Stealing the Mystic Lamb (12 page)

Connoisseurship has been notoriously prone to wishful thinking and ulterior motive. Everyone wants to discover works by famous artists, so collections such as some of the Old Masters in the Barnes were likely overattributed—paintings assigned to famous artists more through enthusiasm and wishful thinking than willful misattribution to demand a higher price. Even the likes of Bernard Berenson, perhaps the most famous art historian and connoisseur of all time, whose authentication was as close to an iron guarantee as anything could be, cooperated with the prince of art dealers, Joseph Duveen, to intentionally misattribute some paintings, most notably a Titian that Berenson said was a more valuable and rarer Giorgione, because Berenson received a commission based on the sale price of the paintings he authenticated—the more famous and rare the painter, the greater his paycheck.

So it comes as little surprise to learn that the authorship of even a monumental painting such as
The Ghent Altarpiece
could be questioned, and could shift, over the centuries. Before the 1823 discovery of the inscription,
Hubert van Eyck was not on the radar of the world’s art historians, beyond references in several sixteenth-century sources (Karel van Mander, Marcus van Vaernewyck, Lucas de Heere) stating that
The Ghent Altarpiece
had been begun by Hubert van Eyck but was completed by Jan.

With the inscription uncovered, the art world was confronted with a great master whom they had overlooked. Suddenly works that had previously lacked attribution were assigned to Hubert. Many works in the world’s museums are simply labeled as “anonymous” or “unknown artist.” When one or more works seem to share an authorial style, art historians may give a name to the anonymous artist, whose real name has been lost over the centuries. A notable example is the work of the great Robert Campin, one generation older than Jan van Eyck (and possibly his master). His name was unknown until recently. Before it was discovered, his works, including the world-famous
Merode Altarpiece
now at the Cloisters in New York, were attributed to “The Master of Flemalle.”

Was Hubert van Eyck the real name of one of these lost masters? After the discovery of the inscription, a number of well-regarded paintings, all in the style of mid-fifteenth-century Flanders, were suddenly attributed to Hubert. These include the
Crucifixion
and
Last Judgment
in the Hermitage, the silver-point drawing
The Betrayal of Christ
in the British Museum, the
Portrait of John the Fearless
in Antwerp, a
Crucifixion
at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, and
The Holy Women at the Sepulchre
from the Cook Collection in Richmond, England, among others. These works were attributed to Hubert, with a prominent question mark, based on the fallible and rather unscientific method of stylistic comparison. The comparison, of course, was to
The Ghent Altarpiece
—none of which may have been painted by Hubert. As the famous art historian Max Friedlander wrote in 1932, “Having read the entire literature on van Eyck . . . only one thing about the Ghent Altar is sure, namely that its famous inscription has caused stylistic criticism greater embarrassments than this discipline, not exactly short on blunders, has ever known before.”

Despite the hunger to provide paintings for this newly discovered master painter, it is not clear that any of Hubert’s paintings are extant. Still,
Hubert van Eyck’s association with
The Ghent Altarpiece
is further indicated by the fact that he was buried in the Church of Saint John, in the wall of the Vijd Chapel—the church and the chapel for which
The Ghent Altarpiece
was painted. The grave was later moved and lost when the church’s dedication was changed from Saint John to Saint Bavo. But the epitaph on Hubert’s tomb is recorded in the 1550 notes of a traveler named Marcus van Vaernewyck. This epitaph gives Hubert’s death date as 18 September 1426—perhaps only weeks after
The Ghent Altarpiece
was begun.

We may infer from this that, if Hubert van Eyck was indeed a painter associated with
The Ghent Altarpiece
, then his contribution to it included the layout, design, and perhaps a few unfinished figures, but little more. He died long before he could have made a major, or even substantially visible, contribution. Although the exact date of the commission of the altarpiece is unknown, the very fact that Hubert died in 1426 and the painting was not completed until 1432 indicates the extent of work still required as of 1426. In the six years following his brother’s death, it was Jan who did the painting.

Yet travelogues from two other nearly contemporary tourists indicate that very soon after the completion of the altarpiece, Hubert was considered to have been its painter. Hieronymous Münzer, who visited Ghent in 1495, wrote that “the master of the altarpiece is buried before the altar.” Jan van Eyck was buried in Bruges, so Münzer can only be referring to Hubert. The second tourist was Antonio de Beatis, secretary to a visiting ecclesiastical dignitary, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona. De Beatis wrote of his 1517 visit that the “canons” of the church had told him that
The Ghent Altarpiece
had been painted by an artist from “ La Magna Alta” (the old term for Germany, from which is derived the country’s French name,
Allemagne
) by the name of Roberto and that Roberto’s brother completed the work. Perhaps the Italian De Beatis Italianized the name he thought he heard, whether it was Hubrechte, Luberecht, or Ubrecht, and transformed it in his memory into Roberto.

But these archival documents suggesting that there was indeed a Hubert van Eyck painting in Ghent in the 1420s were only discovered in
1965. Many still consider that all-important inscription to be a sixteenth-century forgery. If so, it would be the first of thirteen crimes involving this one ill-fated painting.

