January 30, 2020
The Lamb's Uncanny New Face: Restoring the Ghent Altarpiece
A 2020 restoration of the van Eycks' Ghent Altarpiece revealed a startlingly human-faced lamb hidden under centuries of overpaint — and went viral.
The Ghent Altarpiece, completed by the van Eyck brothers in 1432, is one of the most important — and most stolen — paintings in history. A meticulous restoration revealed, in 2020, that its central mystic lamb had a startlingly human, forward-staring face hidden beneath centuries of overpaint.
The 'humanoid lamb' instantly went viral, equal parts unsettling and hilarious, but it was also a genuine art-historical revelation: this was the van Eycks' original, intense vision, long obscured.
Beneath the memes lay serious science. The restoration peeled back the work of later, more timid hands to recover the radical naturalism that made the van Eycks pioneers of oil painting.
Image: “Lamgods open” — Jan van Eyck / Presumably Hubert van Eyck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.