Comparison of Leonardo da Vinci's Jesus and St. John ,
before and after the restoration completed in 1999

Jesus before restoration	Jesus after restoration
John before restoration	John after the sex change (er, restoration)

From http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~lbianco/project/restoration.html :

The most recent restoration, which took more than five times as long as Leonardo's execution of the painting, has been trumpeted by many but also condemned by many in the art world.

Critics, chiefly American and English, call Brambilla's removal of earlier restorations unnecessary and destructive, erasing fragments that might have been faithful to the original. James Beck, Art History Professor at Columbia University in New York, has been a prominent critic of the restoration. He has called it 18 to 20 percent Leonardo, and 80% the work of the restorer. Beck maintains that the areas that have been painted by Brambilla's watercolor essentially repaints the masterpiece. He asserts that the painting does not represent a conservation of what remains of Da Vinci's original, but represents a repaiting of a work that doesn't even have an echo of the past.Even Martin Kemp, Professor of History at Oxford and world expert on Leonardo, questions Brambilla's decision to fill in some of the gaps of the painting with similar tones of water-colors.

Although there are a number of critics, many have praised Brambilla's work. This is a topic to be debated in years and decades to come since it will never be certain as to whether the current state of the painting remains faithful to Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece or not

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