“An unspeakable event”.
Thus began a post, dated August 7, 2012, from the blog dedicated to the culture of the small Spanish town of Borja, with just 5,000 inhabitants.
The publication explained that an inventory of religious art in the region found the fresco Ecce Homo, the work of the painter Elías García Martínez, on the walls of the Santuario de la Misericordia in Borja in a poor state of conservation.
“But, to our amazement, we can see that, in the short space since then, ‘an arrangement’ has occurred, the result of which is what is offered in this image.”
“We do not know the circumstances in which the arrangement occurred.”
It didn’t take long for them to be revealed.
A parishioner of the Borja sanctuary named Cecilia Giménez, then 81 years old, was identified as the author of the clumsy restoration.
Armed with “good faith”, she tried to solve the problems of painting conservation even without mastering the necessary techniques.
The rest is history: a tsunami of ridicule swept through social networks, fueled newscasts, comedy shows and talk circles around the world in the following weeks and reverberated with such force that it would transform Doña Cecilia’s work into one of The biggest memes in internet history.
Faced with the sudden interest of a new public in local sacred art, the parish priest of the sanctuary even asked the mayor to cover the painting and thus avoid jokes. The request was denied.
The old woman, under threat of legal action for what was classified as an “act of vandalism”, fell into depression. She cried for several days.
Soon, however, his spirits recovered. She realized that the situation was turning around: little by little, ridicule gave way to appreciation, often ironic, in a phenomenon typical of web culture.
Before long, the image became a series of merchandise products, such as key chains, t-shirts and fridge magnets, and even an opera composed by American Andrew Flack in 2015.
10th anniversary
Ten years later, Borja unashamedly celebrates the Ecce Homo transformed by the hands of the Spanish woman, who now lives in a nursing home, in poor health at 91 years of age.
“His situation has gotten much worse, but he is still aware of the phenomenon and lives here in Borja in a residence of the Aragon government. He is with his son, who also has a serious health problem,” the current mayor told BBC Brazil. of the Spanish municipality, Eduardo Arilla Pablo.
José Antonio has a brain injury and lives in a wheelchair. Doña Cecilia’s other son, Jesusín, died at the age of 20 from a rare muscle disease.
The woman said in a recent interview with public TV in Aragon that, if she could, “she would try to restore Ecce Homo again.” She told a newspaper in the Basque Country that she always liked to paint and she has good memories of the restoration because “she did it with love.”
The mayor of Borja indicates that on September 10 there will be “an act of recognition for Cecilia Giménez and Elías García Martínez” that will be broadcast live on YouTube.
It is also a recognition of the great impact caused in this small town located 60 km from Zaragoza and part of the Spanish autonomous community of Aragon.
“In terms of tourism, we are a global product. We receive visitors from 110 countries around the world,” says Arilla.
In the first year after the case surfaced, there was an explosion in tourist numbers, with 40,000 annual visitors to Borja.
“Now it has stabilized. But we work so that this chain never breaks,” says the mayor.
Now, the flow is between 10,000 and 11,000 annual visitors who witness live what has become famous on the web.
“As an institution we cannot allow these things to happen,” acknowledges the mayor.
“We have a great monumental and artistic heritage and we are committed to restoring it. What happened was a mistake. But it is also true that, once this happened, it is a pop phenomenon, a pop icon,” he says.
“With all due respect to the original painting by Elías García, the most important work is now defined in the manner of Cecilia Giménez.”
The artistic value of the original
The fresco by García Martínez (1858-1934) is a reproduction of other Ecce Homo (“Behold the man” in Latin) from the past.
It is a common theme in European art between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose title alludes to the phrase of Pontius Pilate when he presents Jesus Christ tortured before the crowd.
García Martínez was a professor at the Zaragoza School of Fine Arts and also the patriarch of a family of artists, including his son Honorio García Condoy, an avant-garde sculptor.
The family spent the summer in the Borja region, so García Martínez painted the interior fresco of the sanctuary in 1930.
The Spanish newspaper El País described the original painting as having “little artistic value”. The work was not cataloged by the Cultural Bodies of Aragon.
Was what the restorer did art? “Cecilia Giménez created something totally different, with much more impact than the original painting,” says Nathalia Lavigne, curator and researcher in digital culture.
“But everything there is context, the meme is context. The image penetrated contemporary visual culture because it had all the characteristics of a meme: something casual, amateurish and a little anarchic. It was never his intention to do what happened.”
The case of Ecce Homo remade, according to Lavigne, is related to a contemporary question: not so much about what art is but where art is.
“In that context in which she did the restoration, it certainly wasn’t art. But you can look at it this way, thinking about the idea of longevity of the circulation of the image, which is going to determine the importance of the life of the object” .
Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia, director of films such as “El bar” and “El día de la bestia”, declared on Twitter that the image is an “icon of our way of seeing the world. It means a lot.”
American art critic Ben Davis even named the restoration among the 100 pieces that defined the 2010s (“a beloved masterpiece of unintentional surrealism”).
For Rob Horning, editor of the Internet technology and culture e-zine Real Life, the meme actually “provided an opportunity to simultaneously lampoon the piety of religion and the pseudo-religion of art.”
Horning observes that the success of tourist visits to Borja also shows a curious relationship between the offline world and the online world: it is as if the wall on which Doña Cecilia’s Ecce Homo is found tells the viewer: “Here is the internet. “.
“The feeling has to be pretty powerful,” says Horning.
There are in the meme of the restored work of 2012 some paths that over the years would become characteristic on the internet.
The case suggested, for example, that the consequences for someone who goes viral, even in the context of ridicule, may not be so dire, and that a big hit can be “monetized.”
Cecilia Giménez was awarded 49% of the image rights to her Ecce Homo, money that she invests in a fund to support patients suffering from the same disease as her son.
But the main lesson of the meme, says the journalist, is that the internet “takes advantage of phenomena and reverses them.” The meme, in the end, “turned around”.
Even Doña Cecilia seems more convinced of her work.
In 2016, during the opening ceremony of an “interpretation center” for his work in Borja, he declared: “Sometimes, from seeing you so much, I think ‘my son, you are no longer as ugly as you seemed to me at the beginning'”.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-62545473, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-08-16 03:00:07
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