Amid the storm of mockery and bad publicity over what became known as the Monkey Christ, Giménez took to her bed with an attack of anxiety, losing 17kg (37lb) in the process. However, she soon found that notoriety had an upside as people began bidding to buy her own art, which she sold on eBay, and she later donated the proceeds to a Catholic charity. The botched restoration became first an internet sensation and then a tourist attraction and the church began charging for admission. Ryanair laid on special flights to Zaragoza, the nearest airport, and today thousands of people continue to visit the village to see her work....
They made an opera about it:
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25 comments:
Love the happy ending and hope it's legit. Life is fascinating.
This whole thing is silly. No one can have any idea what Jesus actually looked like. Giminez’s picture is as good as any.
I'm making lemonade story
Good thing she didn't mess up the picture of Mohamed.
God works in mysterious ways.
Mexicans love murals for some reason.
She's Spanish? My bad.
Lucky for her it was only a depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ and not an Obama Senior Advisor.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Canon contains representations of Christ which are much different, and much older, than what the Romans came up with.
The Curse of Monkey Crisco. h/t Gimenez
No one can have any idea what Jesus actually looked like. Giminez’s picture is as good as any.
I beg to differ. After a few margaritas some Catholic girls unanimously admitted Jesus on the sad cross got them kind of hot as kids. Inguinal fold strikes again…
I guess I don’t know but can suspect Giminez’s image doesn’t do much for the ladies…
Jesus was a Jewish Peson of Tan (JPoT), an omnivore, and Homo sapien standing with Divine attribution.
Why is UTube asking me to 'sign in' to prove I'm 'not a bot'? I already know that I'm not a bot. And I don't need further proof that UTube is, in fact, a bot. I guess the video will just have to watch itself.
"...Giménez took to her bed with an attack of anxiety."
It would be a wad of soiled TP like The Guardian to describe the richly deserved shame for the destruction of a priceless work of 12th-century art as "an attack of anxiety."
Creeping Hinduism? (Monkey God)
"the destruction of a priceless work of 12th-century art"
The original work was painted — in 2 hours — in the year 1930. It was already in terrible condition, despite its relative newness, when Giménez got involved.
Nominative determinism has struck: "an opera based on the story written by Andrew Flack, a US public relations expert"
For several years, at my then-wonderful parish in Pennsylvania, our rector brought in a friend of hers who is an iconographer to run a week-long "icon workshop" ("If I call it a retreat, no one will come," she said). It was one of the deepest spiritual experiences of my life - so much so that for some years thereafter, I painted (or "wrote") icons on my own as an Advent and Lenten devotion.
The iconographer told us that icons could be viewed as family portraits: the skill of the iconographer lay in reproducing the existing image as perfectly as possible, not in putting her own artistic stamp on it. The hope was to produce an image that, if the friends of the pictured person saw it, would be instantly recognizable. The group of us who were making our own attempt at this task, none of us artists, were deeply grateful that this iconographer's skill could correct our errors - often with just a few tiny brush strokes. It was amazing.
Wednesday, the third day of the workshop, was hands and faces day. Watching the face of the saint (or of Christ) emerge from the darkness of the sankir* undercoat was - frankly it was like a miracle.
* Sankir is a color that's almost a non-color. It's sort of olive green, sort of brown, sort of ocher. It's the color of the shadows on a (semitic or European) person's skin. All flesh starts as sankir with no contrast - just a flat surface. The face or other body parts are built up from it by adding more and more light, in essence. Painting hands was my favorite - you basically paint the skeleton, the bones, over the featureless sankir undercoat, and then the musculature, and suddenly, when you lift your head from your work, what you're painting simply IS a hand.
"The original work was painted — in 2 hours .."
Like Schrodinger's lobsters there is confusion in the media as to the creation of the original, but two hours seems unlikely to this non-artist.
Narr: "Creeping Hinduism? (Monkey God)"
Yes, we need to hear from Hanuman Prodigious Leaper! CC, JSM
"..."the destruction of a priceless work of 12th-century art"
The original work was painted — in 2 hours — in the year 1930...."
I think I might be guilty of the same mistake: I read the story and then jumped to a memory of a famous botched restoration of Christ that happened a few years ago, where face of Christ in the old painting was shown pre-restoration, with an adoring Christ looking up from the cross in classical artfulness, but it had been transformed into a crude grade school caricature.
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