A minor fresco on a sanctuary wall, painted in about two hours in 1930 by a man who taught art at the local school. Christ, crowned with thorns, in the mode of a thousand others. Flaking badly by 2012.

A parishioner in her eighties undertakes to repair it. The result is not a repair. The result is a face with the eyes of something that has been surprised in a hedge.

The town receives more visitors in the following year than in the previous century. A museum is built. The original painter’s granddaughter, initially horrified, comes to terms with it. The image circulates worldwide within days and is still circulating.

The restoration destroyed a work of no consequence and produced a work of global consequence. It cannot be undone, and nobody with a vote wants it undone, and the economy of a town now rests on it.

The damage is the artefact. The artefact is the town’s only real asset. Neither statement can be withdrawn.

She did not make a copy of the fresco. She made the fresco into a copy — of nothing, of no prior thing, an image with no ancestor that has now been reproduced more times than the original was ever looked at.