Stealing the Mystic Lamb (13 page)

Saint Amand had been a hermit for fifteen years before beginning a successful missionary career at age forty-five. Pope Martin I (later a saint himself ) had granted Amand a bishopric without a fixed see. Amand had a bishop’s privileges but no cathedral. Amand wandered, preaching in Flanders and among the Slavic tribes of the upper Danube. He founded several abbeys and was the probable founder of Ghent’s Abbey of Saint Peter. There he first encountered Allowin.

Moved by the piety and strength of the future Saint Amand, Allowin followed the bishop on his missions in Flanders. Amand baptized Allowin with the name Bavo (Baaf in Flemish, alternately spelled Bavon in English). Relatively little is known about Bavo’s life postbaptism. The only enduring story is of an occasion when Bavo ran into a man whom he had sold into serfdom long before. Bavo insisted that the man lead him in chains to the town jail, as a retributive, penitent gesture. After his missions with Amand, Bavo was given permission to live as a hermit in the forest behind the Abbey of Saint Peter in Ghent. Bavo died on 1 October 653 and was buried in the abbey that, from that point on, bore his name.

Ghent achieved sufficient importance that Charlemagne granted it a fleet with which to defend itself against Viking incursions along its rivers. The settlement had been attacked and plundered by Vikings on two occasions, in 851 and 879. Vikings were unprepared for either open-field
combat or siege and breach of fortifications, so, after the second of the two devastating Viking attacks, in 879 Ghent developed its first substantial wooden fortifications.

Ghent blossomed in the twelfth century, when it became an international center for the cloth trade, importing English raw wool and producing high-quality cloth for export. In 1178 Count Philip of Alsace, the ruler of the area, gave Ghent official trade privileges and built the city’s first stone citadel, the formidable Castle of the Counts, which still stands today. By the thirteenth century, Ghent was the second-largest city in Europe, after Paris, with a population of 65,000.

Thirteenth-century Ghent saw the unusual oligarchic governance of a board of merchant patricians. This board oversaw governmental and judicial matters in the city, keeping the reigning Counts of Flanders at arm’s length and defending their mercantile interests. Ghent continued to flourish as a center of trade, functioning with a surprising amount of independence and distance from the feudalism of the countryside around it.

This division of power between the merchant patricians in Ghent and the Count of Flanders destabilized at the start of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. While the Count of Flanders allied with France, Ghent wanted to preserve its profitable relations with England and its wool imports, the cloth from which was the primary source of Ghent’s substantial wealth. The city needed England. The ruling lord of the region sided with France. What was Ghent to do?

Ghent was in no military position to resist its overlord, Count Louis de Male of Flanders (for whom Joos Vijd’s father, Nikolaas, worked), so it relied on policy and politics. The merchant patricians enlisted the aid of wealthy cloth trader and civic leader Jacob van Artevelde, who tried to preserve relations with England despite the Hundred Years’ War. Van Artevelde unified several towns in Flanders, including Bruges and Ypres, and supported the English king Edward III openly from 1340. But eventually he was suspected of conspiring to install Edward’s son as the new Count of Flanders, and he was murdered by the townspeople in 1345. His son Fillip continued where his father had left off, administratively
defending the interests of Ghent against the military allegiance of the overlord Count of Flanders.

With the death of Louis de Male, Flanders shifted to the fiefdom of the Dukes of Burgundy. It was under their rule, particularly that of Duke Philip III (Philip the Good), that the area blossomed artistically. This was the period during which Jan van Eyck painted
The Mystic Lamb
for the church of Saint John, which was formerly the church of the seventh-century Abbey of Saint Bavo and would later become the Cathedral of Saint Bavo.

