On September 19, 2017, a major earthquake hit central Mexico— exactly 32 years to the day of the devastating 1985 quake in Mexico City. The 2017 earthquake resulted in 370 fatalities, thousands of injuries, and the collapse of many buildings.
Among the material loses, one of the most notable, and symbolic, was the fall of the historic statue of Hope (La Esperanza), part of a trio of sculptures Fe, Esperanza y Caridad (Faith, Hope and Charity) that sat atop the clocktower of Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral. The sculptures were designed by the renowned Spanish architect and sculptor Manuel Tolsá, known for designing many important neoclassic buildings in Mexico; Tolsá completed the statuary work of the cathedral’s cupola and façade in 1813.
The statue of Hope, in accordance to Christian symbolism, is represented holding an anchor, which relates to a quote in the New Testament (Hebrews 6:19: “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil”). The national patrimony conservation department of Mexico’s INAH (National Institute of Archaeology and History) took on the job of restoring Hope, whose head had been shattered due to its fall.
Just two weeks ago, after six years of hard restoration work, the reconstructed sculpture was finally unveiled, and it immediately caused a second earthquake— this one of a PR and social media nature. Immediately everyone observed that the face of Hope bears little to no resemblance to the original Tolsá sculpture, with an elongated nose, shortened forehead, enlarged cheekbones and wide mouth. The INAH was faced with its own Ecce Homo moment (referring to the viral conservation botching in a church in Borja, Spain of a 1930 fresco representation of Jesus Christ by an amateur artist and parishioner). Given that the presidential elections in Mexico are scarcely three months away, the story was used by the critics of president López Obrador and his party, Morena, to illustrate the government’s incompetence; a leading critic was a conservation group that has campaigned to restore another Tolsá monument, an equestrian statue of Charles IV known as “El Caballito”, on Tacuba Street. The defenders of the statue in social media argued that the caucasian features of the original sculpture are anti-nationalist and a more indigenous-looking face was appropriate. However, La Esperanza’s new elongated nose and high cheek bones are hardly representative of any indigenous mesoamerican culture; they rather resemble a northern Tibetan facial structure. The new Esperanza’s visage also looks rather gloomy and dejected, almost as if she knew about the public’s disapproval. The trending nickname for the effigy became La Desesperanza (Hopelesness).
Amidst this restoration PR crisis, Arturo Balandrano, director of the Monuments and Sites Division of the Culture Ministry, and Marina Straulino, who was in charge of the restoration project, did their best to defend the indefensible, first arguing that they worked diligently to put the piece back together and replace its missing parts. When this explanation clearly proved to be insufficient, they went even further into territories that advanced a radical theory of conservation.
Balandrano said that the critics missed the fact that “restoration is an art, and there will always be those who like a Picasso and those who don’t”. He took exception with the idea that restorers should follow the “style of Tolsá”, retorting: “it is a comment that contributes nothing”. When asked if they attempted to make an exact replica, he replied, “it can’t be done, we would not be able to do it, we are not Tolsá.”
But then Straulino went further in the defense, making the perplexing statement that to reproduce the exact face of La Esperanza was not only impossible but “it would have been a forgery”.
I hope you are thoroughly enjoying these arguments as much as I am, and are as excited as me to unpack the radical theoretical implications of the aesthetic concepts that Balandrano and Straulino put forth.
I am reminded of an amateur artist that once a friend of mine asked me as a favor to advise. Her paintings were hopeless in every respect: composition, draftsmanship, color. I started gently pointing out the areas for potential improvement, but she had a objection at the ready to each of my suggestions. She didn’t have enough time to finish the works because of family distractions; the art supply store did not have the right materials, and so forth—always someone else’s fault. In the case of the excuses created by the Esperanza conservators, we the public are the ones at fault due to our unsophisticated expectation that a restored piece should look anything like the original, and our inability to understand that the accurate reconstruction of artworks constitutes fraud and that the labor of the restorer falls more in the realm of artistic expression and not in the one of exact science.
This view would make actual, professional conservators both laugh and cringe. The art conservation field is rooted in science because it relies on principles of chemistry, physics and biology. Art conservators also do substantial art historical research, but their primary focus is investigative, often doing detective work, employing methods like X-rays and digital spectroscopy in order to understand the compositions of materials of certain works on a microscopic scale, which allows one to piece together crucial aspects of the process and materials, up to molecular precision, of a work.
Visiting a conservation lab in a major museum is a fascinating experience, and is enormously attractive to the general public who can learn a lot about how art works are made. Over my many years working alongside conservators, I have always been fascinated by their knowledge and views. Art conservation shares, with medicine, a Hippocratic-like, “do no harm” oath: never do something to a work that is not reversible. This follows the logic that future conservation science will be better and should have the ability to replace and improve, if necessary, efforts from previous generations. It is also something that is learned from experience. For example, a little known fact about European painting museum collections (Medieval, Renaissance painting and beyond) is that many of the paintings in them today have been heavily restored by past generations of conservators over the centuries, some restorations more invasive than others, to the point that some works might only even have only 10% of the original paint visible in them. More than restored, one could say that those pieces have been embalmed. In the case of excessively (and sometimes irreversibly) restored work is so familiar to us that should we restore it to the exact way it looked on the day it was originally made the contrast would feel jarring: in other words, the invasively repainted work becomes the “authentic” one to us, for that is the one we have always known. The same holds true for works that have not been restored: the naturally yellowed, cracked, or dirty surfaces feel to us as being part of the original work, so when they are brought back to their original state they seem unrecognizable. This is what happened when the Sistine Chapel was restored in the 1980s, and the bright original colors felt fake to us, the contemporary viewers: we were used to the patina of time as part of the fresco, the dirty, soot-covered walls over centuries of burning candles from below.
