Ghent Altarpiece

Open, the Ghent Altarpiece's twelve panels build one of the most ambitious theological programs in Northern European painting. Its top register shows God the Father enthroned in majesty between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, flanked by singing and instrument playing angels and, at the outer edges, Adam and Eve painted with a startling, almost uncomfortable physical realism for the period. Below, the central Adoration of the Mystic Lamb gathers popes, bishops, martyrs, virgins, prophets and knights from every era of sacred history into one continuous landscape, all converging on a small lamb standing on an altar, blood flowing visibly from its side into a chalice, a direct visualisation of Christ as the sacrificial Lamb of God from the Book of Revelation.

The rhymed quatrain discovered on the frame in 1823 names Hubert van Eyck as the artist who began the work and calls him greater even than his brother, then names Jan van Eyck as the one who completed it after Hubert's death in 1426 and dated the finished altarpiece to 6 May 1432. That inscription is also part of why the painting matters technically: the van Eyck brothers are traditionally credited, on the strength of works exactly like this one, with perfecting oil paint as a medium capable of the luminous, jewel like colour and fine detail the Ghent Altarpiece still displays five centuries later, at a moment when most European panel painting still relied on tempera. Few single works are credited with both a major theological statement and a technical revolution in how paint itself was used.

No other major artwork has been the target of as many documented crimes as the Ghent Altarpiece. Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, counts thirteen separate offences against it since 1432, with all or part of the work stolen outright six times.

The pattern begins early: French revolutionary troops under Napoleon seized panels in 1794 and carried them to Paris, though France returned them to Belgium after Napoleon's fall in 1815. During the First World War, occupying German forces attempted to seize the panels that remained in Ghent; a cathedral custodian discovered the plan in time, hid the panels inside the walls and floorboards of the bishop's residence, and had them smuggled to safety in the countryside before the theft could be completed.

The most notorious episode came on the morning of 11 April 1934, when the sacristan of Saint Bavo's Cathedral discovered that the panel showing the Righteous Judges, one of the altarpiece's own lower wings, had been cut from its frame overnight. Despite a ransom demand, an investigation and decades of theories, the original panel has never been recovered and the case remains formally unsolved; a faithful copy now hangs in its place. Barely a decade later, Nazi Germany seized the entire altarpiece and stored it with vast quantities of other looted European art at the Altaussee salt mine in Austria, from which the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program recovered it, and nearly everything else the mine held, in 1945. The altarpiece's current bulletproof glass display case is a direct, standing response to that history.