Stealing the Mystic Lamb (20 page)

Not even the panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
that remained in Ghent were exempt from danger. In 1822, a fire broke out inside Saint Bavo Cathedral, damaging and destroying many of its artworks. Only through the rapid intervention of the cathedral staff and the local firefighters were the panels that remained in the cathedral preserved from harm, suffering only minor smoke damage.

In 1823, under Gustav Waagen’s supervision, the panels were given a harsh cleaning, which revealed the hidden inscription referring, for the first time, to a “Hubert van Eyck.” This sent the art world into fits and further catapulted van Eyck, and now
the van Eycks
, to the fore.

The territory that had begun as Flanders (and which then became the Austrian Netherlands followed by the French Netherlands, and then the United Kingdom of the Netherlands) officially seceded from Holland and became the country of Belgium in 1830. The name Belgium was selected in reference to the Celtic tribe originally from the region, dubbed “Belgae” by the conquering Romans.

The occupational history of this small territory is long and dense. From Celts to Romans to the Counts of Flanders, who had yielded the parcel of land to the Burgundian Empire, which fell to the Hapsburgs, it passed through centuries of religious conflict and power shifts, before the French Republican and then imperial armies made it their own. Since 1830, it has been known as Belgium. But throughout its existence, through many names and many occupying powers, its greatest treasure has always been
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
. And now that treasure was dispersed, its limbs stolen, smuggled, and sold off to crown the Prussian royal collection.

In 1830 the Prussian king built the Königliche Gallerie in Berlin to house the fruits of his labors. The collection of Edward Solly joined the relatively small but precious Giustiniani collection, 157 paintings, which had been also purchased by Prussia to form the seedling of its new museum in Berlin.

Art lovers expanded their travels to include this new Berlin Museum and to see its highlight, the wings of
The Lamb
. An English critic, George Darley, noted during his 1837 visit that the change of scene seemed to do wonders for van Eyck’s painting, which displayed “the most refreshing transparency, after the foul and ferruginous atmosphere which in Ghent rolled over them for four hundred years. Their azures, greens, and crimsons, like the richest jewels reduced to pure and many-colored water, which swam and stayed itself in lucid mirrors on the various parts of the surface, seem rather waved thither by the magician-painter’s wand.” Darley went on to write that an examination of the surface of van Eyck’s painting reveals no trace of brushstroke: “scarce a touch rises from the general level to betray that the tints were successive: yet no work can have less of the licked appearance so usual and so hateful in smooth execution.” Darley’s lyricism is indicative of the level of admiration for van Eyck’s paintings during this period. As the most expensive painter of the nineteenth century, van Eyck was the most desired artist by the English, French, and Germans.

The Berlin Museum evolved into the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904, when it was moved to a grand new space on what is now called Museum Island in Berlin. It was only then, with the press that accompanied the opening of the new gallery, that the full significance of Solly’s collection came before the eyes of the general public at an international level. The London
Times
published in 1905 a confirmation of both Solly’s prowess as a collector and the success of his shadowy dealings, calling him “one of the most remarkable collectors who ever lived, and one of the most conspicuously in advance of his time.”

At the Kaiser Freidrich Museum, the six wooden wing panels of
The Lamb
were split vertically, so that both sides, recto and verso, could be
displayed and seen from one angle. This sort of severe surgery would never be sanctioned today, and indeed the dismemberment of a masterpiece, even at that time, was something drastic. It shows a prioritization of presentation value above respect for, and conservation of, the work. This critical alteration would aid the theft of both sides of one of the vertically split panels in 1934. The wing panels would remain on display in Berlin until 1920.

The final intrigue in the story of
The Ghent Altarpiece
before the First World War came in 1861. The Belgian government persuaded the staff of Saint Bavo Cathedral to sell them the Adam and Eve panels for display in the national gallery in Brussels and for safekeeping. The sale price was set at 50,000 francs (around $115,000 today), a badly needed cash influx for the underfunded diocese. The Belgian government also gave Saint Bavo the copies of the wing panels that had been painted by Coxcie in 1559, the only panels in their possession from Coxcie’s copy, to replace those that had been stolen and currently resided in Berlin. As the final part of the deal, the government paid the Belgian artist Victor Lagye to paint copies of the Adam and Eve panels to be displayed in situ, replacing those that would go to Brussels. These new Adam and Eve panels did not depict their subjects naked, as in the original. Rather, taking the cue from Emperor Joseph II eighty years earlier, the Belgian government asked Lagye to cover the nudity with strategically located bearskin garments. These new Adam and Eve panels, adapted to satisfy the Victorian prurience of the era, were placed in the cathedral in 1864.

With the Homeric twists and turns of
The Lamb
’s journey, it is understandably difficult to remember which panels were where at any given time. From 1864 until the First World War, the locations were as follows.

On display in the original location, the Vijd Chapel of Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, were the new copies of the Adam and Eve panels by Victor Lagye, the wing panels copied by Michiel Coxcie in 1559, and the original van Eyck central panels, returned from Paris.

The Belgian government had the original van Eyck Adam and Eve panels. They remained in the Brussels Museum, save for a few months in
1902, when they were on loan as the centerpiece of an exhibit of Flemish masters in Bruges.

The Berlin Museum, inheritor of the Prussian royal collection, owned the six original van Eyck wing panels. In 1823, the museum acquired the Coxcie copy of the central panels of
The Lamb
, which had been on display in the Munich Pinakothek, after having been acquired from L. J. Nieuwenhuys. Therefore Berlin now displayed a semblance of the complete
Ghent Altarpiece
, with nearly as much original material as Ghent could boast.

The far-flung panels of the altarpiece could rest—briefly.

Then came the First World War.

G
hent was the site of the 1913 World’s Fair: a brief respite before the tumult of the First World War, and the next installments in the illicit whirlwind tour of Jan van Eyck’s masterpiece, which is, in itself, a journey through the history of art theft.

Germany’s 1871 victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to an influx of income, fueled initially by the French indemnity payments, much of which was spent on enriching German state art collections. Led by the charismatic new director of the Berlin Museum, the successor to Gustav Waagen, Wilhelm von Bode, Germany began to purchase not only individual pieces but entire collections. This art harvest included the financing of archaeological excavations, such as Heinrich Schliemann’s famous excavation of Troy, the findings of which filled German galleries. A competition to purchase the artworks of the increasingly impoverished European aristocracy arose between the German state museums and American private collectors.

The onset of the First World War saw an entirely new approach to how art should be handled in wartime. For the previous few thousand years, the rules of engagement had been simple: The conqueror plunders the conquered. