The Ghent Altarpiece: A Simple Walkthrough of the Panels

The Mystic Lamb’s Unsettling Gaze: Sacrifice, Symbol, and the 2019 Reveal

At the heart of the altarpiece’s meaning is the figure of the Mystic Lamb. In Christian symbolism, a lamb represents Jesus Christ, specifically in his role as a willing sacrifice who takes on the sins of the world (harking back to John 1:29: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” – words that are even inscribed on the altar front in the painting). Van Eyck’s lamb stands upon an altar, bleeding into a chalice, clearly identifying it as the sacrificial Lamb of God. Yet this lamb is anything but an ordinary farm animal. If you look closely at its face, you’ll notice something uncanny: the lamb has human-like features. Its eyes, instead of being set to the side like a real sheep’s, face forward and seem to look straight out at us. This was quite deliberate. In medieval art, when animals symbolised Christ (the lamb being called ‘Agnus Dei’ in Latin), artists often gave those animals an otherworldly twist – some images even showed the lamb with seven eyes and seven horns as described in the Book of Revelation. Van Eyck chose a subtler but still arresting method: he painted the lamb with a calm, human-like gaze that meets the viewer’s eyes. The effect is that the lamb – and by extension Christ – is confronting us, engaging us directly. It is as if the Lamb of God acknowledges our presence in front of the altar and invites us to the sacrifice.

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece before and after restoration

However, this striking feature of the lamb did not always sit comfortably with viewers, especially modern ones. For a few centuries after the altarpiece was finished, the lamb’s face that Van Eyck originally painted was actually hidden under overpaint. Sometime in the 16th century, likely during a restoration, someone painted a more “normal” lamb’s face over the original, toning down the human-like intensity (perhaps that later painter or patron found Van Eyck’s lamb too strange). It wasn’t until the recent restoration completed in 2019 that the original lamb’s face was fully revealed again. When this happened, contemporary audiences were shocked. Many literally gasped at the sight, and images of the “new” lamb went viral on the internet. People said it looked “weird”, “disturbingly human”, and even “terrifying”. Memes compared it to the so-called “uncanny valley” effect – that unsettling feeling when something looks almost human but not quite. Jokes aside, this reaction highlights a fascinating point: what Van Eyck intended as a powerful symbol – the Lamb of God staring knowingly at us – can unsettle modern sensibilities that aren’t used to such direct, symbolic imagery in a naturalistic style. In Van Eyck’s time, the faithful viewer would have understood that the lamb’s odd gaze meant it was no ordinary lamb at all, but Christ in disguise, aware and present. In fact, art historians like to point out that the lamb’s face is painted much like Van Eyck’s human portraits, which often look out toward the viewer, engaging their eyes. This was likely intentional; the lamb has a personhood in this scene. It’s not merely a beast being slaughtered – it is Christ, alive, offering himself. The lamb’s serene expression despite the wound (note that its blood flows abundantly, yet it shows no agony) underscores a theological point: Christ’s sacrifice was voluntary and imbued with divine peace.

There has been debate among scholars about the lamb’s original look, especially after that restoration. Some initially wondered if the restorers had made a mistake – could Van Eyck really have painted something so peculiar? But scientific evidence and the uncovering of the original paint confirmed that yes, this was Van Eyck’s authentic lamb. So, the debate resolved into admiration for the painter’s daring vision. Still, the discomfort remains for some viewers: the Mystic Lamb confronts us with the visceral core of Christian faith (sacrifice, redemption through blood) in a very graphic yet strangely personal way. It’s one of those moments where the altarpiece does not allow us to remain mere observers. The lamb’s eyes meet ours, and symbolically, Christ looks out from the painting and into the church – and perhaps into the soul of the onlooker. In medieval belief, the Mass performed at the altar made Christ’s sacrifice present again; here, Van Eyck provides a picture of that belief, literally on the altar in the painting, making the mystical visible. It might make us uncomfortable, but that discomfort is part of the artwork’s power. It reminds us that this altarpiece wasn’t meant to be “pretty” decor – it was meant to move, even unsettle, the viewer toward devotion and awe.

