When things go... smash!
Short post - Museum accidents and dodgy restorations
Spare a thought for the four-year-old child who accidently smashed a 3500-year-old jar at Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel last week. The incident joins an illustrious list of historical object-based accidents and fails. In 2015, a very similar incident happened at Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete in 2015. This time a tourist tripped and grabbed onto a 4000-year-old vase as she fell. The vase was reported to have been entirely smashed.
In 2020, an Austrian tourist accidently broke three toes off a 200-year-old plaster cast model of Antonio Canova’s statue of Paolina Bonaparte at the Gipsoteca Museum, in northern Italy.
My most favourite incident isn’t necessarily an accident, rather more of a botching. It’s the ‘restoration’ of the fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, Spain. According to reports, an eighty-year-old parishioner noticed that one of the frescoes, which was originally painted by ElÃas GarcÃa MartÃnez nearly a century ago, was flaking so decided to restore the work herself. The result is one of the funniest and most infamous restorations in modern history.
Another jarring restoration was that of statue of Santa Barbara at Brazil’s Santa Cruz da Barra Chapel. Almost a decade before Barbie hit cinemas, restorers in 2012 gave Santa Barbara a full Barbie glow-up, complete with eyeliner and thin brows.
Have you had any near misses? Do you have a favourite museum or restoration faux pas?
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