Paumgartner-Altar

When Dürer built this altarpiece for the Paumgartner family of Nuremberg around 1500, he did something quietly personal. The two armoured saints on the wings, George on one side and Eustace on the other, wear the real faces of the brothers who paid for it, Stephan and Lukas. More relatives appear as small kneeling figures in the Nativity at the centre. That is nearly not what we see today. A century later, tastes had changed, and someone painted horses, helmets and landscapes over the saints and blotted out the little family portraits. Restorers only stripped those additions back off in 1903 to recover Dürer's design. The panel survived one more assault, in 1988, when a man attacked several pictures in the Munich gallery with acid, and this was among the works that had to be brought back.