"Bug-Eyed Jesus": Botched restoration in Brazil turns saints into caricatures and draws crowds of tourists

The world is witnessing a new wave of tourist pilgrimages to masterpieces of so-called "catastrophic restoration." This time, the epicenter of the absurd is the Brazilian town of Carmo do Cajuru, where an attempt to refresh religious statues turned the Holy Family into looking like comic book characters.

Following a paint job, the sculptural group depicting the Passion of Christ in a local public square ended up with unnaturally huge, "bugged-out" eyes, thick arched eyebrows, and bright crimson lipstick.

While outraged locals stormed the parish council to complain about the blatant disrespect to the sacred relics, news of the hilarious statues instantly went viral. Crowds of tourists from other regions began flooding into the town; about a quarter of a million people flocked to the square to laugh, take photos, or, conversely, pray at the feet of the now-memeified figures.

The restoration had been commissioned by the local Nossa Senhora do Carmo parish. Facing fierce backlash, the church council rushed to acknowledge that the statues' new look "caused profound discomfort among the faithful and local residents."

"The facial features were drawn in an entirely mistaken, inappropriate manner, which is precisely why we took immediate action to remove this artwork," church officials stated.

The clergy declined to reveal the identity of the person who turned Jesus and the Virgin Mary into caricatures. The worst of the changes have already been reversed: the figures were completely stripped of the colored paint, restoring them to their original, austere white color. The parish is now urgently searching for a professional and qualified expert who can properly restore the weathered monuments.

Following in the footsteps of "Monkey Christ"

The incident prompted global media to recall the most famous restoration fiasco in history. In 2012, Cecilia Giménez, an elderly Spanish woman (who passed away last December at the age of 94), independently "refreshed" Elías García Martínez's century-old Ecce Homo ("Behold the Man") fresco in a church in Borja.

The result of her labor, which transformed Christ into something resembling a hairy monkey, gained worldwide fame as "Monkey Christ" (or "Fluffy Jesus") and similarly turned a backwater Spanish town into a Mecca for tourists from across the globe. Its Brazilian counterpart had every chance of replicating that success, had the angry parishioners not insisted on the immediate removal of the paint.