Fresco frenzy, a decade on: How a botched painting became a town's greatest asset

MAKING an embarrassing mistake and the whole town finding out is not exactly on everyone's bucket list. The world's press reporting it with a picture of you is rare if you're not a pop star, silver-screen artist or international sports personality, but is exceptionally traumatic if it does happen. And your blunder turning your sleepy little village into a global tourism magnet raking in millions for local traders is almost unprecedented.

Yet a 91-year-old lady living in an Aragón care home can proudly say she has achieved just that.

Cecilia Giménez was younger then, and more active – 81, a regular churchgoer and keen watercolour painter with passion and talent.

Purely for her own enjoyment, she restored a canvas of the Virgin Mary at the Santuario de Misericordia ('Sanctuary of Mercy'), her local parish, saving the committee a fortune, and she sought to do the same with a post-war fresco of the head of Christ, by the little-known artist Elías García Martínez.

Oil-on-fresco does not tend to last, and García Martínez's failure to use the correct materials meant his 66 x 40 centimetre (about 2'2” x 1'4”) portrait titled Ecce Homo was in a very poor state when Cecilia started work on it.

Much later, she insisted that she hadn't finished it, and that's why the photos of it in the regional newspaper, El Heraldo de Aragón, showed it looking nothing like the original.

But the outcry was immediate – Elías García Martínez's relatives threatened to sue her for criminal damage, professional restorers complained about the dangers of letting amateurs loose on valuable works, and poor Cecilia took to her bed with a panic attack.

All this was a decade ago, in August 2012 – and Cecilia, interviewed earlier this month, assures she does not regret a thing and would relive the entire experience over again even if she had the chance of going back in time and changing it.

This year, an article critiquing Madonna's latest album, Finally Enough Love, likened the Ecce Homo restoration to DJ Offer Nissim's double appearance on the compilation as a 'cultural clean-up'.

Earlier in 2022, the judges on Rupaul's Drag Race mentioned Cecilia's restoration as an example of 'how not to do things'.

Although, in reality, the pensioner's work turned out to be exactly how to do things if you want to turn your obscure Zaragoza-province village of just over 5,000 inhabitants into a tourism destination as famous as the Sagrada Família or the Alhambra Palace.

Chaos unleashed

Whilst a terrified and distressed Cecilia was trying to hide from the world, memes took over social media – from the 'adapted' Ecce Homo recreated with Homer Simpson's head and dubbed 'Ecce Homer', to Da Vinci's The Last Supper featuring a tableful of 'new' Ecce Homos as diners – and a petition began circulating on Change.org.

Its authors called for the painting to be left exactly as it was, rather than being returned to its original look, raising the point that new art movements have always arisen through departures from the norm and bold attempts at questioning the status quo.

By then, of course, the Heraldo de Aragón article, published on August 21, had been shared and rehashed, versions in different languages and different newspapers appearing on every inhabited continent. Cecilia had nowhere left to hide now, with the result of her unfinished restoration becoming a Twitter trending topic and making headlines worldwide.

Curious crowds to international tourists and thriving local industry

Such was the global mirth at what was, at the time, an extremely unfortunate situation, that the next couple of weeks brought in visitors, firstly from elsewhere in the province of Zaragoza, then farther afield in Spain, including international tourists already on 'circuit' holidays to experience the country's highlights who made a swift diversion.

Before August 2012 was out, hordes of Japanese holidaymakers who, prior to Cecilia's story breaking, would have been unable to place the town of Borja on a map, were queuing to get into the church and photograph the radically-altered fresco.

They were followed by visitors from the US, from Australia and all over Europe – and low-cost Irish carrier Ryanair started offering flights to Zaragoza from various parts of the continent for just €1.

So many multi-national and morbidly-curious crowds started appearing in Borja that local bars and restaurants, previously scraping by during a long recession serving regulars from the village, were suddenly run off their feet and reporting their turnover multiplying almost overnight.

Public pressure for the Ecce Homo to be left with its new look, combined with this international tourism furore and culture enthusiasts calling Cecilia a 'genius' and a 'paradigm-changer' who had 'invented a whole new genre of modern art', eventually led to a decision not to fix what, it turned out, was not in fact broken at all.

Thousands earned as annual visitors double the population

During the first two years after Cecilia made global news, over 150,000 people from every corner of planet earth travelled to Borja to see the 'alternative' Ecce Homo.

At first, the attraction was partly in its being so topical, and partly through fear that the parish would either restore the Ecce Homo to its former look or paint the wall and blank it out altogether – but once it became clear that the church community would do no such thing, and once the incident began to become 'old news', the frenzy started to wane. 

Despite this, according to Borja's mayor since 2015, Eduardo Arilla, an average of 11,000 people still visit the Ecce Homo every year.

The parish began charging entry tickets from autumn 2012, and for a token €3, visitors can see the church itself, the information centre and museum, the rectory, and of course, the painting.

