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Restorer's Notebook: Uncovering the Gaze of the Mystic Lamb
Hélène poised the surgical scalpel a millimetre above the oak panel, her knuckles white inside powder-free nitrile gloves. Beyond the soundproof glass wall of the restoration studio in Ghent, dozens of museum visitors pressed close against the velvet cordon, watching her every movement on closed-circuit monitors. Beneath her stereomicroscope lay the central altar panel of Jan and Hubert van Eyck's masterpiece, painted in 1432. For over four centuries, scholars and worshippers had revered the docile, pastoral profile of the sacrificial lamb. Yet as Hélène eased away a tiny square of sixteenth-century overpaint with a micro-swab soaked in mild solvent, her breath caught. Underneath the familiar animal muzzle, two distinct, frontally positioned eyes were emerging from the dark tempera.
Rarely has an art historical discovery provoked such immediate institutional dread.