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When Renovation Goes Wrong … and Then Goes Right
An old church in a small town in rural Spain featured a lovely little fresco honoring Jesus. Elías García Martínez painted “Ecce Homo” (Latin for “Behold the Man”), which depicted the Messiah crowned with thorns, back in 1930. Eighty years takes a toll on a painting, especially considering how damp and porous the walls were; by 2012 it was looking pretty rough. That’s when an 83-year-old widow decided to help.
Devout parishioner Cecilia Giménez painted as a hobby, so she brought her brushes to the Santuario de Misericordia and got to work. Her past paintings were limited to canvas and the church stone took a bit of getting used to. The rough surface absorbed the paint and the dampness spread it further than Giménez had intended. The more paint she added, the worse it got. So, she set down her brushes. After vacation, she would correct the work.
The church authorities walked in and suspected vandalism. The mayor was called in to investigate. The original artist’s grandchildren threatened to sue the vandal and asked for a panel of restoration experts to repair the damage.
“But then we discovered it was Cecilia,” the mayor said, “who is well known in the town and who has had a hard life, who with good intentions had attempted to restore it.”
Giménez was widowed young, lost one son to a degenerative disease, and cares for another son in his 50s with the same illness. Adding to her worries, the botched restoration went viral, drawing laughter and jeers from art critics and internet trolls.
But then something curious happened.
“We’ve had hordes of people – 35,000 from August to December – coming to the town just to see the painting,” the mayor said. “They pay a one-Euro entrance fee and stay overnight and eat in local restaurants. That painting isn’t making anyone rich, but it’s keeping businesses in this town from closing.”
All the money raised from the entrance fee goes towards church upkeep and a local retirement home.
The new “Ecce Homo” appears on the town’s lottery tickets and nearby wineries competed to use it on their wine labels. One Spanish artist remarked, “Cecilia has created a pop icon.”
Giménez donated a landscape to a Roman Catholic charity and, after a flurry of eBay bids, it sold for €1,000. She’s been invited to exhibit her work at galleries all over Europe.
“All my life I’ve painted as a way to relax, to help me forget my misfortune. I’ve had lots of exhibitions and sold work to people in the town,” Giménez said. “As an artist, one wants to be known, but not for creating something one isn’t proud of, not for being a joke. I would at the very least have liked the chance to finish it in a proper way.”
What was once mocked as vandalism is now doing good for the community and the church.
“It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, driven by the media into a phenomenon,” one visitor said. “God works in mysterious ways. Your disaster could be my miracle.”
Published in Group Writing
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t excuse her stupidity. She deserves all the scorn and mockery she gets. It’s not something one can live down.
A nice coda to this story. Thanks for writing it.
The road to schlock is paved with good intentions?
The Spring Time for Hitler of Frescoes.
While I don’t condone what she did, I love the redemption that’s on display in this story and the reminder that people are more important than things – even very old things.
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According to this article:
I can’t help but wonder what it would have looked like if she’d been allowed to finish. Probably not as good/realistic as the original, but not as bad as it does. Then again, I suspect part of the painting’s draw is due to the story that surrounds it and the fact that it isn’t finished. So maybe that it isn’t finished turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the village.
A good story with a silver lining. Jesus would be proud.
Seems to be a trend….
It is not just amateurs who can botch a restoration. San Javier del Bac was falling apart because people who should have known better hit on the bright idea of using paint that would seal the adobe structure. Adobe must breathe, or it crumbles internally. So a new restoration team, trained by the same people who were doing the Vatican renovation, went back to native materials, used for centuries. You can still see them working today–another gone wrong then right story, as the new skilled workers are from the community.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under January’s theme: Renovation. There are plenty of dates still available. Have a great home renovation story? Maybe with photos? Have a terrible home renovation story? How about furniture, or an instrument, a plane, a train or an automobile? Are you your renovation project, or someone else’s? Do you have criticism or praise for some public renovation, accomplished or desperately needed? Are you a big fan, or not so much, of home renovation shows? Unleash your inner fan or critic. We have some wonderful photo essays on Ricochet; perhaps you have a story with before and after photos, or reflections on the current state of a long project. The possibilities are endless! Why not start a conversation? Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
The February 2019 Theme Writing: How Do You Make That? Is up. Thanks for the great suggestions. I’ll likely use some of the others in March and April.
Good that the local community is deriving benefit…but let’s not get carried away with the presumed talent of the amateur artist. Her attempt at restoration was an abomination and destroyed a beautifully rendered work of Renaissance art.
If high-resolution photos were taken of the original fresco, either digitally or with a camera using conventional film, it’s quite possible to replicate the original artwork with fairly precise accuracy but do so on a safer and longer-lasting surface even if a new surface could be added somewhere inside the church.
The schlocky, modernist/primitivist destruction of the original painting of the beautiful and more realistic depiction of Christ is almost a metaphor of what’s been happening in the Church in the last 60 years. Maybe Francis will have the Sistine Chapel ceiling painted over in this style…not to give him any ideas.
Actually, the painting wasn’t that old. According to Wikipedia, it was painted around 1930. And to be fair, we don’t know how modernist/primitivist the restoration was supposed to be since the woman wasn’t allowed to finish it. Based on the eyes, I suspect the finished product wouldn’t have looked as realistic as the original; but I think it would have looked a lot more realistic than it currently does.
Interestingly enough, according to this article, the priest and the congregation knew she was attempting to restore the painting. She wasn’t doing it in secret. It sounds like there was no problem with what she was doing until someone who didn’t know what was going on noticed and decided to raise a ruckus about it.
Thanks for the correction on the timeframe of the original. I never mentioned anything about her “restoring” the original in secret.
You’re right; you didn’t. That part wasn’t meant to address anything you’d said. I’d just run across the information and decided to throw it into the mix for general information purposes in case anyone (like me) assumed she had done what she did in secret (which is exactly what I had done). Sorry for the confusion there.
Of course she made a mistake, but many artists (self styled) are just as unaware of their artistic limitations.
Frankly the old lady’s painting is no worse than a lot of junk I see in museum galleries today.
Always remember to thin your paints.
I can’t remember where I saw it, so I can’t provide any detail, but I saw recently that a lot of the old Roman and Greek statues were originally painted. It’s possible some of these restorations are closer than we think.
I don’t know if this is the article you saw or not, but here’s one on the subject:
Why Do People Still Think That Classical Sculptures Were Meant To Be White?
I’m not sure either, but this is certainly the subject matter. Some of those seemingly garish updates might be the real thing.