Overview
Botched Ecce Homo Painting, also known as “Potato Jesus”, refers to the failed restoration of a century-old Spanish devotional fresco, executed by an elderly amateur art restorer. The result of the botched restoration spawned a photoshop meme, in which the ruined painting was edited on to other famous works of art, or vice versa, it has also had other miscellaneous meme traits, such as captioning, rage comic and dolan duck iterations.
Background
On August 21st, 2012, the Spanish publication Heraldo[2] published an article about a failed painting restoration performed by an elderly woman named Cecilia Jiménez. Jiménez wished to restore a damaged fresco created by Spanish painter Elías García Martínez named Ecce Homo (“Behold the Man”), which was donated to the Santuario de Misericordia Church in the Spanish town of Borja. According to the church, Jiménez restored the painting without permission, though she claimed the priest had allowed her to do so. After assessing the damage caused by the restoration, the church announced they would be hiring a professional restorer to attempt to undo the botched job, though many in Spain and around the world have protested to keep the painting.
Notable Developments
Online Reaction
On August 21st, 2012, Redditor rolmos submitted a post to the /r/pics[5] subreddit titled “An old church in Spain needed to restore a worn out painting. They hired the wrong person”, which included photographs of the painting before and after it was altered. Within two days, the post received over 11,000 upvotes and 750 comments. Redditor donosti replied to the post with an edited version of the failed restoration made to appear as if it were an illustration of a lion (shown below, left). On August 22nd, a 4chan thread featured the painting referring to it as “Potato Jesus” (shown below, right), which referenced the I Can Count to Potato image macro series. The thread has not yet been archived.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] elEconomista.es – Una anciana de Borja restaura mal un fresco… y consigue la mofa en Twitter
[2] Heraldo.es – La ‘restauración’ de una pintura mural en una iglesia de Borja acaba en chapuza
[3] La Voz de Galicia.es – La restauradora: «El cura lo sabía»
[4] Facebook.com – Facebook page
[5] Reddit – An old church in Spain needed to restore a worn out painting. They hired the wrong person.