In the summer of 2012, in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja — a town of a few thousand people in Aragon, north-eastern Spain — an octogenarian parishioner looked at a flaking fresco of Christ crowned with thorns and decided to help. Cecilia Giménez, an amateur painter in her early eighties, had touched up the picture before, with the informal blessing of local clergy, and the humidity was eating it faster than she could mend it. This time the repair went further. When photographs surfaced that August, the world met what Spanish wits christened Ecce Mono — “Behold the Monkey” — and the English-speaking press dubbed the Monkey Christ: eyes smudged into asymmetric dots, the crown of thorns fused into a furry hairline, the mouth a hesitant blur. One BBC correspondent's description became canonical: the restoration now resembled “a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic”.
The original was no priceless treasure, which is part of what makes the story bearable. Ecce Homo was painted directly onto the church wall around 1930 by Elías García Martínez, a competent academic painter who reportedly knocked it off in a couple of sessions as an act of devotion; art historians valued it sentimentally rather than financially. His descendants were nonetheless horrified, and briefly considered legal action. Giménez, mortified by the global mockery, insisted she had never intended to work in secret and had simply been overtaken by the job — she had, she said, left it unfinished when the holidays intervened, planning to fix the face later. The internet did not wait.
The miracle of Borja
Then came the twist no conservator predicted. The mockery turned to pilgrimage. Within months, tens of thousands of visitors had detoured to Borja to see the ruined fresco in person; within a few years the total ran into the hundreds of thousands, from as far away as Japan. The church, which had previously rattled a donation box, began charging a small entrance fee, with proceeds supporting the Sancti Spiritus charitable foundation and its care home — the very institution attached to the sanctuary. An interpretation centre opened to explain the fresco's history; souvenir stalls sold Monkey Christ mugs, biscuit tins and wine labels; and in 2016 an American-composed comic opera about the affair, Behold the Man, was performed in Borja itself. Giménez, once the town's embarrassment, negotiated a share of merchandising royalties, which she split with the charity. The worst restoration in history had become, economically speaking, the most successful artwork in Aragon.
What restoration is supposed to be
Professional conservators laughed too, then winced, because the fiasco was a perfect negative image of their discipline. Modern conservation, codified by the Italian theorist Cesare Brandi in the 1960s, rests on principles Giménez unknowingly violated one by one: interventions should be minimal; materials should be reversible, so future restorers can undo them; retouching should be distinguishable at close range from original paint; and documentation should record every step. A trained restorer would have consolidated the flaking paint, filled losses neutrally and stopped. Spain's professional body, ACRE, used the scandal to campaign for legal regulation of who may touch heritage — because in Spain, remarkably, almost anyone could. The campaign gained urgency as Borja proved to be a genre rather than a one-off: in 2018 a sixteenth-century painted St George in Estella emerged from a school-teacher's workshop looking like a pink-faced toy soldier, and in 2020 a private collector's copy of a Murillo Immaculate Conception came back from a furniture restorer twice, each attempt more alarming than the last. Palencia added its own entry in 2020, when a repaired sculpted head on a bank building emerged looking, in the popular verdict, like a potato — proof that Borja had founded a tradition nobody wanted.
Yet Borja complicates the sermon. The botched fresco has been contemplated, photographed and genuinely loved by more people than the intact original would ever have reached, and it funds the care of the elderly. Some theorists now discuss it, only half-jokingly, as an accidental artwork in its own right — a memento of good intentions and the internet age. The lesson for quiz purposes is tidy: restoration should be reversible, and this one wasn't. The lesson for everyone else is untidier: sometimes you ruin a painting and create a miracle.
Quiz nuggets
- The botched Ecce Homo restoration happened in 2012 in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain.
- The original fresco was painted around 1930 by Elías García Martínez; the restorer was parishioner Cecilia Giménez, then in her eighties.
- Spanish wits nicknamed the result Ecce Mono — “Behold the Monkey”; English media called it Monkey Christ.
- The fresco drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, with entry fees supporting a charity care home, and inspired a 2016 comic opera.
- Modern conservation principles — minimal, reversible, documented intervention — were codified by Italian theorist Cesare Brandi.