Very few of us find fame quite as late, or quite as brutally, as Cecilia Giménez did in the summer of 2012. The Spanish amateur artist was already 81 when her efforts to restore a decent, if unremarkable, fresco of the scourged Christ brought her a renown that almost destroyed her.

Almost overnight, Giménez, who died on Monday at the age of 94, was stripped of her quiet existence in the north-eastern Spanish town of Borja, and recast as the well-meaning and unwitting creator of what would become known around the English-speaking world as Monkey Christ. In Spain, the meme phenomenon was dubbed Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), a play on the painting’s Latin title Ecce Homo (Behold the Man).

For weeks, months and even years, the side-by-side images of Elías García Martínez’s original and Giménez’s unfinished restoration went viral globally, becoming shorthand for bungled efforts and disastrous outcomes.

There was, however, more to that summer’s events in Borja’s Santuario de Misericordia than the initial reports – including my own – suggested. Giménez, who was married in the church, had already spent two decades tending to the fresco, trying to protect it against the ravages of time and water damage. She was also only midway through her restoration, and had headed off on a two-week holiday when news of Monkey Christ started spreading.

“Reporters told the world the story of the old woman who couldn’t paint and had ruined a painting,” Giménez told the Guardian in 2015. “That’s not true. It is true that I haven’t done many portraits. But if it hadn’t been for me, the painting would have probably disappeared long ago.”

Before and after: the Ecce Homo mural and Giménez’s restoration Composite: Ricardo Ostal/AP

By then, though, the damage was already done. Stressed and embarrassed, she lost a lot of weight as she worried about the consequences of her well-meaning actions, and the ridicule they had brought on her home town.

But little by little, a small miracle took place. The people of Borja rallied around Giménez, congregating outside her house to applaud her, and the town became a popular, if unlikely, tourist destination. These days, the Santuario de Misericordia is home to a busy museum celebrating the church’s renown, and to an equally busy shop selling every conceivable piece of Monkey Christ merchandise. From shelf after shelf, the familiar and oddly benign image of Giménez’s handiwork stares down at visitors from wine bottles, teddy bears, T-shirts, mugs and mousepads.

The hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who have flocked to Borja over recent years have brought fame – and a not insubstantial amount of cash – to the town. That money doesn’t just pay the salaries of the sanctuary-museum’s two caretakers; it also covers the care home fees of local people who would not otherwise be able to live there. Among the home’s residents were Giménez herself and her surviving son, who has cerebral palsy. And then in 2023, an affectionate comic opera called Behold the Man opened in Las Vegas, celebrating Giménez and her incredible impact on Borja.

When I met Giménez in Borja in the winter of 2018, her memory was beginning to fail and so her niece, Marisa Ibáñez, sat in on the interview. By then, Giménez, who clutched a large handbag crammed with press cuttings, had made peace with what had befallen her and told me she would do it all again.

“It was done with good intentions and despite what happened, it’s been a good thing for Borja,” she said. “People from all over the world are visiting the sanctuary now. That’s the best medicine. I used to cry a lot over all this but I don’t cry any more because I can see how much I’m loved.”

When I think of Giménez, who was laid to rest on Tuesday afternoon, I’m reminded of The Saint, a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. It tells the story of a man who spends years in Rome, hoping to persuade the Vatican that the miraculously weightless and perfectly preserved body of his daughter is proof of her candidacy for canonisation. Only at the end of the story does it become clear that it is the father, through his long years of patient devotion to his daughter’s cause, who is the real saint.

And so it was with the elderly people and this devout woman from Borja. We were all too busy chuckling over the meme to see that the incomplete restoration was never the story – the restorer was.

In her many years of quiet devotion and in the dignity with which she endured so much, Giménez was a rare blaze of grace and humility in an ever-darker, ever-crueller world. That – and not Monkey Christ – was her life’s work and its legacy.

Towards the end, Giménez’s dementia proved unexpectedly merciful, devouring the bitter and painful memories of her humiliation and leaving her with only positive recollections. She had, Ibáñez told me, “turned it into a beautiful story”.

The headlines of the past 24 hours have spoken of “the woman who immortalised the Ecce Homo” and “the woman who turned Borja’s Ecce Homo into a global attraction”. But as her niece pointed out when we spoke a couple of years ago, Cecilia Giménez can be summed up in a single word: “You can look up lots of adjectives to describe her but I think the one that describes her best is ‘good’. It’s a word that’s used so lightly that we don’t realise what it means.”

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