“Furry Jesus” or how Cecilia Jimenez saved the city. “Furry Jesus”: How a damaged fresco brought prosperity to an entire city Cecilia Jimenez
On August 21, a small article appeared in the Spanish edition of Heraldo, which talked about how badly a resident of the small town of Borja, an 80-year-old pensioner, restored the fresco "Ecce Homo" ("Here is the man"), painted by the artist Elias García Martínez. The publication included photographs of the fresco depicting Jesus Christ before and after restoration. In the updated version of the work, Christ was unrecognizable - the fresco began to resemble a child’s drawing, depicting either a monkey or a fluffy potato with eyes.
After the publication in Heraldo, a real scandal erupted around the act of Cecilia Jimenez, who decided to restore the fresco, which, according to various sources, dates back to the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Some attacked the old woman with severe criticism, while others came to the defense of the elderly Spaniard, proclaiming her the new Munch and Modigliani rolled into one. Be that as it may, the image of Jesus Christ created by Jimenez seems to have already occupied its niche in modern art.
Cecilia Jimenez told reporters that she began working on the restoration of the "Ecce Homo" fresco located on a church column several years ago. According to a parishioner of the church, she was upset by the condition of the work, which was deteriorating due to the humidity in the premises of the religious building.
The pensioner, as she herself claims, turned to the priest, and he allegedly agreed for her to carry out restoration work. “Of course, everyone knew about what I was doing. When people came to church, they saw that I was drawing. The rector knew. How could I do such things without permission?” Jimenez was quoted by the media. At the same time, representatives of the church claim that they knew nothing about the artistic work of their elderly parishioner.
One way or another, the restoration, which began in 2010, was completed in the summer of 2012. The results of Cecilia Jimenez's work were revealed a couple of weeks ago, when specialists arrived at the church to assess the condition of the fresco depicting Christ in order to draw up a plan for restoration work. The restoration was supposed to be done at the expense of the granddaughter of the author of the fresco, Teresa Martinez - it was she who allocated the money and sent it to the church.
Arriving in Borja, experts discovered instead of a fresco something completely different - a primitive image of a certain creature with a fur-covered head (optionally, dressed in a woolen bonnet), sadly turned to the side. Staring down from the fresco was, as BBC News wrote, "a pencil sketch of a very hairy monkey in a baggy tunic." Only this very dimensionless tunic reminded of the original appearance of “Ecce Homo” - both before and after the restoration it was beetroot color (by the way, as Teresa Martinez noted, Cecily Jimenez’s tunic turned out not as bad as everything else). The church in Borja promised that the furry Jesus will disappear - the fresco is planned to be restored again, this time by professionals.
After the news spread in the English-language press about the most unsuccessful restoration in the history of art, a campaign was launched on the Internet to preserve the furry Jesus (bloggers have already managed to give Jimenez’s work a new name - “Ecce Mono”, which they translated as “Behold the monkey”). Of course, the creation of an elderly Spanish woman in just a few hours became one of the most popular Internet memes - “phototoads” of a furry Jesus can be found without particularly straining.
A petition has appeared on change.org in defense of the restored Jesus. The author of the updated version of the ancient fresco is compared to Goya, Munch and Modigliani, and the work itself is seen as a criticism of the “creationist theories” of the Church. At the time of writing this text, more than ten thousand people spoke in favor of preserving "Ecce Mono". Perhaps they are all right in their desire to recognize furry Jesus as a work of art in its own right.
Goya is not Goya, but the fresco by Cecilia Jimenez can be called an interesting example of primitivist painting (if we abstract from the existence of the original version). Primitivism as a pictorial style arose around the time when García Martínez, following academic traditions, painted the walls of a small church in Borja; now the works of the greatest primitivists, for example Niko Pirosmani and Henri Rousseau, hang in museums and cost a lot of money. There is nothing to say about the avant-garde artists who experimented with this style and turned to it, unlike the Spanish grandmother, absolutely consciously.
In this story, Cecilia Jimenez showed herself, of course, not as Pirosmani, but definitely as a grandiose popularizer who gave the world knowledge. “The most terrible restoration” turned into a real triumph for the artist Elias García Martinez, whom no one in the world knew until that moment. He was born in the municipality of Requena in 1858, began drawing there, then studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of St. Carlos, then went to Barcelona and then to Zaragoza. He got married there, taught, painted, died - in a word, nothing impressive. The most interesting page in the artist’s biography was the creation of a fresco with the image of Jesus, who turned into a monkey in the 21st century.
