Salamanca's 'botched' Michelangelo compared to Cecilia's Ecce Homo
Monday, July 25, 2016 @ 10:29 AM
CECILIA Jiménez's Ecce Homo restoration may have a successor - although as yet, it has not gone as viral as the 80-something parishioner's botched, or as the lady herself revealed later, unfinished, fresco.
A 17th-century statue of Michelangelo, the patron saint of the small village of Peñaranda de Bracamonte (Salamanca province) has been restored by an amateur artist - but local churchgoers are not happy.
They describe it as 'insulting', 'horrible' and 'ridiculous' - in the same way as locals in the village of Borja (Zaragoza province) did some years ago when they saw the results of the first stages of Cecilia's 19th-century Ecce Homo painting restoration, believing it to be the finished result.
Poor Cecilia took to her bed for two days, suffering panic attacks and depression as the village-wide backlash resulted in threats from the original artist's descendants to sue her for criminal damage and her half-finished repair job was mocked on the internet worldwide.
But the elderly amateur artist's black cloud had a silver lining, and in fact lined Borja's own pockets with silver: she would never have guessed that within two days of what she thought was the worst day of her life, a petition would be raised online to leave the fresco as it was, her style was being referred to even by experts as a new wave of religious art, and Ryanair was running international flights to Zaragoza for €1 for visitors to see her 'mistake'.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com