Cecilia Giménez, who introduced the world to Ecce Homo de Borja, died this Monday at the age of 94 in the residence of this city where she lived with her son, who had an intellectual disability, as confirmed by the mayor of the city, Eduardo Arilla. Cecilia, a painting enthusiast, wanted to restore the work in her town’s church in 2012 without imagining that the result would make it world famous and end up attracting thousands of visitors to the Misericordia Sanctuary in this Zaragoza town.
It was the Heraldo de Aragón newspaper that catapulted this story by publishing what happened to this painting after it passed into Giménez’s hands, even though no one predicted what would follow. What began as a spontaneous “restoration” of a dilapidated work of art that decorated one of the walls of the Sanctuary, a small church located in a 16th-century inn, ended up becoming a complete disaster. The painting was created at the beginning of the 20th century by the painter Elías García Martínez, who frequented this sanctuary with his family, and was in poor condition.
Giménez, then in his eighties, undertook, without asking permission, to repair the work, which was not of great artistic importance and was not part of any pictorial group or altarpiece, but it had a certain sentimental value for the town of Borja. The woman did it with the good intention of preserving the work painted on the wall, but at some point she realized that she had gone much further than she imagined and that’s when she informed the cultural heritage officer of the municipality to confess the damage she had caused.
Media from around the world, such as The World, Telegraph and the BBC, They echoed the event. The truth is that the new work created by Giménez has become a symbol of the city of Zaragoza, which has attracted thousands of tourists to this town of just over 5,000 inhabitants, practically since this news became known.
“The change undergone (unintended) by the sanctuary is undeniable: there was a before and after the repainting of Ecce Homo,” says a Borja tourist website. The fame of Giménez’s work was so great that an interpretation center was opened in the church to explain the context in which the painting was created and, in doing so, explain a little of Borja’s history.
From costumes to documentaries to an opera in New York, they emerged inspired by this fiasco, which ultimately proved very profitable for the municipality, but which also plunged the unwitting artist into depression, overwhelmed by the global reaction to his work.
(News in update)
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