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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 . What the international advisory committee had authorized was routine surface cleaning and varnish removal ; what the scalpel actually revealed was a radical artistic disruption . In 1550 , two Netherlandish painters had overpainted nearly forty percent of Van Eyck's original panel , deliberately concealing the lamb's disturbing , quasi - human countenance beneath an anatomical sheep snout . Had the restorers proceeded blindly with mechanical scraping , those delicate fifteenth - century glazes would have been lost forever . Some committee members urged caution , arguing that the sixteenth - century intervention had acquired historical legitimacy of its own . They wished to halt the solvent treatment ; Hélène did not . To leave the later overpaint intact would be to privilege historical prudery over Van Eyck's daring theological intent . What the original artist had created was not a peaceful farm animal , but an incandescent , confrontational incarnation of the divine : a creature possessing large , piercing eyes set forward like a human face , gazing straight into the soul of the viewer . Only after three months of multispectral scans and macro X - ray fluorescence did the council grant permission to proceed . Millimetre by millimetre , working between cardiac pulses to steady her fingers , Hélène rolled away the yellowed varnish and the cosmetic repaints of four hundred years . When the final residue lifted , the true Lamb of God stared out from the panel with fierce , hypnotic intensity . Outside the glass , the crowd fell into a hushed stillness . What they beheld was not the comfortable , pastoral symbol of tradition , but the raw , unblinking brilliance of the Northern Renaissance .
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