The Ghent Altarpiece (wings closed)

On 6 May 1432 the polyptych was installed in the Vijd chapel in Ghent, and a verse on its frame credited two brothers, Hubert van Eyck, who began it and died in 1426, and Jan, who finished it. Outside feast days the wings stayed shut, so what the city actually knew was this grey outer face. The Annunciation runs across the upper row. Below it kneels Joos Vijd, a wealthy Ghent alderman who paid for the chapel, facing his wife Elisabeth Borluut, and between them stand the two Saints John, painted in grey to look like carved stone in niches, at a time when a carved wooden retable was still the usual thing to set above an altar. Cleaning between 2012 and 2016 found that roughly 70 percent of these outer panels was later overpaint, and removing it brought back the tones of the donors' robes.