The fact that the updated fresco will be beneficial was probably already understood in the church itself, which in recent days has been receiving inquisitive tourists in an intensive mode. And they can be understood - there are a lot of canonical images of Christ, but in the hood there is only one.
In his article, The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones rightly notes that the devout pensioner could make a career in the comic genre. Her act can only be compared with the restoration of the portrait of James Whistler's mother, carried out by the famous Mr. Bean, who literally sneezed on the painting and then, in horror, put it in order. You also need to have the gift of comic destruction, and by using it wisely, you can now build an entire strategy for popularizing art. Jones, however, advises paying attention to more worthy examples - paintings by old masters, or the frescoes of the early Renaissance in Palazzo Schifanoia.
» in original form (left)
and after “restoration” (right)
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Excerpt describing Furry Jesus
"Aliment de poison d"une ame trop sensible,"Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,
"Tendre melancolie, ah, viens me consoler,
“Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite
"Et mele une douceur secrete
"A ces pleurs, que je sens couler."
[Poisonous food for an overly sensitive soul,
You, without whom happiness would be impossible for me,
Tender melancholy, oh, come and comfort me,
Come, soothe the torment of my dark solitude
And add secret sweetness
To these tears that I feel flowing.]
Julie played Boris the saddest nocturnes on the harp. Boris read Poor Liza aloud to her and more than once interrupted his reading from the excitement that took his breath away. Meeting in a large society, Julie and Boris looked at each other as the only indifferent people in the world who understood each other.
Anna Mikhailovna, who often went to the Karagins, making up her mother’s party, meanwhile made correct inquiries about what was given for Julie (both Penza estates and Nizhny Novgorod forests were given). Anna Mikhailovna, with devotion to the will of Providence and tenderness, looked at the refined sadness that connected her son with the rich Julie.
“Toujours charmante et melancolique, cette chere Julieie,” she said to her daughter. - Boris says that he rests his soul in your house. “He has suffered so many disappointments and is so sensitive,” she told her mother.
“Oh, my friend, how attached I have become to Julie lately,” she said to her son, “I can’t describe to you!” And who can not love her? This is such an unearthly creature! Ah, Boris, Boris! “She fell silent for a minute. “And how I feel sorry for her maman,” she continued, “today she showed me reports and letters from Penza (they have a huge estate) and she is poor, all alone: she is so deceived!
Boris smiled slightly as he listened to his mother. He meekly laughed at her simple-minded cunning, but listened and sometimes asked her carefully about the Penza and Nizhny Novgorod estates.
Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholic admirer and was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of disgust for her, for her passionate desire to get married, for her unnaturalness, and a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility of true love still stopped Boris. His vacation was already over. He spent whole days and every single day with the Karagins, and every day, reasoning with himself, Boris told himself that he would propose tomorrow. But in the presence of Julie, looking at her red face and chin, almost always covered with powder, at her moist eyes and at the expression of her face, which always expressed a readiness to immediately move from melancholy to the unnatural delight of marital happiness, Boris could not utter a decisive word: despite the fact that for a long time in his imagination he considered himself the owner of Penza and Nizhny Novgorod estates and distributed the use of income from them. Julie saw Boris's indecisiveness and sometimes the thought occurred to her that she was disgusting to him; but immediately the woman’s self-delusion came to her as a consolation, and she told herself that he was shy only out of love. Her melancholy, however, began to turn into irritability, and not long before Boris left, she undertook a decisive plan. At the same time that Boris's vacation was ending, Anatol Kuragin appeared in Moscow and, of course, in the Karagins' living room, and Julie, unexpectedly leaving her melancholy, became very cheerful and attentive to Kuragin.
A Spanish pensioner tried to independently restore a 19th-century fresco - one of the main attractions of the local church. The result was disastrous.
A fresco by Elias García Martínez depicting Jesus Christ graced a church near Zaragoza for over a hundred years.
Art Over the years, it has received some damage: some of the fragments have been erased due to the high humidity in the room, and in some places the paint has crumbled.
Then the 80-year-old woman brought paints to the church and completed the missing details.
According to BBC correspondent Christian Fraser, instead of the Savior on the fresco, it turned out to be something similar to a hairy monkey in a shapeless tunic. Martinez's fine work was hidden by crudely applied paint.
The parishioner soon realized she had damaged the ancient work and contacted the local council, who are hoping to restore the fresco.
The image of the “restored” fresco spread all over the world and attracted the attention of thousands of Internet users.
“I am very glad that my church and my city became known to the whole world thanks to me, although this was not my intention when I began restoring the fresco,” explains Jimenez.
As a result of enormous attention and mass criticism, Jimenez was acutely worried about what happened.
