“Navarre’s own Ecce Homo.”
June 26, 2018 11:41 AM Subscribe
“For 500 years, the painted wooden effigy of St George that adorns a chapel in the Spanish town of Estella has been locked in a silent struggle against his old foe, the dragon. Today, however, the saint faces a different battle thanks to a feat of restoration that has prompted comparisons with the infamous “Ecce Homo Monkey Christ” and exasperated the mayor. [...] The restoration is believed to have been carried out by a handicrafts teacher at the request of the parish authorities of the Church of St Michael.” via: [The Guardian]
he looks like thomas the tank engine
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:54 AM on June 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:54 AM on June 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
Unfortunately the restoration job on St George is too good to be funny. It's not great, but it's completely passable. I can see why the owners of the sculpture would love for it to blow up like Ecce Homo Monkey Christ but this isn't going to cut it, they'd need to do something real goofy to his face for it to compare.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:55 AM on June 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:55 AM on June 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
Was Ecce Homo Monkey Christ ever fixed?
Yes it was.
posted by Fizz at 11:58 AM on June 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
Yes it was.
posted by Fizz at 11:58 AM on June 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
Fixed real good.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:59 AM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:59 AM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
Puts me in mind of this hilarious retouching work.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:06 PM on June 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:06 PM on June 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
St. George looks like if you added some buckles, he could be a minor final fantasy character, the one you forget to level up but need for the final boss fights. Monkey Christ is hilarious! He's so earnest and sweet and fuzzy.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:43 PM on June 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by betweenthebars at 12:43 PM on June 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
To lazily cut & paste my tweet o the subject: On one hand there’s s conversation to be had about community use vs preservationism. On the other, any couple of kids hanging around a Games Workshop store could show them a thing or two about painting knight figurines.
posted by rodlymight at 12:58 PM on June 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by rodlymight at 12:58 PM on June 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
The "fixed" one is the face of a knight who just dropped his keys through a sewer grate.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:18 PM on June 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:18 PM on June 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
True, a restoration should have been handled by experts for best results. Then again, it's folk art in every meaningful sense of the term, and against that standard, wonkiness doesn't matter so much. It's people doing their best to address the particular needs of their community, within that community, and does that deserve to be made the subject of fun for it?
(Well, Ecce Homo Monkey Christ does. That shit's hilarious.)
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:20 PM on June 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
(Well, Ecce Homo Monkey Christ does. That shit's hilarious.)
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:20 PM on June 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
It's people doing their best to address the particular needs of their community, within that community, and does that deserve to be made the subject of fun for it?
You're right to bring this up, I was thinking about this after I posted. It is probably a result of their needing to save money and not being able to afford the cost of a professional restoration artist.
It's still funny though.
posted by Fizz at 1:34 PM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
You're right to bring this up, I was thinking about this after I posted. It is probably a result of their needing to save money and not being able to afford the cost of a professional restoration artist.
It's still funny though.
posted by Fizz at 1:34 PM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
The small town of Borja, home to "Ecce Homo Monkey Christ," has seen a serious boom in tourism -- since Mrs. Cecilia Giménez ‘restoration’ more than 150,000 tourists have visited the town in order to see the painting on the walls of the small church – which charges a euro to enter – behind a clear plastic screen. And beyond that, it looks like the church is really capitalizing on the amateur restoration job (visitor photos via Google Maps; "Se Busca" translates to "Wanted"). Given that the gift shop photo is dated March 2018, I'm guessing that it hasn't been re-restored. In fact, it looks like there is now a whole exhibit of Jesus portraits in varying qualities, as well as a portrait of Cecilia Giménez and her restoration of the portrait (Google maps again).
To see how it once looked, here's a trio of portraits, including an image of Ecce Homo Christ a decade before its deterioration, via New York Times, and here's a stand-alone of the earlier version of the portrait on Wikimedia.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:01 PM on June 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
To see how it once looked, here's a trio of portraits, including an image of Ecce Homo Christ a decade before its deterioration, via New York Times, and here's a stand-alone of the earlier version of the portrait on Wikimedia.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:01 PM on June 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
I could try and summon up what little I remember reading about last year re: the shifting focus over the decades from restoration toward conservation in fine art archiving in order to avoid essentially damaging/erasing works in the attempt to "save" them, but if I'm honest I'll really accept any and every excuse to think fondly once more of Ecce Homo and just giggle and giggle and giggle all over again. It is somehow an endless source of joy, both in its goofy absurdity and also in the utter humanity of that whole situation.
posted by cortex at 2:26 PM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by cortex at 2:26 PM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I still feel—per an article comment at the time—the correct name should not be Ecce Homo Monkey Christ, but rather Rhesus Christ.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 4:48 PM on June 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 4:48 PM on June 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
"Ecce Homo Monkey Christ"
See, we call it the "Ecce Mono". It's snappier.
