Spanish town marks anniversary of botched ‘Ecce Homo’ fresco

A pro-bono, and botched, restoration of a Jesus Christ fresco in a small-town Spanish church — an incident that not only went viral online, but also quickly became a target of global ridicule — has now reached its newest phase: an event worthy of local celebration.

This weekend, the town hall of Borja, Spain — a municipality in the nation’s northern Zaragoza province with a population of roughly 5,000 — will fête the 10th anniversary of Cecilia Giménez’s kind-hearted, yet unfortunate, work on the “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) with a full itinerary of programming, The Post has learned.

More than the 10th anniversary of the artistic snafu, it also marks the event’s progression from a worldwide embarrassment, to economic saving grace, to a lesson in forgiveness and support.

On Saturday, and with Giménez — now 91 — in attendance, the town hall will host a commemorative gala in the 430-seat Cervantes Theater set to include select performances from the comic “Behold the Man” opera sung by local soloists, as well as awards for Spanish journalists who followed the story. It’s expected to bring in a full house.

On Sunday, and at a local cinema, Borja will broadcast a documentary based on the summer 2012 incident — an unfinished restoration that turned an image of Christ in a crown of thorns into an amorphous portrait that’s long been likened to a potato and a monkey — that’s also set to win an award at a local film festival.

“The 10th anniversary of the incident is celebrated because the failed restoration had a great worldwide repercussion — and for Borja, it has been very important [because] our city and our rich heritage have been made known,” Borja’s mayor, Eduardo Arilla, told The Post via email. “Cecilia is very popular. She has the support of a large majority of [people from Borja], because everything she did was done with good intentions.”

That said, Giménez’s work wasn’t always registered as such. Giménez, an amateur painter then in her 80s — and a longtime Sanctuary of Mercy church parishioner who had performed a number of approved “Ecce Homo” restorations over the years — found herself in the global spotlight after lending her most recent touch. A devotee of the 1930 work by the minor Spanish artist Elías García Martínez, which to this day remains on display in that church, Giménez sought to reverse the fresco’s flaking paint caused by humid air.

“So I wet the painting, making broad strokes. Then I left it to dry and went on [vacation] for two weeks, thinking I would finish the restoration when I returned,” she told the Guardian in a 2015-published article. In that span of time, the Spanish media received word of what had happened — and the news rapidly spread internationally. Ultimately, the church forbade her from finishing it. “When I came back, everybody in the world had heard about ‘Ecce Homo.’ The way people reacted still hurts me, because I wasn’t finished with the restoration. I still think about how if I hadn’t gone on holiday, none of this would have ever happened.”

It didn’t take long for “Ecce Homo” to become known as “Ecce Mono,” or “Behold the Monkey” — and in the aftermath, journalists reportedly hounded Giménez with photographs and questions, which made her fall into a depression. (She visited a psychiatrist and was prescribed medicine for it.)

The fresco remains impossible to restore — and controversies around it in its earliest days swirled, including the artist’s heirs threatening to sue Giménez for the good deed gone wrong, but that never happened.

What did happen, however, is that “Ecce Homo” grew into an international spectacle that brought in tourists at a time when Borja needed them.

By 2016, and during a period when Spain still felt the burn of the 2008 recession, more than 160,000 visitors flocked to the church to see it with their own eyes and snap photos. They even purchased “Ecce Homo” merchandise, such as mugs and pens — then priced at $7 and $2 respectively — and ate at local restaurants, all of which allowed Borja to remain financially stable.

The pocket-change admission fee went in full toward a church-affiliated nursing home. A portion of the souvenir proceeds went to Giménez, who used the money to care for her son José Antonio, now in his 60s, who has cerebral palsy. The two of them, with Giménez currently having health issues of her own, live together in a local nursing home.

Over the last decade, mayor Arilla told The Post, “we estimate that [“Ecce Homo”] has had some 300,000 visits from more than 110 countries.”

As the years have gone on, Giménez’s “mind began to fail her,” her niece, Marisa Ibáñez, told The Post. She added that Giménez is no longer aware of what happened in 2012 — and in her mind, she imagines an event that didn’t happen — and despite her previous struggles — it’s not one that causes her pain. “She thinks that everything went really well,”

“Simply, she sees how people show her love, and that makes her tremendously happy,” said Ibáñez. “That love is her engine of life.”

That comes after Giménez “accepted everything that life gave her with humility and also with great integrity,” said Ibáñez. “The only thing that managed to destabilize her was being ridiculed around the world, but with the love of the people and her family, she was able to overcome it.”

For Andrew Flack, the 70-year-old New Jersey-based co-creator of the “Behold the Man” opera, who will also be in attendance in Spain this weekend, that’s the driving narrative.

“In our story, she is really the heroine,” said Flack, who co-created the work with composer Paul Fowler, and this weekend marks its second staged performance in Borja. It will even debut next year in Las Vegas to kick off the 25th anniversary season of Opera Las Vegas. “She’s the one who made a mistake — but gosh, she sat with it and she lived with it and she thought her faith would pull her through, and it did. It’s really the idea of faith and forgiveness … she forgave her neighbors for treating her so poorly. Her magnanimous quality and religious forgiveness — the teaching of that — really helped her get through this.”

The Saturday evening operatic numbers will be directed by Esmeralda Jiménez, featuring members from her own chorus. For her, participation is an act of support.

“I am not proud of ‘Ecce Homo,’ but we do have affection for [Giménez], who is a normal woman from Borja — and the way the events unfolded 10 years ago made the town have to position itself with her,” Jiménez told The Post. “These 10 years have taught us to take this issue with humor and see the positive side, and [whether the incident has been good or bad], it has been priceless publicity.”

That’s the silver lining that has brought matters full circle.

“The town is healed,” said Flack.