the painting was painted on top of an older painting, which had been scraped off to the preparation layer. The institute also found that modern paints had been used in the restoration and that the restorer had made new underdrawings and used various techniques to recreate the craquelure of the painting. The institute also discovered that Van der Veken had made some minor changes to the back of the panel, probably in an attempt to make the work appear more similar to the original van der Weyden and increase its appearance of authenticity. All of these interventions by Van der Veken can be qualified as amounting to an intention to create a forgery. The Renders Magdalena was not returned to the owners as it was claimed by the Belgian state. The Renders Madonna The second controversy involves the Renders Madonna which Renders had sold to Goering and after its return to Belgium has been part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Tournai where it is attributed to the 'School of Rogier van der Weyden'. Originally, the Renders Madonna panel had been part of a diptych attributed to Rogier van der Weyden. The other half is a portrait of the donor Jean Gros, which has been located in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1933. The diptych was probably separated in 1867, the year in which the portrait of Jean Gros was shown at an exhibition in Bruges, organized by the historian James Weale. It was probably the deplorable material condition of the Madonna which led to the decision to separate the two panels of the diptych. A German photo from World War I shows the battered state of the panel at that time. When he was asked by Renders to restore the Madonna, Van der Veken endeavored to reconstruct all that had been irretrievably lost and damaged. He used his very 'radical' hyperrestoration method. His intervention still determines the present condition of the painting, and there is no visible aging. Research carried out in 1999–2000 by the Laboratoire d’étude des œuvres d’art par les méthodes scientifiques (French: Laboratory for the Scientific Examination of Artworks) of the Université Catholique de Louvain made it possible to determine the extent of the restoration and to describe the restoration process in detail. The research showed that Van der Veken had literally scraped off the bottom part of the painting, thereby