‘Here, belovéd numbskulls, is a little picture: You gather,
one presumes, what must be done when a portrait on a panel
becomes obscured—maybe even lost—to external stain.
The artist does not discard the panel, though the subject must return
to sit for it again, whereupon the likeness is etched once more upon
the same material. As He tells us in the Gospel, I came
to seek and to save that which was lost—our faces, say.
—St. Athanasius, ‘His Image Recovered,’ translated by Scott Cairns
Heartlands 