Cecilia Giménez Zueco did not set out to become an art celebrity. She lived quietly in Borja, a small town in Aragón, Spain, painting for pleasure, attending church, and remaining largely invisible to the broader world. That anonymity ended abruptly in 2012, when an act of devotion made her an accidental art restorer and a global social media phenomenon.
Her attempt to badly touch up a fading fresco of Christ was caught by Facebook followers, who turned it into a viral meme shared on news platforms worldwide. Giménez died peacefully this week at 94, leaving behind a body of work (mostly flower paintings) in international public relations.
The fresco in question, Ecce Homo, was painted in 1930 by Elías García Martínez on the wall of the Sanctuary of Mercy. By the early 21st century, it had deteriorated badly. Giménez, who had no formal training in conservation, took it upon herself to intervene. What emerged was not restoration in any conventional sense but something closer to an accidental reinvention. Christ’s face dissolved into soft, rounded forms. The eyes slid. The features blurred. Within days, photographs ricocheted across the internet. The comparisons came fast and cruel. “Ecce Mono.” “Beast Jesus.” or Behold The Monkey, a joke, apparently, without an off switch.
What followed was ridicule at a scale rarely visited upon a single individual. Giménez, elderly and unprepared, became the unwilling centre of a scandal. But something else happened, quieter at first. People came to Borja. Then more people. Then thousands. The church that had been largely ignored for decades became a site of pilgrimage for selfies, driven in part by curiosity, in part by a collective wink, and in part by sincere engagement with a work that had slipped free of its original intent.
Giménez did not hide. Nor did she attempt to correct the record. She stayed. She spoke gently. She accepted interviews with a mix of embarrassment and resolve. Eventually, she exhibited her own paintings—small, earnest works that revealed none of the irony imposed upon her by strangers. The town introduced an entrance fee to see the fresco. The proceeds funded local projects. Borja, once peripheral, found itself pinned to the map.
Giménez did not destroy the fresco. She altered its fate. Ecce Homo ceased to function as devotional imagery and became something else entirely: a collective object, shaped as much by online circulation as by pigment on plaster.
Artists, musicians, filmmakers, and composers responded. Operas were staged. Documentaries commissioned. The image migrated across media, losing and gaining meaning with each iteration. Giménez, once framed as the villain of a conservation fail, became an accidental collaborator in a sprawling, participatory artwork authored by the public.
Eduardo Arilla, Borja’s mayor, described her as “one of the town’s most beloved residents,” praising her generosity and resilience. Those qualities were visible to anyone who watched her navigate the aftermath. She never claimed credit. Nor did she express bitterness. If anything, she seemed quietly astonished that a private gesture could unravel into something so vast.
Zueco was not a trained artist, nor a restorer, nor an intentional provocateur. Yet her intervention raised questions that continue to unsettle the field: Who controls an image once it circulates? Where does authorship end? What happens when failure becomes fertile ground?
Cecilia Giménez Zueco will be remembered not for mastery but for rupture. For reminding the art world—against its will—that meaning is not always authored, that reverence can misfire, and that even the smallest acts can tilt the cultural axis. In Borja, Ecce Homo remains on the wall, unchanged. It no longer asks to be fixed. It simply insists on being seen.