THE PAMPLONA CRUCIFIX, located in the parish hall of St. Augustine’s Cathedral in Tucson and believed to be 600 to 800 years old, is being restored by art conservators. This is the new look, replacing the one below.

                                                                                                                                   — Comments —

Michael S. writes:

Your title suggests to me that you feel some sort of disdain toward the restoration of the statue. But it’s not obvious to me just what your objection is. Do you object to the fact that a centuries-old statue no longer looks centuries-old?

Then I wonder… is that the original head of the statue? Maybe it’s just the different camera angles of the two photographs, but I’m not entirely sure either way.

This, however, is just silly, if not outright stupid:

“Richard Baeuerlen of the Golden Brush applies wallpaper over the arches inside St. Augustine Cathedral. The wallpaper is made to look like there is carved stone over the arches.”

Really? Fake stonework? That’s just pathetic.

(And “Baeuerlen” looks like a Germanic name. Does Mr. Baeuerlen look the slightest bit Germanic to you?)

Anyway, I wish my cathedral parish would restore the Cathedral to the way it looked before its “renovation” a few decades back.

Laura writes:

Could the face on the original crucifix look like this laid-back lifeguard with styled locks? Judging purely from these photographs, if you look at the original, even without the aging, it appears to be a very different face, less sensuous and more ethereal. Did the restorers blow-dry his hair and put lipstick on his mouth? If the original did resemble this restoration, they should have kept the statue as it was, with its streaks resembling sweat and tears. People will have to wait another 600 years or so to get that back. People should gather at the foot of this cross and pray for the streaks and aging to be restored, for the crayon-colored paint to miraculously disappear.

The wallpaper is in poor taste. Plasterwork is very expensive, but Tucson is not exactly a poor city. Why not wait until the cathedral can someday afford the plaster or masonry rather than settle for the sort of decorating touches one expects to find in a restaurant in Little Italy? This reminds me of what Kristor said the other day about libraries and excellence. Churches should strive for excellence and if they cannot afford it, they should settle for a rustic or bare simplicity. But this isn’t just about aesthetics, these are more evidence of the desacralization of the Church, the physical stripping away of the divine. 

Michael S. writes:

I admit to being a little slow these days, and I’m no expert on art restoration. (Or visual art in general; I am more musically inclined, and am admittedly bewildered by those who are not.) I agree they should have just left it alone as much as possible, and just focused on maintaining the physical integrity of the piece.

At least they could have the hair a darker color. [Laura writes: Yes, that would make a big difference. ]

And as far as fake decorating goes… I don’t know about Little Italy, but there’s an Italian restaurant the next town over, which is historically mostly Italian, and they have wallpaper that does the whole, “Hey, we’re in Sicily and the plaster ain’t what it used to be and, hey LOOK — here’s some exposed brick!” which, of course, isn’t really exposed brick. I look at something like that and wonder, “What is the point?”

Did the Gordon Gekko protege in Wall Street have one of the rooms in his Manhattan apartment done up like that? With Rigoletto on the stereo — that detail, I remember.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

That’s not a restoration; it is an abomination. The original may be damaged, but it has wabi/sabi.

Shame on those who make Christ look stupid even in death.

A., who lives in Tucson, writes:

Bishop Gerald Kicanas has allowed and perhaps even encouraged the destruction of our sacred spaces. He has had millions with which to work. Sadly, he may well be the next president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops despite his decision in the 1990s to ordain a seminarian who had already committed sexual indiscretions and who later sexually molested children as a priest. In 2007, Kicanas told a local newspaper that he had no regrets about ordaining the priest.

Pray for our Church.

Kristor writes:

The irony is that the faux stonework wallpaper they installed on the arches of St. Augustine’s Cathedral had to have been really expensive, even to look like a pretty good fake. 

There is nothing wrong with simplicity in a church. A church is not somehow made better as a church by being more ornate. My church in Berkeley is unadorned wood. And by “unadorned,” I mean it is planks nailed to two by fours. No walls are attached to the inside of the framing. In places you can see through the cracks between the planks. Yet it is a marvelous little space; it appears in books about Berkeley architecture (which is actually quite a serious and important subject in architectural circles), and couples come from all over Northern California to be married in that humble room. 

In general, architectural fakery is a Really Bad Idea. It never, ever works. If a wall is not really made of stone, don’t attach a stone façade to it. The eye is not fooled by such things. Honest materials, even if inexpensive, always feel more reliable. Because they are straightforward about themselves, bare concrete or plaster would have been much more muscular and pure than wallpaper that aped something different. When the nave of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral was finished in the 60’s, the builders realized that if they installed the masonry fan vaulting the original plans had called for, it would present a terrific danger to the congregation in the likely event of an earthquake. They considered installing fake stone, made of asbestos or something similarly ghastly. They rejected the idea. So when one looks up in that building, one sees the concrete arches, and beyond them the steel girders that the vaulting would have hidden. No one minds. The Cathedral is thrilling. The building is honest. 

Fake stonework in a church, being a sort of lie, cannot help but engender anxiety in the congregation about the other lies to which they might there be subject. If St. Augustine’s wanted to adorn the arches of their church, they would have done far better to paint them with floral patterns. If it was good enough for the Temple in Jerusalem, it was good enough for St. Augustine’s.

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