{"id":384481,"date":"2026-01-01T10:07:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T10:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/384481\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T10:07:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T10:07:08","slug":"cecilia-gimenezs-botched-monkey-christ-became-a-global-meme-the-real-marvel-was-the-woman-behind-it-sam-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/384481\/","title":{"rendered":"Cecilia Gim\u00e9nez\u2019s botched Monkey Christ became a global meme. The real marvel was the woman behind it | Sam Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Very few of us find fame quite as late, or quite as brutally, as Cecilia Gim\u00e9nez did in the summer of 2012. The Spanish amateur artist was already 81 when her efforts to restore a decent, if unremarkable, fresco of the scourged Christ brought her a renown<\/a> that almost destroyed her.<\/p>\n

Almost overnight, Gim\u00e9nez, who died on Monday<\/a> at the age of 94, was stripped of her quiet existence in the north-eastern Spanish town of Borja, and recast as the well-meaning and unwitting creator of what would become known around the English-speaking world as Monkey Christ. In Spain, the meme phenomenon was dubbed Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), a play on the painting\u2019s Latin title Ecce Homo (Behold the Man).<\/p>\n

For weeks, months and even years, the side-by-side images of El\u00edas Garc\u00eda Mart\u00ednez\u2019s original and Gim\u00e9nez\u2019s unfinished restoration went viral globally, becoming shorthand for bungled efforts and disastrous outcomes.<\/p>\n

There was, however, more to that summer\u2019s events in Borja\u2019s Santuario de Misericordia<\/a> than the initial reports \u2013 including my own<\/a> \u2013 suggested. Gim\u00e9nez, who was married in the church, had already spent two decades tending to the fresco, trying to protect it against the ravages of time and water damage. She was also only midway through her restoration, and had headed off on a two-week holiday when news of Monkey Christ started spreading.<\/p>\n

\u201cReporters told the world the story of the old woman who couldn\u2019t paint and had ruined a painting,\u201d Gim\u00e9nez told the Guardian in 2015<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s not true. It is true that I haven\u2019t done many portraits. But if it hadn\u2019t been for me, the painting would have probably disappeared long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before and after: the Ecce Homo mural and Gim\u00e9nez\u2019s restoration Composite: Ricardo Ostal\/AP<\/p>\n

By then, though, the damage was already done. Stressed and embarrassed, she lost a lot of weight as she worried about the consequences of her well-meaning actions, and the ridicule they had brought on her home town.<\/p>\n

But little by little, a small miracle took place. The people of Borja rallied around Gim\u00e9nez, congregating outside her house to applaud her, and the town became a popular, if unlikely, tourist destination. These days, the Santuario de Misericordia is home to a busy museum celebrating the church\u2019s renown, and to an equally busy shop selling every conceivable piece of Monkey Christ merchandise. From shelf after shelf, the familiar and oddly benign image of Gim\u00e9nez\u2019s handiwork stares down at visitors from wine bottles, teddy bears, T-shirts, mugs and mousepads.<\/p>\n

The hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who have flocked to Borja over recent years have brought fame \u2013 and a not insubstantial amount of cash \u2013 to the town. That money doesn\u2019t just pay the salaries of the sanctuary-museum\u2019s two caretakers; it also covers the care home fees of local people who would not otherwise be able to live there. Among the home\u2019s residents were Gim\u00e9nez herself and her surviving son, who has cerebral palsy. And then in 2023, an affectionate comic opera<\/a> called Behold the Man opened in Las Vegas, celebrating Gim\u00e9nez and her incredible impact on Borja.<\/p>\n

When I met Gim\u00e9nez in Borja<\/a> in the winter of 2018, her memory was beginning to fail and so her niece, Marisa Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez, sat in on the interview. By then, Gim\u00e9nez, who clutched a large handbag crammed with press cuttings, had made peace with what had befallen her and told me she would do it all again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was done with good intentions and despite what happened, it\u2019s been a good thing for Borja,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople from all over the world are visiting the sanctuary now. That\u2019s the best medicine. I used to cry a lot over all this but I don\u2019t cry any more because I can see how much I\u2019m loved.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I think of Gim\u00e9nez, who was laid to rest on Tuesday afternoon, I\u2019m reminded of The Saint, a short story by Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/a>. It tells the story of a man who spends years in Rome, hoping to persuade the Vatican that the miraculously weightless and perfectly preserved body of his daughter is proof of her candidacy for canonisation. Only at the end of the story does it become clear that it is the father, through his long years of patient devotion to his daughter\u2019s cause, who is the real saint.<\/p>\n

And so it was with the elderly people and this devout woman from Borja. We were all too busy chuckling over the meme to see that the incomplete restoration was never the story \u2013 the restorer was.<\/p>\n

In her many years of quiet devotion and in the dignity with which she endured so much, Gim\u00e9nez was a rare blaze of grace and humility in an ever-darker, ever-crueller world. That \u2013 and not Monkey Christ \u2013 was her life\u2019s work and its legacy.<\/p>\n

Towards the end, Gim\u00e9nez\u2019s dementia proved unexpectedly merciful, devouring the bitter and painful memories of her humiliation and leaving her with only positive recollections. She had, Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez told me, \u201cturned it into a beautiful story\u201d.<\/p>\n

The headlines of the past 24 hours have spoken of \u201cthe woman who immortalised the Ecce Homo\u201d and \u201cthe woman who turned Borja\u2019s Ecce Homo into a global attraction\u201d. But as her niece pointed out when we spoke a couple of years ago, Cecilia Gim\u00e9nez can be summed up in a single word: \u201cYou can look up lots of adjectives to describe her but I think the one that describes her best is \u2018good\u2019. It\u2019s a word that\u2019s used so lightly that we don\u2019t realise what it means.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Very few of us find fame quite as late, or quite as brutally, as Cecilia Gim\u00e9nez did in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-384481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}