Students seeking good luck before an exam will not be able to rub Warner Bentley's nose at the Hopkins Center for a while. The bust of Warner Bentley was vandalized sometime between Monday night and yesterday morning.
Director of the Hopkins Center Timothy Rub said he did not know when the statue would be restored.
No one is sure of how the damage was inflicted.
"As best we can tell someone put tarnish remover or some kind of metal remover over the greater portion of the [bust's] head, face and chin and then tried to wipe it off," Rub said.
The bust was previously a "dark chocolate color except for the nose," Rub said. The color was created by patina, which is a bronze treatment. Over the years, the treatment rubbed off the nose by students seeking good luck.
Now most of the bust is a color similar to that of the nose.
"Whatever was used to remove the patina remained in the crevices, so now there is a lot of green gunk in the face and head," Rub said.
"It is going to take someone hours with a Q-Tip to go through and remove the green substance," he continued. "It will be a painstaking process."
The statue's restoration will be an expensive process. Estimates run upwards of $1,500 to $2,000," said Adrienne Hand, public relations coordinator for the Hood Museum of Art.
"I don't know where the funds are going to come for it," Rub said. "There are clearly more useful ways to spend the resources than to have to clean up after a thoughtless prank."
Safety and Security began its investigation yesterday afternoon, Rub said. Currently, the prank is believed to be a an April Fool's Day prank.
"Everything points in that direction," Rub said.
The statue "has lost something and we can't really get it back," Hand said. "It is really sad."