I know inept restorations that fuck up village parish works of art are funny on a superficial level, but this is just the latest in a very very long history of fucking up our artistic heritage. It used to be that parish priests would neglect watching over the church so thefts were usual in the 1980's (Erik the Belgian was a notorious thief) when the priest (or the monks and nuns) weren't selling artworks themselves. Here in Aragon we're in a conflict with the diocese of Lleida because the nuns of Sigena closed the nunnery and sold a bunch of valuable things that were catalogued since the 1930s and couldn't be sold. Fortunately they just sold it to Catalans instead of Americans -- the stuff in the Met's Cloisters branch is as good as lost to us.
This disregard for art is IMO a symptom of the Spanish parish clergy being mostly sexagenarians to octogenarians who got into a seminary during Francoism to get a proper meal, and who were taught pretty much nothing further than how to give Mass in Latin. Vocations in Spain declined after the Transition and are extremely thin nowadays. These priests have never been taught history of art or conservation despite being the guardians of the artistic heritage in their churches, and that's why you get amateurs like Cecilia Giménez or people from a handicrafts shop in Estella fucking with our art.
Anyway, the people I hate with all the fiery heat of a thousand solar furnaces are the assholes who decided in the 1950s-1970s that the Romanesque churches that had their frescoes painted over in white during the Baroque (and there are hundreds of them since by the 1600s frescoes from the 1100s were dirty and fugly in the extreme and the cheapest way to deal with that was to whitewash the walls and call it a day) should have all their paint removed with chisel and hammer so the bare rock was visible in an austere Council Vatican II way. So we lost most of the hidden Romanesque wall paintings and nowadays, save a few exceptions like this or this, Spanish Romanesque churches look like this instead of this.
(The last link is a reconstruction of the abse of Sant Climent of Tahull, which was ripped from the wall in the 1920s and can be conveniently visited at the MNAC in Barcelona)
tl;dr: opinions about art preservation, I has them.
posted by sukeban at 12:41 AM on June 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
See, we call it the "Ecce Mono". It's snappier.
I know inept restorations that fuck up village parish works of art are funny on a superficial level, but this is just the latest in a very very long history of fucking up our artistic heritage. It used to be that parish priests would neglect watching over the church so thefts were usual in the 1980's (Erik the Belgian was a notorious thief) when the priest (or the monks and nuns) weren't selling artworks themselves. Here in Aragon we're in a conflict with the diocese of Lleida because the nuns of Sigena closed the nunnery and sold a bunch of valuable things that were catalogued since the 1930s and couldn't be sold. Fortunately they just sold it to Catalans instead of Americans -- the stuff in the Met's Cloisters branch is as good as lost to us.
This disregard for art is IMO a symptom of the Spanish parish clergy being mostly sexagenarians to octogenarians who got into a seminary during Francoism to get a proper meal, and who were taught pretty much nothing further than how to give Mass in Latin. Vocations in Spain declined after the Transition and are extremely thin nowadays. These priests have never been taught history of art or conservation despite being the guardians of the artistic heritage in their churches, and that's why you get amateurs like Cecilia Giménez or people from a handicrafts shop in Estella fucking with our art.
Anyway, the people I hate with all the fiery heat of a thousand solar furnaces are the assholes who decided in the 1950s-1970s that the Romanesque churches that had their frescoes painted over in white during the Baroque (and there are hundreds of them since by the 1600s frescoes from the 1100s were dirty and fugly in the extreme and the cheapest way to deal with that was to whitewash the walls and call it a day) should have all their paint removed with chisel and hammer so the bare rock was visible in an austere Council Vatican II way. So we lost most of the hidden Romanesque wall paintings and nowadays, save a few exceptions like this or this, Spanish Romanesque churches look like this instead of this.
(The last link is a reconstruction of the abse of Sant Climent of Tahull, which was ripped from the wall in the 1920s and can be conveniently visited at the MNAC in Barcelona)
tl;dr: opinions about art preservation, I has them.
posted by sukeban at 12:41 AM on June 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
Oh and by the way, today's news are that the Cathedral of Cádiz lost four angels by Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán and they might have ended up in the trash or stolen. Because of fucking course.
posted by sukeban at 12:49 AM on June 27, 2018
posted by sukeban at 12:49 AM on June 27, 2018
On the other hand: a very nice gallery of the restored Pórtico da Gloria in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela that was unveiled today.
posted by sukeban at 9:34 AM on June 28, 2018
posted by sukeban at 9:34 AM on June 28, 2018
Update: thank goodness, the angels by Luisa Roldán have been found. The then canons of the cathedral (all of them deceased by now) wanted to thrown them in the trash around the year 2000 when they did some cleaning but someone kept them in their storage closet. This is what I meant earlier when I talked about the Spanish clergy being so cavalier about the art they have in custody.
posted by sukeban at 11:57 AM on July 2, 2018
posted by sukeban at 11:57 AM on July 2, 2018
« Older This expedition is already shaping up to be a gas | Rethinking the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Fizz at 11:42 AM on June 26, 2018