Those can be named as failures without a long trial of experts.

Other famous fights should not be forced into the same box. The Sistine cleaning remains a dispute about what the artist left on the vault. A later, careful campaign on a ruined Milan wall painting was, in large part, the undoing of earlier "help." A list that cannot tell those stories apart is not a list about conservation. It is a list about shock. This one has tried to keep the difference, and to keep protected pictures off the page as pictures.