4 Spanish Restoration Fails
¡Ay, caramba! In art restoration, good intentions don't always lead to good results.1. Anonymous, “Religious Sculptures” (c. 15th century)
A local tobacco shopkeeper took it upon herself to add some flair to the trio of 15th-century wooden sculptures using industrial enamel paint.
“I’m not a professional painter” Maria Luisa Menendez
The sculptures had been professionally restored just 15 years before but the parish priest apparently had given his blessing to the amateur.
2. Unknown, “Saint George” (c. 16th century)
This 500-year-old sculpture of Saint George was turned into a cartoon character after the church hired a local teacher for the job.
Re-restoring it cost $37,000! The church paid for the re-restoration to “somewhat” its original appearance.
3. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Copy of “The Immaculate Conception of El Escorial” (c. 17th century)
Spanish amateur restoration’s latest victim...
In 2020, an art collector paid $1,200 for a furniture restorer to clean up his copy of The Immaculate Conception of El Escorial.
He Made 2 Attempts. But the restorer only took it from worse to worser.
4. Elías García Martinez, “Ecce Homo (Monkey Christ)” (c. 1930)
Initially suspected as vandalism, the alterations were instead the creation of an 81-year-old parishioner.
“They didn’t let me finish” - Cecilia Giménez
Remarkably, this restoration turned into a notorious attraction, ultimately revitalizing the struggling economy of the small Spanish town. The Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja had around 46,000 visits between August and December 2012.
Spanish paintings:
Some voices in Spain are now calling for tighter rules for art restoration...
Why Museums Are the Ultimate First Date Hack.
Skip the awkward small talk over overpriced cocktails. Here's why a museum is your secret weapon for a memorable first date:
The Walking Advantage
Side-by-side walking eliminates the awkward face-to-face restaurant staredown. This positioning creates a more relaxed atmosphere where conversation can develop organically as you move through the space.
Instant Culture Points
Strolling through art and history shows you're cultured—without trying too hard. You don't need to be an expert; showing interest in something beyond Netflix and takeout speaks volumes about your curiosity and depth.
Built-in Conversation Starters
When words fail, point at any bizarre Renaissance baby and ask "Why does that infant have an eight-pack?" Instant ice-breaker. Art provides endless topics to discuss, from the sublime to the ridiculous, making those initial getting-to-know-you moments flow naturally.
Affordable Elegance
Cheaper than dinner and drinks, and definitely fancier than a coffee shop. Many museums have "pay what you wish" options or free admission days. You get all the sophistication without emptying your wallet.
Easy Exit
When you're done, you have a natural end to the date—or an easy excuse to keep going elsewhere if things are clicking. "I'm getting hungry after all that art appreciation. Want to grab a bite?" is a smooth transition if the chemistry is right.
Pro Tip
Download MuseMuse first. Because nothing kills the mood like pretending to understand medieval tapestries.
So You Think You Know the Rose?
By now, we've all heard that the rose is a symbol of love. Red equals passion, white equals purity, yellow equals infidelity, according to the Victorians. But the rose's symbolic résumé stretches back far longer than Valentine's Day panic-buying, and its career has been nothing short of exhausting.
The flower dates back to at least the Oligocene epoch, some thirty-three to twenty-three million years ago. That's a long time to maintain brand consistency.
The Ancient World: When Men Wore Rose Perfume
In Ancient Greece, roses were linked with Aphrodite, Eros, and Dionysus. The Romans went completely rose-mad. They used roses in their cuisines, cosmetic products, and as ornament in their frescos. They even held an annual festival called Rosalia each May.
Here's a delightful tidbit: roses were awarded to men for great acts and virtues, and it was men who wore perfume made from roses. Before roses became the domain of bridal bouquets and apology arrangements, they were status symbols for Roman men.
The Romans also had a custom of hanging a rose over confidential meetings, giving us "sub rosa" (under the rose) for secret discussions. The next time you see a rose carved into a ceiling, know that it's not just decorative. Henry VIII ran with this idea.
The Middle Ages: When Color-Coding Got Biblical
Christianity took the rose's pagan credentials and adapted them. Red roses became symbolic of Christ's blood and martyrs, white roses of the Immaculate Conception. The Virgin Mary collected rose-related epithets: Rose of Heaven, Mystical Rose, the Sinless Rose Without Thorns. There was a medieval belief that in Paradise before the Fall, roses had no thorns.
The rose symbol became so powerful that it led to the creation of the rosary and other devotional prayers in Christianity.
Meanwhile, the thirteenth-century French poem Romance of the Rose took the metaphor in a different direction. The rose personifies the woman, and his plucking of the rose represents his conquest of her.
The Wars of the Roses: Peak Rose
Between 1455 and 1485, your choice of rose: white for York, red for Lancaster, revealed your allegiance. The term "Wars of the Roses" wasn't coined until 1829, when Sir Walter Scott gave it the name.
When Henry VII ended the conflict, he married Elizabeth of York and created the Tudor Rose: five white petals in the centre for York surrounded by five red petals for Lancaster. The ultimate political merger, commemorated in floral form. The Tudor Rose was so ubiquitous in England that it appeared on the 20 pence coin from 1982 to 2008.
The Dutch Golden Age: Death and Roses
By the seventeenth century, Dutch painters had given the rose yet another layer of meaning: memento mori. Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life with a Skull, a Book, and Roses contrasted death with life's pleasures. This became known as vanitas painting—a reminder that everything beautiful eventually dies.
Rachel Ruysch, daughter of a botanist and the era's most prominent still-life painter, brought scientific precision to her rose paintings. She depicted thorns with precision, juxtaposing the fleshy texture of rose petals to the jagged edges of milk thistles. Her flowers were so botanically accurate they could have been used as field guides.
The Victorian Era: The Language Gets Complicated
The Victorians turned flower-giving into an elaborate code. In floriography, the Dog Rose conveyed 'Pleasure mixed with Pain'; the Moss Rose stood for 'Voluptuous Love'; the Musk Rose meant 'Capricious Beauty'. Yellow roses indicated 'Infidelity'. One imagines the social catastrophes from people not memorizing their floral dictionaries.
Modernism and Beyond
Georgia O'Keeffe blew roses up to wall-sized proportions. She wanted to celebrate their beauty and play on their cultural associations while shocking people into really looking at them.
Salvador Dalí frequently painted women with bouquets of roses in place of their heads. In his 1958 Meditative Rose, he places a formally perfect rose high in the sky, replacing the sun.
After millions of years and countless symbolic iterations, the rose remains the go-to flower for everything from weddings to funerals. Umberto Eco, in a postscript to The Name of the Rose, observed: "the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left."
The rose has been a symbol of love, death, purity, sexuality, secrecy, politics, religion, and beauty for so long that it's become useful for any occasion, meaningful for all of them, and specific to none.
And yet we keep buying them, painting them, writing about them. Perhaps that's the rose's greatest trick: after all this time, after all these meanings piled on top of each other, it's still just a flower. Beautiful, temporary, and covered in thorns. The rest is just us, projecting.
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