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The elderly woman from Spain who made international headlines for her poorly executed repair job on a cherished religious painting has passed away at the age of 94.

Cecilia Giménez, a resident of the town of Borja in northeast Spain, became a global sensation thirteen years ago after she undertook to restore a 100-year-old fresco titled Ecce Homo located in her parish church.

Giménez's handiwork spread across the internet and was dubbed "Monkey Christ", largely due to the resulting depiction of Christ's head bearing a resemblance to a furry primate.

Local Announcement and Tribute

The 94-year-old's death was confirmed by Borja's mayor, Eduardo Arilla, in a social media post, where he acknowledged her as a "passionate enthusiast of painting from a very early age".

"Descansa en paz Cecilia, your memory will live on with us," Arilla wrote.

Arilla also paid tribute to Giménez's "famous restoration of Ecce Homo" in the summer of 2012, which "due to the poor state of conservation it was in, Cecilia, acting in good faith, chose to apply new paint over the original".

The Painting's History and the Now-Infamous Act

The Ecce Homo ("This is the Man" in Latin) painted by nineteenth-century painter Elias Garcia Martinez had been held for over a hundred years in the Santuario de la Misericordia near Zaragoza.

In 2012, Giménez, then 81, explained that church members had "traditionally fixed everything here", and that she had received permission from the local priest to do the work.

She added at the time that anyone who came into the church would have observed she was painting over the original artwork.

A Surprising Economic Lifeline

The aftermath of the restoration spawned the "Monkey Christ" internet phenomenon and saw the previously sleepy town of Borja quickly become a major visitor attraction.

The town, which had in the past seen only five thousand tourists per year, attracted over 40,000 tourists by 2013, and managed to raise more than €50,000 for charity from the attention.

Today, officials estimate that between 15,000 and 20,000 tourists visit Borja each year to view the notorious portrait, which is now protected by a pane of glass.

Legacy and Community Support

After recovering from the wave of criticism, with support from local residents and others globally, Giménez later stage an exhibition of her paintings featuring twenty-eight of her own works.

She was praised by Borja's mayor for her kind-hearted nature and decades of dedication to the church.

In the end, what began as a sincere but flawed art repair forged an improbable piece of pop culture and provided remarkable tourist revenue to a small Spanish town.