Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting suite “The Four Seasons” (1573) has returned to the Louvre Museum after an eight-month break. However, after a comprehensive restoration that enhanced their chromatic range and sharpness, the portraits that are currently shown in the Denon Wing are notably different—glowing, even.

The four paintings that make up “The Four Seasons”—Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn—each feature a profile of the season’s unique food, flowers, and plants. For example, winter is wrinkled with the knobby bark of a tree trunk, whereas spring is blooming with lush foliage, flowers, and berries.

Arcimboldo was a preferred court painter who became more well-known for these elaborately composite portraits. He painted “Seasons” for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, which resembled the way features were shown on Imperial Roman coins. The set in the Louvre’s collection is a duplicate that Maximilian had the painter make for Augustus of Saxony as a diplomatic present; the emperor’s original Winter and Summer has survived and is kept by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The “Seasons” canvases have been yellowed over the decades that they have been displayed in the Louvre, and their increasingly hazy varnishes have obscured the paintings. While attempting to lighten the varnish, the restorers stumbled into another problem: what should be done with the flowery garlands that hung around the borders of each portrait?

Only the Louvre’s “Seasons” cycle has these borders, and Arcimboldo’s portraits were usually painted on solid black backgrounds, thus these flourishes are thought to be later embellishments. Most likely, the artist created them first, followed by others in the 18th and 20th centuries when the paintings were sliced and expanded.

During restoration, scientific imaging and analysis verified that these modifications are, in fact, 18th and 19th century. Even worse, though, they obscured large areas of the original artwork. Around four centimeters of the paintings’ margins were hidden by the flowery borders, which occasionally covered important details like Augustus of Saxony’s coat of arms on Winter. Furthermore, the alignment of the portraits—particularly the individuals’ gazes—had been disturbed by the changes made to the paintings’ size and format.

These flower festoons were chosen to be removed from the images by the restorers. In doing so, they discovered a layer on the head of Spring that was well preserved, along with a few other blooms. Additionally, Augustus’s coat of arms was made public. The crew used reproductions from the 17th century to recreate the missing areas of the paintings whose sides had been cut.