It was not a happy time for the citizens of Ghent. Ghent was the most populous, rich, and powerful city in the Burgundian lands. But years of exorbitant taxes levied by Burgundy prompted the people of Ghent to rise in rebellion. Duke Philip the Good assembled 30,000 soldiers and met the rebels at the Battle of Gavere on 23 July 1453. Ghent had an army of equivalent size. Soon after the battle began, there was an accidental explosion within the Ghent artillery battery, and most of the rebels’ heavy artillery was destroyed. The duke thoroughly defeated the people of Ghent, who suffered 16,000 casualties. The surviving citizens feared that the duke would level the city by way of punishment. When asked about this, the duke replied, “Were I to destroy this city, who would build for me one like it?” The irreplaceable city was spared, but Ghent was once more under the firm control of the Burgundian Empire.

The Dukes of Burgundy retained control of Ghent until the young, brotherless duchess Mary of Burgundy married Maximilian of Austria, a member of the Hapsburg family, on 18 August 1477. Flanders bloodlessly became a part of the Hapsburg Empire. But much blood was about to be shed in a war for its independence after Ghent’s most famous son became its greatest enemy.

The future King Charles V, the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor and the destroyer of Rome, was born in Hapsburg Ghent in 1500. The city received no leniency from the emperor, who sent troops against them in 1539, when the city leaders refused to pay the exorbitant taxes Charles needed to fund his campaigns abroad. Charles personally came to the city to lead his soldiers. He subdued the people of Ghent and forced the city’s
nobles to show their subservience by walking in front of him barefoot with nooses around their necks. The Flemish word for noose,
strop
, was later adopted into the nickname of the people of Ghent, who became known as
Stroppendragers
, or “noose bearers.”

After the imperialist warring of Charles V, the rule of his son Philip II saw the most carnage that would mark the city’s history. As with many northern European cities during the Reformation, the population of Ghent was divided into embattled religious factions, Catholic versus Protestant. Among the various Protestant sects in Ghent, including the nonaggressive Anabaptists and Mennonites, the Calvinists frequently resorted to violence and iconoclasm.

In 1559 the church of Saint Bavo—the original name, Saint John, was discarded in 1540—was elevated to the status of cathedral. Ghent became the seat of a bishopric. This was in part an attempt to strengthen the Catholic hold on the region at this dangerous time of religious conflict. So impressed was he with the altarpiece, Philip II commissioned that same year an exact copy of its central and wing panels for display at his court in Madrid. Philip’s collection already included van Eyck’s
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
, acquired upon the death at the Spanish court of its owner, Mary of Hungary, in 1558. The artist who received the commission to paint the copies was a Flemish master called Michiel Coxcie. Coxcie was a renowned and adept imitator of the great masters of his time, particularly Raphael, for which he received the nickname “the Flemish Raphael.” Coxcie’s copy of
The Ghent Altarpiece
was never meant to be passed off as the original and therefore was not a forgery. But five hundred years later, an unscrupulous Brussels art dealer who would twice profit from crimes involving
The Mystic Lamb
, would sell Coxcie’s copy as the stolen original.

The city of Ghent’s official religion alternated between Catholicism and Calvinism, depending on who was in power at any given moment. The year 1566 saw violent Protestant riots during a period of brief power seizure
before the Catholics regained control in 1567. This would become known as the Ghent Iconoclasm. Foremost among the Calvinist complaints was the Catholic fascination with icons. Calvinists argued that Catholics had begun to pray
to
icons, violating one of the Ten Commandments, rather than praying through icons in order to inspire a more vivid prayer.

Coupled with this perceived “worship of graven images,” Calvinists in particular were outraged by the capitalistic tendencies of the church and the inordinate wealth and corruption of the clergy. Buying “indulgences”—paying clergy in exchange for a promise that once you die you’ll get into Heaven faster—was a booming medieval industry. Popes themselves alternately bemoaned and benefited from this endless source of income. The Calvinists found it repulsive that people could buy their way into Heaven through gifts and patronage. They wore only dark clothes and banned singing, dancing, or buying alcohol on Sundays. They condemned the money spent on Catholic decadence, particularly in the form of gilt artworks and overdecorated churches. Iconoclasm, the destruction of icons, carried a symbolic force for Protestant rioters, who destroyed or irrevocably damaged thousands of artworks during the Reformation. The gorgeous, incandescent
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
proved an irresistible target.

