Focus restoration of the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb. First installment: the history and materials

A capital work of the Flemish Renaissance and among the most highly regarded and admired in the entire history of art, the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb, a masterpiece created by Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, c. 1390 - Bruges, 1441) and his older brother, Hubert van Eyck (? - Ghent, 1426), was shown for centuries in St. Bavon’s Cathedral in Ghent: painted in 1432 for the local nobleman Joos Vijd, for exactly a century it has been back in the place for which it was made, after a long and troubled history that has seen it disassembled and reassembled several times, hidden by the local community to escape wars and looting, stolen by the French during the Napoleonic occupation of Belgium, dismembered and sold in its parts until, in 1920, the work was finally reunited. Exactly one hundred years later, the story of the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb is enriched by a new chapter: the long and careful restoration the work underwent. In this four-part focus we will try to understand, thanks to the material provided to us by the technicians of the KIK-IRPA (Royal Institute of Fine Arts) in Brussels who worked on this complex intervention, what operations were conducted on this polyptych, how it looked before, how it will look after, why it was important to intervene, what the results are.

Beyond the various vicissitudes the work has undergone over the centuries, there have been many interventions through which the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb has been reworked several times over the centuries. The historiographer Marcus van Vaernewyck (Ghent, 1518 - 1569) reports in his Den Spieghel der Nederlandscher Audtheydt, published in 1568, that the first intervention dates as early as 1550: a particularly unfortunate restoration because, according to his testimony (the only one, however, to that effect), it would have involved the destruction of the predella (or at least that is what we think is most likely: Van Vaernewyck, in the text, uses the term voet, which literally means “foot”). Two important painters of the time, the Dutchman Jan van Scorel (Alkmaar, 1495 - Utrecht, 1562) and the Flemish Lanceloot Blondeel (Poperinge, 1498 - Bruges, 1561) would have been called in to remedy the many problems that arose as a result of the unfortunate restoration: we learn this again from Van Vaernewyck’s chronicle. It is to this period that the first repainting of the work dates back (overall, the repainting carried out between the 16th and 17th centuries, as the documentation campaign conducted for the current restoration discovered, covered more than half of the pictorial surface, or about 70 percent, in some places even with several overlapping layers): we do not know for sure whether it was Van Scorel and Blondeel themselves who carried out the retouches, but we can imagine that the intervention served to make the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb more akin to the religiosity of the time. This would explain the heavy retouching undergone by the figure of the lamb itself, which, as was discovered a few weeks ago, originally had a totally different, much more humanized appearance than the sixteenth-century lamb, i.e., the one we had always known so far.

In the history of the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb there are other important passages and other restorations or rearrangements. A new restoration occurs in 1612, at the hands of a certain Novelliers, a painter from Brussels. This is followed in 1663 by a cleaning carried out by Antoine van den Heuvel, and a further restoration conducted in 1731 (and in the meantime the panels continued to be disassembled and repositioned). Further work was carried out after 1816, that is, after the polyptych, which had returned to Ghent following the fall of Napoleon (who had taken it to France), was sold in its individual parts. Between 1823 and 1824, the compartments that had been purchased by Frederick William III of Prussia are examined in Berlin, and further restoration is carried out between 1825 and 1829 (thirty years later, however, it is the turn of the compartments that remained in Ghent). New analyses are conducted in 1922, thus shortly after the reunification of the polyptych and its return to the Cathedral of St. Bavon: in 1937, the compartments with Adam and Eve undergo an intervention by the restorer Van der Veken of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and then the looming Second World War necessitates the work’s hospitalization in a safe place. The Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb was thus shipped to Pau, in the French Pyrenees, where it underwent further investigation to ascertain its state of preservation. Misfortune, however, again befell the polyptych, for on August 3, 1942, it was requisitioned by the Germans and sent to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, and then underwent, between 1944 and 1945, the intervention of German restorer Karl Sieber. When the war ended, the U.S. Army’s Third Army found the polyptych hidden in the salt mine of Altaussee, a hamlet in Styria, and had it transferred to Munich: from there, the work took the road to Brussels, until, in October 1945, it was again placed in the Cathedral. However, the complex machine needed further interventions: thus we arrive at the important campaign of 1950-1951, the most important restoration undergone by the painting before the present one.

In 1950, experts were divided between those who intended to follow the “Anglo-Saxon school,” thus eliminating the patinas and repainting that had been superimposed on the original in order to restore the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb to its original condition, and those who preferred to stick to the positions of the “Italian school,” which instead leaned toward not altering the work’s centuries-old history by limiting itself to a conservative restoration but not changing the marks that stratification had left on the polyptych. An important pool of international restoration experts (including the Italian Cesare Brandi) is thus convened, and in the end it is decided for an approach geared above all to respecting the historical integrity of the work: the intervention, therefore, is mainly conservative, and overlays are removed only where necessary to ensure the protection of the polyptych. The restoration is completed quickly, and leaves open some important questions: it was not understood, for example, how far the ancient repainting extended, or how far Jan van Eyck’s intervention went and where his brother Hubert’s began.

Understanding the history of restorations is important for understanding how best to protect the work, because materials change over time, and they also react differently to agents that can alter them. Paints made from traditional materials (mastics, oils, various natural resins), as well as newer, synthetic ones, yellow and dull over time, compromising the balance of the original colors and altering the legibility of the work. There is also to consider that the discipline of restoration itself has changed profoundly: in ancient times, repairs on polyptychs were carried out by painters, often unskilled, who simply cleaned the work with rags or often aggressive solvents (for example, with caustic soda, with which many paintings have been significantly damaged), and with interventions that often led to major and extensive abrasions of the painted surface. Today, on the other hand, restorations are conducted by highly trained professionals, who are able to selectively intervene on the works, with special products that respect the delicacy of the materials, and to repair the gaps using the techniques used by the authors of the works.

As mentioned above, analysis of the painting discovered that, in the face of extensive repainting that affected more than half of the painted surface, the underlying original painting executed by the van Eyck brothers was very well preserved, and only 5 percent of the 15th-century painting had been lost. The intent of the restoration that began in 2010 with a survey campaign (and materially in 2012) was therefore on the one hand to ensure the protection of the work, and on the other hand to remove the overlays in order to restore the work to its original state, so as to show the public the fifteenth-century appearance of the polyptych. A restoration directed by Hélène Dubois, a restorer at KIK-IRPA, and conducted by the institution’s technicians panel by panel (only a third at a time of the compartments went to the laboratories: the remainder, from time to time, were left in St. Bavon’s Cathedral so that the public could continue to see them), shown to the public live, costing 2.1 million euros and financed 80 percent by the government of Flanders, and the remaining 20 percent by the InBev-Baillet Latour Fund, a nonprofit foundation active since 1974 that supports arts and culture. The intervention, supported by a commission of twenty international experts, will be able to preserve the work for future generations, as KIK-IRPA let us know, and when the restoration is complete the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb will also be guaranteed the necessary microclimatic conditions. In the next installments of this special focus devoted to Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s masterpiece, we will learn about the documentation and interventions in detail. The restoration is also featured in the major exhibition on Jan van Eyck that is on view in Ghent until April 30, 2020, hosted in the halls of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

Pictured: the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb (closed) before and after the restoration.

Focus restoration of the Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb. First installment: the history and materials

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