Faces, bodies, and the shock of realism

The Ghent Alterpiece – Adam and Eve

One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Ghent Altarpiece – and one reason it left such a mark on art history – is its unprecedented realism. Van Eyck’s panels are populated with figures that have distinct faces, bodies, and expressions, painted with such naturalism that they seem almost alive. In an age when many paintings still favoured stylised or idealised figures, Van Eyck gave his characters individuality and tangible presence. The donors, Jodocus and Lysbette, for example, are not generic pious folk; they have high cheekbones, lined brows, and, in Lysbette’s case, a slightly double chin – real middle-aged people of the 15th century immortalised in paint. Adam and Eve, as we noted, are depicted naked and unabashedly real: Adam’s skin has a tone and texture that feels true to life, and Eve’s body is softly rounded, her face thoughtful. They even appear to cast shadows into what looks like our space – Adam’s foot seems to project out of the painted niche, catching the light as if it were physically present in the chapel. Such details were astonishing for the time. In fact, the realism was so pronounced that when Emperor Joseph II of Austria visited in 1781, he reportedly found Adam and Eve’s nude figures too real and indecent for a church and had them covered up with painted fig leaves (those prudish additions have since been removed, restoring the originals). The shock, even centuries later, testifies to how convincingly Van Eyck rendered human anatomy. These were perhaps the first monumental nudes in Northern painting that weren’t stylised into abstract ideals but looked like actual people standing there – a married couple at that, which could bring to mind the viewer’s own ancestors, emphasising that sacred history was made by real flesh-and-blood humans.

Beyond the figures, the altarpiece’s landscapes and objects are depicted with a zeal for reality that was unheard of. Van Eyck and his workshop painted plants and animals with such accuracy that modern botanists can identify many of the species blooming in the altarpiece’s imagined meadow. Every leaf and petal is individualised. Similarly, the distant cityscape in the Adoration scene includes carefully drawn Gothic church towers and walls that echo actual Netherlandish towns of Van Eyck’s day (some say you can see references to Utrecht’s cathedral tower or the skyline of Ghent itself). Clouds are shaded as if from direct observation of nature, and an atmospheric perspective is used – the distant blue hills fade realistically. All these things that we take for granted in later paintings were novel in 1432. The result was a kind of visual shock for early viewers: the sacred was depicted with the same truth-to-eye as the mundane. Imagine standing before this altarpiece when it was new – the sense that you were looking at something real and not just an icon would have been intense. A local legend even later claimed that Van Eyck ground crushed jewels into his paints to achieve the shimmering colours – a fanciful explanation for what was simply masterful technique and keen observation. As one modern observer noted, the Ghent Altarpiece “revels in artistic realism, from identifiable plants and highly detailed portraits (right down to Adam’s nostril hair) to reflections in a horse’s eye and light refracted through a ruby”. In other words, Van Eyck delighted in capturing the tiniest specifics of the material world. This dedication to visible reality was disruptive in the best way: it opened a door for art to move toward naturalism and away from the flattened, purely symbolic approach of medieval tradition.

The Ghent Altarpiece – Donors, Jodocus Vijd and Lysbette Borluut

It wasn’t just viewers who were stunned – other artists were too. The altarpiece became a training ground for painters who travelled to see it and learn its secrets. We already mentioned Dürer’s admiring visit. The Spanish painter copyists in the 16th century made reproductions of the Ghent Altarpiece for King Philip II, spreading its influence far. What made the realism so impactful was how Van Eyck integrated it seamlessly with the spiritual message. For instance, he painted the light in the Annunciation scene to fall as if from the actual window of the Vijd chapel where the altarpiece stood. This meant that Mary and Gabriel appear lit by the same sunlight that the real-life viewer experienced in that space – collapsing the boundary between the painted world and the viewer’s world. Such an illusion was not just a trick; it was a statement that the divine could enter our reality. It gave viewers the eerie and profound sense that the events on the panels were happening in continuity with their own surroundings. No wonder some 15th-century beholders might have found the effect almost miraculous or, to more conservative eyes, perhaps too worldly for comfort.

In a time when most people encountered art primarily in churches, the Ghent Altarpiece recalibrated their expectations of what painting could do. It could persuade the senses – you could almost feel the textures: the lush velvet of a mantle, the hardness of a gold crown, the damp earth of the meadow. It could populate a religious scene with real faces that one might recognise on the street. By doing so, it brought the heavenly and the earthly onto the same plane. This was a defining feature of the Northern Renaissance ethos: to find the sacred in the everyday and, conversely, to ennoble the everyday by rendering it with minute care. Van Eyck’s contemporaries in Italy were exploring perspective and classical idealism, but even they were impressed by the sheer optical truth of oil painting’s new champion in the North. The shock of Van Eyck’s realism eventually wore off only because it became the new normal – generations of artists built upon it. But standing before the Ghent Altarpiece even today, we can recapture a bit of that original wonder, especially now that it has been recently cleaned and restored to its full brilliance. Every blade of grass, every curl of hair, and every catchlight in an eye speaks to us across nearly six centuries with a truly timeless immediacy.