Spain... Why Is It Always Spain?

AAARGH! It's happened again!

This is a closeup of The Immaculate Conception by Baroque artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo. 

Recently a private art collector in Valencia, Spain paid an anstonishingly low $1,355 to have the priceless painting cleaned and restored. Inexplicably, instead of taking it to a museum or a professional artist, he gave the job to a furniture cleaner (?).

Welp, you definitely get what you pay for in this life. This is how the furniture guy "restored" the painting. Yee-ikes!

One would think after a botched job like this that the collector would have learned his lesson and taken what was left of the painting to someone who knew what they were doing.

Nope! For reasons known only to him, he took it back to the furniture restorer and insisted he make it right. This was his second attempt. Jesus Jetskiing Christ! That's worse than the first one! Somebody make it stop!

Of course this horrific incident is similar to the infamous bumbled restoration of the Ecco Homo fresco in the church of Santuario de Misericondia, located in— you guessed it— Spain!

Spain... why is it always Spain?

The Ecco Homo image was already in dire shape when an amateur (no sh*t!) painter named Cecilia Giminez decided to try and "fix" it back in 2013. Oddly enough the botched attempt proved far more popular than the original painting, and the church regularly gets around 40,000 visitors a year who want a glimpse at the "Monkey Christ."

Sadly, I don't think the same will happen with The Immaculate Conception debacle.

The reason this sort of thing tends to happen so often in Spain is due to the country's lack of laws governing the restoration of priceless art. As of right now, ANYONE in Spain can try their hand at fixing any piece of art! Conservation experts are currently lobbying the Spanish government for a new law preventing grandmas and furniture cleaners from ruining any more paintings.