“She spends every summer in the temple,” explains Jose Maria Aznar, who is responsible for the maintenance of the church. “All these years, Cecilia has helped us restore the church without any problems. At first she was afraid to touch the fresco, seeing that it was badly damaged, but one morning she took her brushes and, without discussing it with anyone, began to “restore” it.
Although Ms. Jimenez has her detractors, many people support her. Hundreds of fans sent her letters of approval.
“I want to thank you for the support I receive from all over the world,” says Jimenez. “Thanks to her, I feel much better now.”
“She told my wife what she had done, she said, 'I retouched the mural and now it looks terrible, I have to leave town, I'll leave it like this for now, but when I come back I'll fix it,' explains Aznar. “But, despite her good will, I, as the person in charge of the temple, had to inform the mayor’s office of Borja.
After this, local authorities came to the church to analyze what happened. They later published their findings on a blog. They were posted on Facebook, and Borja and its residents gained worldwide fame.
Spanish art experts are planning to hold a meeting in the church to discuss the restoration plan.
Juan Maria Oeda, a member of the city council for cultural affairs, which is involved in the case, said that the culprit is ready to meet with experts and tell them what materials she used.
"I think she [the pensioner] had the best intentions. If we fail to restore the mural, we will hang a photo of the work on the wall of the church," Oeda said.
The artistic value of the fresco is not very great, but local residents appreciated it.
According to the BBC correspondent, as luck would have it, a local restoration center had just received a donation from the artist's granddaughter, which was intended to restore the fresco.
On August 21, a small article appeared in the Spanish edition of Heraldo, which talked about how badly a resident of the small town of Borja, an 80-year-old pensioner, restored the fresco "Ecce Homo" ("Here is the man"), painted by the artist Elias García Martínez. The publication included photographs of the fresco depicting Jesus Christ before and after restoration. In the updated version of the work, Christ was unrecognizable - the fresco began to resemble a child’s drawing, depicting either a monkey or a fluffy potato with eyes.
After the publication in Heraldo, a real scandal erupted around the act of Cecilia Jimenez, who decided to restore the fresco, which, according to various sources, dates back to the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Some attacked the old woman with severe criticism, while others came to the defense of the elderly Spaniard, proclaiming her the new Munch and Modigliani rolled into one. Be that as it may, the image of Jesus Christ created by Jimenez seems to have already occupied its niche in modern art.
Cecilia Jimenez told reporters that she began working on the restoration of the "Ecce Homo" fresco located on a church column several years ago. According to a parishioner of the church, she was upset by the condition of the work, which was deteriorating due to the humidity in the premises of the religious building.
The pensioner, as she herself claims, turned to the priest, and he allegedly agreed for her to carry out restoration work. “Of course, everyone knew about what I was doing. When people came to church, they saw that I was drawing. The rector knew. How could I do such things without permission?” Jimenez was quoted by the media. At the same time, representatives of the church claim that they knew nothing about the artistic work of their elderly parishioner.
One way or another, the restoration, which began in 2010, was completed in the summer of 2012. The results of Cecilia Jimenez's work were revealed a couple of weeks ago, when specialists arrived at the church to assess the condition of the fresco depicting Christ in order to draw up a plan for restoration work. The restoration was supposed to be done at the expense of the granddaughter of the author of the fresco, Teresa Martinez - it was she who allocated the money and sent it to the church.
Arriving in Borja, experts discovered instead of a fresco something completely different - a primitive image of a certain creature with a fur-covered head (optionally, dressed in a woolen bonnet), sadly turned to the side. Staring down from the fresco was, as BBC News wrote, "a pencil sketch of a very hairy monkey in a baggy tunic." Only this very dimensionless tunic reminded of the original appearance of “Ecce Homo” - both before and after the restoration it was beetroot color (by the way, as Teresa Martinez noted, Cecily Jimenez’s tunic turned out not as bad as everything else). The church in Borja promised that the furry Jesus will disappear - the fresco is planned to be restored again, this time by professionals.
After the news spread in the English-language press about the most unsuccessful restoration in the history of art, a campaign was launched on the Internet to preserve the furry Jesus (bloggers have already managed to give Jimenez’s work a new name - “Ecce Mono”, which they translated as “Behold the monkey”). Of course, the creation of an elderly Spanish woman in just a few hours became one of the most popular Internet memes - “photophotos” of a furry Jesus can be found.
