A bizarre-looking terracotta head placed on a statue of baby Jesus has been removed and replaced with the statue's original head after it drew international attention.
The original head belonging to the statue located outside a Catholic church in Sudbury, Canada was returned on Sunday after the sculpture sported a weird head for several days, CBC News reported.
The statue of Mother Mary and the infant Jesus on the front lawn of Sainte-Anne-des-Pinnes church drew global attention and ridicule after the baby's head was reportedly stolen about a year ago and replaced recently with a strange, terracotta head created by a local artist.
Parish priest Gerald Lajeunesse said the original head of baby Jesus head was returned by a local woman after she saw the story on social media. The woman told the priest the person who took the sculpted head was suffering from personal problems.
The handmade replacement head had its red hue grossly mismatched with the rest of the white statue.
Since the terracotta head was placed atop the statue, it had been photoshopped onto celebrities, political figures and even cartoons.
Lajeunnesse said he's happy to have the head back and is not planning to file a complaint for the theft.
The priest said earlier that after the head of the baby Jesus statue was removed, an artist named Heather Wise replaced it with a bright orange clay terracotta substitute.
But church members, visitors and Lajeunesse himself said the replacement head was "shocking to the eyes."
"It really is shocking to the eyes because of the big contrast in colour," Lajeunesse told CBC News.
But despite the bizarre head that Wise placed on the statue, Lajeunesse believes that the artist was acting "out of the goodness of her own heart."
For her part, Wise said in an interview said she was "sad" after seeing the vandalised the statue.
"My feelings were hurt when I saw it, because I thought 'Who would do that?' It's just not a positive feeling to see that. I said 'I'm an artist, I would like to fix it.'"
Wise's replacement head for baby Jesus is being compared to the "Monkey Christ" painting, another infamous botched restoration project which has been attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors in the northern Spanish town of Borja, according to The Christian Post.
In 2012, artist Cecilia Gimenez turned the original painting called "Ecce Homo" ("Behold the Man") into a distorted unfinished work, with the image resembling a monkey rather than the Son of God, as visitors noted.
