Ecce Homo: Cecilia Giménez, author of the “artistic disaster” that became a meme and which transformed the life of a city, has died

People rushed to the Sanctuary of Mercy in Borja to see the “meme live”. The local priest even asked the mayor to cover the painting and thus avoid jokes. The request was refused.

The elderly woman, threatened with legal action for what was described as an “act of vandalism”, fell into depression. He cried for several days.

Dona Cecilia was marked by difficult struggles throughout her life: one of her children suffered a head injury and lived in a wheelchair with her mother. Another son died at age 20 from a rare muscular disease.

Later, she would regain her morale. He realizes that his work is “turning around”: little by little, ridicule gives way to appreciation, often ironic, in a phenomenon typical of web culture.

In a short time, the image was transformed into a series of merchandise, such as key chains, t-shirts and refrigerator magnets, and even an opera composed by American Andrew Flack in 2015.

Years later, Borja began celebrating his birthday without any embarrassment Ecce Homo. The original, according to critics, had little artistic value, but the restoration that went wrong transformed the life of the work.

In 2022, the city’s mayor, Eduardo Arilla Pablo, told BBC News Brasil that she was still “aware of the phenomenon” caused by her intervention.

Dona Cecilia lived her last years in poor health, in a retirement home run by the government of the Aragon region. The cause of death was not mentioned, but the mayor wrote in a message that she “fulfilled her wish to die peacefully, with the entire Borjan society by her side.”

She said in a recent interview on Aragon public television that, if she could, “I would start trying to fix Ecce Homo again.” Writing in a newspaper in the Basque Country, another Spanish region, he said he had always loved painting and had fond memories of the restoration because he “did it with affection.”

The mayor of Borja indicates that on September 10 there will be “a recognition ceremony for Cecilia Giménez and Elias García Martínez” which will be broadcast live on YouTube.

It is also a recognition of the great impact produced in this small town located 60 km from Zaragoza and part of the Spanish autonomous region of Aragon.

“Tourism-wise, we are a global product. We receive visitors from 110 countries around the world,” says Arilla.

In the first year after the case surfaced, tourist numbers exploded, with 40,000 visitors to Borja.

“Now the situation has stabilized. But we are working so that this chain never breaks down in the city’s hotels,” says Arilla. Today, the annual flow is between 10,000 and 11,000 visitors who attend live what was celebrated online.

But what does the mayor think of what Dona Cecilia did?

“As an institution, we cannot allow such things to happen. 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 it happened, it was the pop phenomenon, the pop icon,” he says.

“With all my respect for the original painting of Elias García, the most important work is now defined in the manner of Cecilia Giménez.”

The fresco created by García Martínez (1858-1934) is a reproduction of other Ecce Homo (“Here is the man”, in Latin) from the past. It is a common theme in European art between the 15th and 17th centuries, the title of which alludes to the phrase of Pontius Pilate when he presents the tortured Jesus Christ to 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 their summers in the Borja region, and this is what led Garcia Martínez to create the fresco inside the sanctuary in 1930.

Spanish daily El País called the original painting “of little artistic value.” The work has never been cataloged by the cultural organizations of Aragon.

“Cecilia Giménez created something totally different, with much more impact than the original painting, which would not be forgotten because it was not even remembered before,” explains Nathalia Lavigne, curator and researcher in digital culture.

“But everything here is contextual, the meme is a context. The image penetrated contemporary visual culture because it had all the characteristics of a meme: something casual, amateurish and somewhat anarchic. What happened was never its intention.”

The case of Ecce Homo remade, according to Lavigne, refers to a contemporary question: from now on, we ask less what art is and more where art is found.

“In the context in which she carried out the restoration, it was certainly not art. But we can see thinking in this way about the idea of ​​longevity of the circulation of the image, which will determine the importance of the life of the object.”

During Dona Cecilia’s “rehabilitation”, unexpected visions arise. Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia, director of films including The Bar and Day of the Beast, said on Twitter that the image is an “icon of the way we see 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-in-chief of the Internet technology and culture magazine Real Life, the meme “effectively provided an opportunity to simultaneously satirize the piety of religion and the pseudo-religion of art.”

The disastrous result also “unleashed a sense of superiority in the spectators,” much like what this lady had the courage to do.

Horning observes that the success of tourist visits to Borja also shows a curious relationship between the offline and online world: it is as if the wall on which Dona Cecilia’s Ecce Homo hangs says to the viewer: “It’s the Internet.”

“The sensation must be quite powerful,” says Horning.

There are certain paths in the 2012 Dona Cecilia meme that will become characteristic on the Internet over the years. The case suggests, for example, that the consequences for someone going viral, even in the context of ridicule, may not be so severe – and that a significant repercussion may even be “monetized.”

Cécilia was guaranteed 49% of the image rights to her Ecce Homo, which she invested in a fund intended to support patients facing the same illness as her son.

But the main lesson of the meme, according to the journalist, is that the Internet “takes advantage of phenomena and reverses them.” The meme, in the end, “made the rounds.”

Even Dona Cecilia seems more convinced of her work. In 2016, during the inauguration ceremony of an “interpretation center” of his work in Borja, he declared: “Sometimes, after having seen so much of you, I think ‘my son, you are not as ugly as you seemed to me at first glance’.