And rather like The Last Supper in Milan, numbers viewing the famous artwork are restricted, with small groups led to it in shifts, to ensure it does not become damaged.

The information centre opened in March 2016, and forms a complete exhibition on what happened, its repercussions, with photos, videos, newspaper clippings, and voice recordings, an Ecce Homo 'scribble board' where visitors can each contribute a brush-stroke, a 'photo-call' cut-out where tourists can pop their own face through a hole in a copy of the picture and 'become' the Ecce Homo themselves for a selfie and, since July 2016, the 'Cecilia Giménez Museum' joined it.

In 2021, Borja earned around €45,000 from ticket sales, and over the past decade since it all started, more than €300,000.

The cash goes directly to the Sancti Spiritus Foundation and to the church, where it funds wages for the jobs created through the huge visitor numbers the Ecce Homo has generated, and goes in grants to the village's most hard-pressed families.

Cecilia holds the right to 49% of the royalties, and the Foundation to the remaining 51%.

Buy your own Ecce Homo: T-shirts, key-rings...and wine

Naturally, having become a massive visitor magnet, the next step was going to be souvenirs. Cashing in on the international hilarity, it would not be long before everything from postcards, key-rings, coffee-coasters and fridge magnets through to T-shirts and trainers featuring the 'new' Ecce Homo began to appear.

It did not stop there. Jumping on the wagon early, Bodegas Aragonesas produced a wine in 2012 called Ecce Homo and, in 2014, Cecilia signed a contract with the merchants to allow them to feature 'her' painting on the label. All profits earned from the wine sales – you can still buy it – go entirely to various charities.

Cecilia's Ecce Homo appeared in the popular video game Angry Birds, and even an Ecce Homo mobile phone App was created.

Carnival masks with the face of Cecilia's new character were mass produced, and for the past 10 years, the figure she inadvertently created has become one of the most-sold Hallowe'en costumes on earth – in Japan, the traditional pre-Hallowe'en processions featuring giant frames with humans dressed up as famous art faces, from Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring through to the Mona Lisa, included Cecilia's Ecce Homo in 2018.

Also in Japan, in 2020, a company creating limited-edition key-ring collections launched one covering well-known botched 'restorations' in Spain.

Along with Cecilia's work, the key-rings included parishioner María Luisa Menéndez's psychedelic Nativity scene figures at a church in the Asturias hamlet of Rañadoiro, which she said she 'brightened up' because the original Gothic-era style was 'awful' – the Virgin Mary wears a hot-pink robe and the Baby Jesus is in lime green – and an anonymous art teacher's repaint of a statue of Saint George in Estella, Navarra, which has been compared to the Belgian cartoon character Tin-Tin.

Very entertaining: Cecilia's Ecce Homo on stage and screen

When something you've painted reaches the likes of Sky and HBO, you must be a 'proper' artist – and although Cecilia has not been commissioned to create future works based upon her Ecce Homo 'style', she's become that one-hit wonder which stands the test of time: One masterpiece, and you're part of cultural history for generations. 

Cecilia's story became an opera in 2018, with the première of Behold the Man being at the Evelyn Smith Music Theatre at Arizona State University, USA and, the following year, the curtain went up on its first showing outside the play's country of creation – in Zaragoza – with the first night being a sell-out.

Earlier, though, the restoration featured on comedy chat shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O'Brian's Late Show, all within days of the brand-new Ecce Homo's hitting the world's headlines.

It went on to feature in sitcom Hot in Cleveland, starring the legendary Betty White, and on the HBO Max series Hacks, led by Jean Smart.

And in April 2016, Sky TV aired a documentary in the UK on the pensioner's unusual tale, titled Fresco Fiasco.

Cecilia's hindsight

Nowadays, aged 91 and living in a care home, Cecilia rarely gives interviews, preferring to lead a quiet life away from the world's cameras.

But she was happy to talk to reporter Elena Périz Beriain in 2018 – the first journalist who gave her the opportunity to speak publicly about her experiences when it all kicked off in August 2012.

Asked how she felt about it all with six years of hindsight, Cecilia admitted that she would 'definitely', and 'without hesitation', knowing then what she does now, 'do it all over again'.

The reason for this is not money or fame, or even knowing that she has changed the face of her town at the stroke of a paintbrush.

Through all the noise, public attention, media madness and newfound celebrity status, Cecilia says 'the best bit it gave her' was the 'love and kindness of so many people'.

From the beginning, with thousands of members of the public supporting her, through to all the thousands more who have passed through her life as a result of her high-profile 'mistake', the elderly artist says she has been touched by how much warmth and affection she has received as a direct consequence of what appeared to her, on August 21, 2012, to be one of the greatest catastrophes and most humiliating moments of her life.

And she has unwittingly served as inspiration and a source of hope for many in the past 10 years – showing that what you think is your most colossal error and worst-ever decision can sometimes trigger a complete, life-changing turning point and end up becoming the best thing you ever did.