To Calvinists, an altarpiece such as
The Lamb
was the perfect example of what was wrong with Catholicism. In their view,
The Lamb
encouraged two types of Catholic sin: prayer to an icon and the ungodly payment for indulgences. In paying for such an outstanding religious artwork for his local church, Joos Vijd had essentially bribed his way through the Pearly Gates.

It had to be destroyed.

The Lamb
was such an obvious target for the destructive rioting Calvinists of Ghent that the Catholics set up an armed guard inside the cathedral, specifically to protect the altarpiece. On 19 April 1566, Calvinist rioters wreaked destruction near and around the cathedral. They tried to open the locked cathedral doors. The Catholic guards inside were vastly outnumbered by the rioters. They would have heard the sounds of
the crowd outside, of crackling wood and falling masonry, as they waited breathlessly in the nave for the rioters to break through and burn
The Lamb
. But the rioters could not get inside. Apparently without a battering ram of any sort, they left.

Two days later the Calvinists returned. Using a tree trunk as a battering ram, they broke open the cathedral doors. As the doors cracked and splintered, buckling at the center beneath the heave of the ram, the first of the rioters burst through. They carried torches in the night, disturbing the quiet dark of the cathedral interior, so vast and ribbed with arches, like the chest cavity of a great whale. They ran to the Vijd Chapel, prepared to drag the altarpiece into the square outside so that all could see the pyre on which they would burn this inspirer of heresies.

But when they reached the chapel, the altarpiece was gone.

In the heat of the riotous night, the Calvinists hadn’t time to stop and think. Perhaps they thought that one of their lot had arrived earlier and taken the painting away. Perhaps they thought its disappearance was an act of God to preserve it. Perhaps they didn’t think at all. They had demolished other art and statuary inside the cathedral, but they never found
The Lamb
. Where had it gone?

After the rioters’ first attempt at breaking in, the Catholic guards, realizing that their numbers would be insufficient to protect
The Lamb
, had devised another plan. They took apart the twelve panels of the altarpiece and hid them at the top of one of the cathedral towers. Each night they stationed guards along the tower’s narrow spiral staircase, easy to defend, as it had to be mounted single file. They then locked the door on the ground floor leading to the tower. As the rioters tore the nave of the cathedral apart,
The Lamb
’s bodyguards remained undetected in the darkness of the spiral stair. The Calvinists hadn’t the wherewithal to search out the altarpiece. When it was not found where expected, the rioters gave up and moved on. Little did they realize that
The Lamb
was only a few meters away, in the tower above their heads.

The Catholics of the city did not wait for the Calvinists to figure out where
The Lamb
was hiding. After the near miss of the night of 21 April,
the Catholics moved the altarpiece to the fortified town hall.
The Lamb
remained locked there until the riots died down.

By 1567 the firm and retributive Catholic Duke of Alba assumed complete control of Ghent. He executed a great many of the Calvinist leaders, scattering the local Protestant communities to lands outside of Ghent. The Duke of Alba ruled until 1573. But the city’s allegiance continued to shift. From 1577 to 1584 Ghent was officially Calvinist. During this period, the altarpiece remained in storage in the town hall. There was talk among the Calvinist leaders of sending it to Queen Elizabeth I of England as a token of their appreciation of her support, both moral and financial, of Protestant seizure of control of the city. It would be sent to the Protestant queen not as an icon but simply as a beautiful artwork. But a respected member of the community and descendant of the original donor, by the name of Josse Triest, insisted that the altarpiece remain in Flanders. His request was granted, and
The Lamb
remained sequestered in storage.