Until recently, this octogenarian Spaniard was living a blameless life in the town of Borja near Zaragoza in the north-east of the country.

A religious woman, she could regularly to be seen attending mass in the Sanctuary Of Mercy Church where she is a longtime admirer of one of the building's frescoes, Ecce Homo. And so you can imagine her concern when water damage caused it to start flaking off the wall in an alarming fashion.

The century-old fresco was painted by Elias Garcia Martinez. He's currently spinning furiously in his grave as a result of what happened next: Gimenez took up her paintbrush and palette and set about restoring his work to its original glory.

But while glory may have been the aim, gory was the end result, as you can see below. "The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic," said the BBC's Christian Fraser when he dropped what he was doing and rushed to the crime scene. Others were even harsher in their critique of the elderly senora's artistic skills. "A movie werewolf," snapped one paper.

"The priest knew! He did!" Gimenez told reporters last week. It's a phrase we've sometimes heard in an altogether different context but here it was her explanation of how the eccentric restoration project had been allowed to continue unchecked. "How could you do something like that without permission?" she added, quite reasonably. She obviously hasn't been following the career of spray can prankster Banksy very closely.

The greatest irony is that the fresco was on the verge of being saved anyway: the artist's grand-daughter, Teresa Garcia, had recently sent a donation to a local centre that works to preserve artworks. Art historians will now view the damage before they decide how to proceed.

As these things have a habit of doing, internet wags with access to Photoshop have now applied the Gimenez method- ology to various other iconic images, among them the cover of Michael's Jackson's Bad album.

Elsewhere, however, this new version of the fresco has actually found favour. "In this country at least, I suppose the transfiguration reflects well the contemporary view on Christianity," wrote a British poster on one of the many news sites to have covered the case, "once a revered religion and institution, now seen as something comical and peculiar."

Tongue lolling fairly close to cheek, one poster in Seville said he found in Gimenez's update an avant-garde work combining primitive expressionism with the modernity of Munch and Modigliani, while reflecting "a simple and naïve popular mysticism."

Which begs the question: if they leave it as it is and it's daubed over again in a century's time, will there be the same amount of alboroto? That's the Spanish for brouhaha, by the way.

.... Cecilia Gimenez