In 1933, art historian and collector Emile Renders published an article claiming that the inscription was a forgery, perpetrated by Ghent Humanists who were dismayed that their city’s treasure should have been painted by an artist associated with the rival city of Bruges. Renders argues that these forgers invented a brother from Ghent, Hubert, whose hand in the altarpiece could make it seem that Ghent’s greatest treasure had been created by one of its own citizens. A contemporary equivalent of this theory might be to say that the greatest treasure of the city of Boston had been created by a New Yorker. Renders’s theory remains intriguing and plausible. Just because archives have proven that a painter named, approximately, “Hubert” was working in Ghent in the correct century does not mean that Hubert was involved in
The Ghent Altarpiece
, nor that the inscription is original.

Another scholar, Lotte Brand Philip, wrote in 1971 that the inscription, while original, had in fact been misread. Hubert van Eyck was actually listed as
fictor
, not
pictor
. This would mean that Hubert created the sculptural framework for the altarpiece, while Jan did the painting. The deterioration of the inscription, in which certain words are completely obliterated, makes a misread plausible. This remains a possibility championed by a number of scholars, although it is contradicted by one of the aforementioned documents, from March 1426, which mentions an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Saviour that is still in the workshop of “Master Hubrechte the painter,” which would make him a
pictor
and not a
fictor
.

To this day, art historians are divided on the authorship of
The Ghent Altarpiece
. Sit in on lectures by different art historians, and half will teach that the altarpiece is by the van Eyck brothers, and half that it is by Jan van Eyck alone.

Though the existence of an artist called Hubert in early-fifteenth-century Ghent is now beyond doubt, his involvement in
The Ghent Altarpiece
remains an unsolved mystery. It seems probable that he was commissioned
to paint the altarpiece but died so soon after the commission that none of his work may be seen in the finished painting, which was taken up by his brother Jan, with the blessing of Duke Philip the Good. Unless some new clue rises from the silt, the precise origins of the altarpiece will remain an enigma. And perhaps that is part of its allure? When all of the questions have been answered, we might cease to look.
The Ghent Altarpiece
proffers many tantalizing questions, supports intriguing answers, yet refuses to yield up definitive solutions. It haunts us still, as it has haunted and beckoned six hundred years of art lovers and thieves—all the more powerful because of the unparted mists that remain around it.

A work of art rarely has intrinsic material value—so much painting is just wood and linen and pigment. It is the way these materials are used, and even more so the story of their past and what they have meant to people and nations, that imparts value to humble ingredients. Rarely discussed by scholars, the history of art crime is a human psychological drama, a tug-of-war of ownership woven with ideological, religious, political, and social motivations that are provoked or embodied by the art in a way that no other inanimate object sustains. And
The Ghent Altarpiece
, with its biography of twists and turns, is an ideal lens through which to examine this phenomenon.

Now let us turn to the story of the painting as a physical object: coveted, desired, reviled, damaged, nearly destroyed, stolen, smuggled, and recovered, only to be stolen again. We shall see how the masterwork that began as a point of pride for the community in which it was housed, the treasure of the city of Ghent, evolved into the icon of the country of Belgium, and became ultimately a symbol for the preservation of civilization against evil.

T
he first century of
The Ghent Altarpiece
’s existence was the only period in which it was unmolested. Beyond the Hubert van Eyck mystery, which many scholars still feel was the result of an early-sixteenth-century forgery, and the damage done by cleaning that resulted in the loss of the predella,
The Lamb
’s first 140 years were quiet. Then, in 1566,
The Lamb
became the victim of an unprecedented and unparalleled string of crimes. It began as the whipping boy for a series of ideological causes, each framing the altarpiece as a symbol of all they hated.

The Lamb
’s hometown, the stalwart and oft-burgled city of Ghent, has a fascinating history, one inextricably linked to the story of its masterpiece. Ghent (Gent in the local language, Flemish, Gand in French) has retained the flavor of its rich and dark history, as the city was largely spared damage from the many wars that charged across its threshold. The story of Ghent is integral to the understanding of what happened to the city’s greatest treasure, particularly in the early period of
The Lamb
’s history as the victim of crimes.

Though archaeological elements have been found at Ghent dating back to prehistoric times, the city began, as so many European cities did, as a Roman fortified encampment. The name of the city probably comes from the Celtic word
ganda
, meaning the confluence, or meeting point, of several bodies of water—in this case the rivers Lys and Scheldt. What began as a simple settlement rose to prominence in 630 with the establishment of
the Abbey of Saint Peter, soon to be renamed the Abbey of Saint Bavo. A second abbey, called Blandijnsberg, followed. Abbeys at the time were not only religious centers but nuclei of trade. A town rose out of the gathering of craftsmen and traders around these abbeys.

It was about this time that a wealthy local landowner by the name of Allowin was born in the nearby settlement of Brabant. Allowin married and had a daughter, but felt unhappy despite his wealth and family. When his wife died, Allowin had something of a midlife crisis. He turned to God, giving away all of his land and possessions to the poor, entrusting himself as disciple to a wandering bishop who later became Saint Amand of Maastricht.