The year is 2012 A fresco titled Ecce Homo rests on a pillar in a small Church in the obscure town of Borja Spain It was painted around 1930 directly on the wall by a minor Spanish artist And after 82 years had had started to flake significantly from moisture buildup Meet Cecilia Giménez Longtime parishioner and amateur painter who is upset with the damage the painting has taken So she decides to try and restore it herself She gets some way through the restoration and decides to take a holiday and let it dry then return and finish it Some time later, the town's folks start to take notice of the changes They aren't pleased At first the mayor suspects vandalism But then folks eventually find out it was done by a local Mr. Giménez Eventually a local newspaper reports on the incident and that's when things really get rolling The news was out and online communities exploded discussion threads criticism memes edits cartoons pastries parodies a bicycle cosplays tattoos Japanese candy pixel art nail painting stamps SNL skits and general hilarity spread far and wide And became an internet sensation The new painting is mocked and ridiculed for days on end Many people call it the worst art restoration ever and the news travels all around the world Let's skip forward 6 years. The location is also Spain this 16th century sculpture of St George has been aging badly the wood has darkened and lots of the paint has flaked off the local parish decides to take matters into their own hands The result is less than adequate one of the eyes veers off to the right the skin is now a cartoonish pink colour and all the subtlety of the original paint job is lost even more upsetting is the statue is a rare example of polychrome sculpture a complex process used to make Statues more lifelike and it gets worse Experts say that with this amount of over painting removing it will also mean the detail in color of the original will be lost forever Apparently the church hired an arts and crafts teacher to do the job.
Let's get forward three months the location Spain Again. A set of fifteenth-century statues was painted in garish colors by a local parishioner with permission from the priest. Of Course.
I'm not a professional she states but I always like to do it and the figures really needed to be painted. "So uh, You know how to paint, right? " "um Yeah.
. . sure" Back to 2012.
The news about the fresco continues to spread many comment on the painting Similarity to a monkey people start to call it "Ecce Mono". Mr. Jimenez is interviewed by a news station where she defends herself But without strong evidence most of it falls on deaf ears Now at this point many of you may be angry at Cecilia Jimenez And I wouldn't blame you some people at the time also had quite vitriolic comments about her and many thought that this was just an arrogant old woman who had ruined a valuable painting without permission and Yeah, what she did was pretty arrogant but according to her she did get permission and she also claimed that people had watched her working in broad daylight and had not said A word and apparently this was also not her first time working on the painting She recounted that she spent time in an apartment by the church and had touched up the painting repeatedly specifically on the tunic with the permission of the parish priests and Caretakers and at some point she decided it needed a major rework on the face Which was halted after her first stage of brushwork now It would be nice to think that the only reason this looked bad was because it was stopped very early But the proportions and muddy colors still wouldn't make much sense for a first stage That's not to say there isn't a possibility if she was given more time there could have been a better result because many parts do look very Unfinished, but I don't think it would be able to match the original painting and even if mrs Jimenez had the skills to replicate the work.
That's not really the point of a proper restoration I've watched over 30 hours of baumgartner restoration So I'm pretty much an expert but according to the opinions of these other experts Restoration is only supposed to restore what has been lost not to over paint an add-on to the artists original vision This is also one of the fatal flaws of the restoration of the st. George sculpture. So as soon as mrs Jimenez started to go past the flaky areas and eventually completely cover up the face She should have stopped and whether the priest actually did give permission or not.
We may never truly know However a year later it was revealed The priest was arrested for alleged sexual abuse and embezzlement of two hundred and eighty five Thousand dollars the priests lawyer said the case had nothing to do with the painting incident You can make of that what you will mrs Jimenez also had a great deal of remorse for what she did once she realized the full extent of her actions Many reports said she suffered a great deal at the time refusing to eat visiting a Psychiatrist just general stress picture this you're an 80 year old woman and your favorite local painting is deteriorating And you think you can restore it a bit first you start with small areas but eventually you want to fix the whole image you start painting on the flaking spots and then you notice this spot is also flaking Off and this spot doesn't look the same and then this color doesn't quite match and then the paint starts getting absorbed And before you know it you've covered up the whole thing so maybe you need to take a break and rethink how you're going to approach this then over the next two weeks your Restoration becomes a worldwide social media sensation you are ridiculed and laughed at by millions of people This is an important thing to note You also have to understand that international backlash for anyone probably does terrible things to their mental health Especially since her mistakes were blown a bit out of proportion as for claims that this painting was rare and valuable And here is what she did to this rare and valuable Sure, it was old and the town's folk did have a sentimental attachment to it But several sources say it had very little historical significance and wasn't really that valuable A lot of this can be demonstrated just by the writings about the painter of the original Elias Garcia Martinez is pretty much only known because of the botched Restoration and it gets better a few years later a copy of the painting by the same artist was discovered by two antique dealers It's an earlier work and is in much better condition So it turns out - Celia Jimenez's mistake was actually far less Significant than most people believe what's more is that Spain had been going through an economic recession But with help from the media the town and the church became quite a tourist attraction Later the church reported nearly 200,000 visitors within the last six years and 57 thousand dollars per year from merchandise and tourist fees later an opera based around Jimenez's life was created. It's about as strange as you would expect As for claims that Jimenez was full of herself It's not far-fetched to say that she has some pride, but honestly if you made a mistake That was so hilarious that it became famous Wouldn't she want at least some recognition and a cut of the profits and these are profits just from tourists visitors and merch sales She did not go around copyright claiming Internet users if anyone was confused But even from these small sources of revenue this painting produced a lot of money Ecce Mono turned out to be great at selling merchandise Pens t-shirts mugs the usual stuff. The money was eventually split between mrs Jimenez and the sanctuaries retirement home.
Mr. Jimenez is reportedly using her half to take care of her son who has cerebral palsy Jimenez also, eventually painted her own version of Jesus for a wine label. Sure, the image might be a bit wonky But it's stylistically clear The features are well defined and I would say it's a big improvement Another Ecce Mono know inspired wine also exists Which apparently is pretty good and even won an award with all the new attention She also opened up an art show full of her other paintings that are so much better than what you would expect Oh, and she also sold one on ebay The painting is now permanently on display next to a picture of the original version Some folks took their own interpretive stance on the now famous work one reporter wrote the restoration provides rare raw access to human fate that work representing one woman's vision of her savior Uncompromised by schooling.
It was unclear whether experts could ever properly restore Ecce Homo But I don't think anyone has the intention of doing so now that the ruined version is producing more money than the original ever did so why do botched art restorations like this happen? So often well, I can't tell you why it seems to be happening so much in Spain But I can tell you that art especially old art is Extremely delicate for a proper restoration a restorer has to approach each and every artwork as its own problem What chemicals need to be used how it should be cleaned how it should be retouched? Where it should be retouched if it should be retouched It's quite complicated and it requires a trained expert to do one properly without causing irreversible damage Not only are these restorations bad They also make getting back the original near impossible one expert says this happens a lot more often than newspapers Talk about and when it comes to really old art, that's just how it is over time it's going to pass through a lot of hands and it's going to get damaged and accumulate grime and eventually Someone is going to try and fix it if it's not in a museum or heavily guarded by someone with a lot of knowledge It's going to deteriorate by natural processes or human Interference as for the 16th century statue a rear esther ation has been completed And as far as I know there has been no further news on the set of statues So what is the lesson in all of this?
