Searches for Ecce Homo Images in Google have surged in the past week. The searches appear to be related to recent news about a Spanish woman who tried to restore the 19th Century Spanish Fresco famous painting known as ‘Ecce Homo’ to it’s original glory. This story actually made me laugh rather a lot. The image below shows three versions of this ‘ecce homo’ painting. The first, on the left, is the original painted version. The one in the middle is the same original, which is fading away, thus a restoration clearly is required, and the third is the attempt this elderly Spanish woman had on the image to bring it back to how it originally looked. Of course, it looks exactly like the first image.

It’s been noted by Joe.ie as if “a kid was set loose with watercolours for the first time”, and quite frankly we found it hilarious that somebody could make this kind of mistake.

The family of the original painter didn’t even know it had been done, and only noticed when they popped into the gallery to check it was all okay. Of course you can only imagine how horrified they were.

You would expect the local Spanish community would also be horrified about this happening to one of their countries own works of art. Not at all. A petition has been signed by over 20,000 people voting for the new Fresco image to be kept the way it is. If it gains just 4,000 more votes, it will reach it’s target and we shall see it stay with us forever.

Of course, the internet of today see something like this, and rather than laugh, they create a meme out of it to make everybody else laugh. Here is one of our favourites so far.

The image is now known as “potato jesus” on the internet. Just imagine if these catastrophic actions were to happen to the famous Mona Lisa:

At least she’s smiling a bit more in it. Thanks to Systaime for that one.