People build houses and paint pictures, create household items and art. By coming into contact with such objects every day, we unconsciously “influence” them, leading to wear and destruction. Houses become cracked like the paint on a painting, clothes wear out, and books become scuffed. That is why, along with the art of creation, the art of restoration appeared - restoration. Anything that loses its aesthetic appearance at a certain stage of time needs restoration. This is a responsible and labor-intensive process that requires the practical skills of an artist, and therefore history knows not only high-quality examples of restorations, but also very depressing ones. About such unsuccessful examples of restoration of works of art in this article.
Brighter, higher, stronger!
French art experts started a real scandal, accusing the Louvre of a terrible restoration. It is worth noting that we are talking about a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. This is not an ordinary portrait of a noble person, but a work painted with the brush of the greatest master of painting. The essence of the accusations boils down to the excessive brightness that the canvas acquired after restoration work. This degree of brightness, according to experts, does not correspond to the author’s original idea. The Louvre notes that this was the most discussed restoration of all that was planned, and the committee approached the work with particular care. But these are all colorful words, but in fact, two representatives of the museum left the committee in protest against the inappropriate restoration. These are Ségolène Bergeon Langle, who was responsible for the work of restorers in all the national museums of France, and Jean-Pierre Cusant, the former curator of paintings at the Louvre. In their opinion, during the restoration work, important analyzes were not carried out that would determine the harmful effects of a potent solvent. Langal and Cusan generally considered the use of solvent unacceptable, but British masters stated that the materials would not spoil Leonardo’s unique pictorial effect, called sfumato. The committee ultimately assessed the work of the restorers as acceptable, but independent experts agree that lightening the surface significantly spoiled the painting. Perhaps the British restorers added brightness so that we could see the masterpiece as it originally looked in da Vinci’s workshop, because some paint pigments darken over time and lose their richness.
Sad pictures
Restoration of historical heritage is always of great importance in every state. These could be castles, buildings, paintings or frescoes. In our case, the object of work was a centuries-old fresco of the Qing Dynasty, located in the temple on Phoenix Mountain. The drawings that adorned the walls were in a deplorable state, the outlines of the figures had lost clarity, and the paint, worn out by time, had noticeably peeled off. The enterprising rector of the temple himself organized a collection of donations for restoration; this required 660 thousand dollars. During the restoration work, many violations were committed, and the saddest thing is that the artist practically painted new characters that do not repeat the plot of the original painting. Restoration categorically does not allow the creation of a new image on top of the old one, but only touches up the necessary fragments. Visitors to the temple note that the beautiful fresco has been hopelessly damaged and looks like a cheap decoration. Two officials responsible for carrying out such work were fired, but the customer noted that he was satisfied with the result. Unfortunately, it is obvious that the use of simple colors and the artist’s style showed the world cartoon scenes in the halls of an ancient Chinese temple.
Fluffy Jesus
Sometimes unsuccessful restorations can become the object of more than just disappointment and criticism. This happened with the fresco depicting the image of Christ in the Temple of Mercy. The temple is located in the provincial town of Bohra, the author of the fresco is Elias Garcia Martinez. A parishioner of the temple decided that the work needed restoration work and decided to personally do it. In 2010, 80-year-old pensioner Cecilia Jimenez began personal restoration; according to her, the rector of the temple allowed her to do this, but this information was not officially confirmed. The process was completed in the summer of 2012, and Cecilia’s work literally blew up the Internet when the pictures went online. The finished work resembled more of a hairy monkey or, upon closer inspection, a Jesus in a fur hat. Experts were outraged, summing up that this was the worst restoration work in history. Perhaps this is so, but Cecilia Jimenez, in addition to her ill-wishers, had defenders who pointed out the old age of the pensioner, and the uproar was a consequence of her kindness and desire to help the temple. And the help was really significant. The unsuccessful restoration attracted a huge number of tourists, and the temple collected charitable donations amounting to over 50 thousand euros.
wet business
Innovative artists surprise the public not with paintings that are familiar to the eye, but with installations and art objects that are assembled from all available materials. Contemporary art goes so far beyond understanding that sometimes very funny things happen to it. One of these occurred in the Dortmund gallery with the participation of a conscientious cleaning lady. The woman who kept order ruined the work of art, thinking it was just a wet spot. The piece was called “When the Ceiling Started to Dribble” by sculptor Martin Kipenberger. The art object was a rubber trough, inside of which there was a wooden tower made of boards. The lime mortar at the bottom of the container imitated rainwater and was an integral part of the composition. The hardworking cleaning lady, however, made her own adjustments and carefully wiped up the puddle. The sculpture is valued at 800 thousand euros and was rented by the gallery from a private collector. Gallery workers claim that the job cannot be restored, and the unfortunate cleaning lady, whose details have not been disclosed, was reprimanded.
