European artists of the past often depicted exotic animals in a way we now know to be wildly inaccurate. Since most would not have had the benefit of direct observation but were usually reliant only on a written description, accompanied by a sketchy illustration that may itself have been anatomically wide of the mark, this is far from surprising. Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros of 1515, depicting the creature as if its thick hide were a suit of armour, comes to mind – though the intricate woodcut Dürer made from this second-hand encounter also happens to be an incredible artistic achievement, and one which helped spread the German artist’s reputation far and wide.

But a lamb, surely, of which plenty could be found gambolling through the fields of medieval Europe, can’t have presented any such mysteries, especially for an artist as observant, as none had been before him, of the tiniest material detail as the 15th-Century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck.

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This is why the unveiling of a part of Van Eyck’s masterpiece, The Ghent Altarpiece, or as it’s also known, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, came as a shock to many. Having undergone years of painstaking restoration, ‘before and after’ images of the artist’s sacrificial lamb trended on social media, drawing the response that the big reveal was simply too freakishly weird-looking and might we please have the earlier one back.