The Ecce Homo is without a doubt the work of art that has had the most repercussions today. As a general rule, paintings, sculptures, architectural works and other expressions of art tend to transcend because of their meaning, their beauty or the hard process of creation they have gone through. The Ecce Homo de Borja, however, has gone down in history for undergoing a restoration that greatly damaged what was the original piece by Elías García Martinez, which ended up in a poor state of conservation. In little more than 100 years, the work showed signs of deterioration, and Cecilia Gimenez, a painting fan, wanted to try to carry out a complete restoration of the work based on good faith and love. The result, however, is not what we expected.
The evolution of Ecce Homo, from left to right.
The result is the Ecce Homo that we all know, a somewhat deformed drawing that went viral in 2012 and has even achieved a higher popularity rating than the original work. When one thinks of Ecce Homo, the restoration made by Cecilia Giménez quickly comes to mind. Right now, you can even see the work wandering through social networks as a meme. Its artistic legacy may be questionable, but the impact it has had on our present day has been achieved by few works of art. That act of restoration branded an act of vandalism, but it became a tourist attraction that attracted up to 40,000 visitors. Now, through an AI similar to that of DALL-E and DALL-E Mini, a complete restoration has been carried out showing how Borja’s Ecce Homo work would originally look.
An absolute transformation
Through imag2imag, the Reddit user StableDiffusion has published an image of the improved Ecce Homo de Borja, perhaps as it should have looked at the time and not as the one we have finally ended up with. There are things that are not understood about the AI-generated delay, such as the transformation of the lower part of the painting into an arm. But when it comes to details of the face, clothing and even part of the lighting, the AI has greatly improved the work done before.
— This article was automatically translated from its original language —