But most crucially, the prime guiding principle among art conservators is to do well by the artist—that is, to help preserve a work as close as possible to what is believed the artist intended. This is why in many important museums it is common practice for the conservators to interview living artists about works of theirs in the museum collection to get a sense of the materials they used and what would be permissible to do for/to the work in order to preserve it for future generations. Often this is hard or impossible to determine when the artist is long gone and/or did not leave much information that would be useful for the conservation process, so best practices need to be used to solve key conservation questions. I often think of the case of Eva Hesse, many of whose works are a conservation nightmare because of the resins she used, resulting in objects that are brittle and delicate in the extreme. Her old studio assistant, Doug Johns, was still alive a decade or so back, and the question that the museum where I worked at grappled with was whether a work of hers in the museum’s collection should simply be allowed to disintegrate or should they ask the same pair of hands that made those works to create replicas (with the same materials but with an improved, lasting chemical formula) and whether that would be in conflict with the spirit of the work or the artist’s wishes (I do not know if the museum in the end pursued that path).
So, in a limited sense, there sometimes is an interpretive gap in the conservation process where both conservators and curators are faced with making decisions around unanswerable questions (what did the artist want, how and under what conditions would the artist allow the repair of a work, etc). But in no way does this limited process ever include any kind of freewheeling artistic interpretation, as the astonishingly irresponsible administrators that oversaw the restoration of La Esperanza argued.
As I was thinking about this, I had a personal recollection that involves downtown Mexico City, broken statues, and Manuel Tolsá.
When I was 15 years old, Josep Salat, my high school art teacher, seeing that I was serious about becoming an artist, suggested that I should audit painting classes in San Carlos, which is the graduate school of visual arts in downtown Mexico City— just a few blocks away from Catedral. Founded in 1785, San Carlos is the oldest art academy in the Americas. Salat also taught in San Carlos and had a small studio there, and he arranged for me to paint in a corner somewhere in the cavernous studios of the neoclassic-style academy building. I only attended for a brief period, but I have distinct memories of the main courtyard of San Carlos, which held life-size plaster replicas of sculptures by Michelangelo (such as Moses, a cast of the head of the David sculpture, and the Dusk and Dawn figures from the Giuliano de Medici tomb) as well as classic Greek sculptures such as the Venus of Milo and the Discobolus. These were invaluable examples for art students who would otherwise have had to travel to places like Florence, Rome or Paris to see the originals. The sculptures, some of them visibly broken and haphazardly restored, are still on view there today.
Turns out that some of those replicas were brought directly from Europe by Tolsá himself. He was appointed director of Architecture and Sculpture of San Carlos in 1791 and after arriving to Mexico, with support of King Charles III, he brought replicas of classical sculptures to Mexico for teaching purposes. The accounts around this vary widely: some claim that he brought up to 76 boxes from Cádiz and that because of the long journey many of these sculptures arrived broken and Tolsá himself had to spend two years restoring them (I do remember seeing the cracks in many of them, but I don’t know when those took place; let’s just say that an art school is not the safest place to permanently display plaster sculptures).
Many other replicas were added to the courtyard after Tolsa’s time. But a detail in which all accounts coincide is that one of the first replicas that Tolsá brought along was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture of which the original resides in the Louvre. Missing head and arms, It is one of the most famous broken sculptures in art history. Today the replica still remains at the center of the courtyard of San Carlos.
Whether Tolsá spent two years restoring those replicas or not, one thing is clear: it did not occur to him to use his considerable artistic skills to come up with a new replacement head and arms for the Winged Victory.
So as a modest proposal, I would like to suggest that we engage in a restoration project for the Winged Victory in San Carlos, using the same creative conservation philosophy shown for La Esperanza: produce new arms and a big head made with full creative freedom— maybe using a replica of La Esperanza’s new head. The restoration would be so creative that it would never be deemed a forgery; if anything, it would be a Greco-Mexican readymade.
My only worry is that the day it comes to restore it, it will be impossible to match the same colossally uninformed hubris that inspired its addition.
A few more thoughts: if making an indigenous representation truly was the intention, then the next question would be: why then doing it in a neoclassic style? Why not put in its stead a Maya stela or a Atlante de Tula? The implications of that logic are profound: should one be consistent with it, this means that we have an imperative to retroactively change all artworks from the past so that they are consistent with today’s dominant views.
If you are someone involved in creative work (painter, sculptor, writer, etc) I also wonder how you would feel about someone coming two centuries after you are dead and decide that any random person can change (repaint, remodel, rewrite) your artworks so they can be more suitable to the times. This is the reason why controversial sculptures (Civil War era, Communist, etc) are simply retired —hidden, buried, modified, or even melted away— and replaced by new works. We are lucky that the Spanish conquistadors didn't take the sculpture of Coatlicue and tried to change its face to the one of the virgin Mary— they just decided to bury the sculpture away, and by doing so, they inadvertently preserved it for the future.
For the record, should it happen that my works are one day considered inappropriate, I request for them to be altogether destroyed, not “improved” by anyone, even if they happen to be a better, smarter, more virtuous artist: to me, erasure and forgetfulness are preferable; a dignified death instead of the continued living of a fake, contrived falsification under my name.
the first thing that struck me looking at the two images is that the restoration looks much more indigenous. there is the question of authorship of the artist, but there is also the difference between what a sculpture does in private, vs what a a monument does in public. perhaps it was time for Hope not to wear such a European face.