Cleaning a painting is supposed to bring the artist back into view. Sometimes what comes back is the restorer. A famous lamb wore four ears for nearly seventy years, and a slashed red canvas returned from its repair covered in someone else's paint. In several of these cases, experts still argue over what was lost, and over who should have touched the picture.
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How These Were Chosen
Restoring a painting means two different jobs. Conservation keeps the object alive: it fixes flaking paint, a split panel or a weak canvas. Cleaning changes what the viewer sees, because it removes yellowed varnish, grime and the repaints left by earlier restorers.
The risk lies in the cleaning. A solvent strong enough to lift a later layer can lift the painter's last touches too, and a thin film may be the artist's glaze or an old varnish gone cloudy. The restorer has to decide which, and cannot undo the answer.
A case enters this list when a restoration changed what people see and someone called the result a ruin, whether a handful of experts or the whole internet. Where that charge was later rejected, or is still argued, the entry says so.
12. Hubert and Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece, panel of the Lamb (1432)
At the center of the Ghent Altarpiece, a lamb stands on an altar in a meadow, blood running from its chest into a chalice. Since 2019 it has looked out of the panel with two eyes set to the front, almost like a person's. For centuries visitors saw a blander animal there, with a broad forehead and large ears, on the altarpiece that Hubert and Jan van Eyck completed in 1432 for Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, in what is now Belgium.
That blander face was a later addition, painted over the original, probably in the middle of the sixteenth century. A Ghent chronicle records two painters at work on the altarpiece in September 1550, and nothing more precise dates the overpaint. A restoration in 1951 then uncovered the Lamb's own ears, which are smaller, but left the added pair in place, so that for nearly seventy years the Lamb of Ghent had four ears.
The overpaint finally came off in a campaign run by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels. Its second phase, a three-year treatment of the lower register of the open altarpiece that ended in late 2019, found later paint over about half of the Lamb panel. The conservators lifted it with scalpels and solvents, and an old varnish beneath it shielded the Van Eycks' own paint.
The face that emerged was made public in December 2019, and the internet turned it into a joke. The serious objection was that the restorers might have uncovered a face they liked rather than the one the painters intended.
Researchers from the University of Antwerp and the National Gallery of Art in Washington took up that question in 2020, in the journal Science Advances. Imaging spectroscopy let them read the layers without touching them, and their study supported the reading that the uncovered face is the one the Van Eycks painted.
At a Glance
Artist: Hubert and Jan van Eyck
Painted: Completed in 1432
Medium: Oil on wood panel
Size: 375 × 520 cm (148 × 205 in), whole altarpiece open
Where to see it: Saint Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium
11. Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508 to 1512)
The prophets and sibyls enthroned along the sides of the Sistine Chapel ceiling came out of a cleaning completed in December 1989 far brighter than anyone alive had ever seen them. Michelangelo had painted that vault in the Vatican between 1508 and 1512. Some saw his own colors at last. Others were convinced that the restorers had washed away part of what he painted, along with the dirt.