A friend tipped me off to the story of the “monkey Jesus,” a botched fresco-restoration effort by an elderly woman in a Spanish parochial church. “The once dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic,” the BBC story reports. This is fine: paintings sometimes get destroyed. But the Monkey Jesus has taken on cult significance that it did not have before, and novena candles are being produced with the image of the Monkey Jesus and have made it to Brooklyn bodegas. This is not without significance.
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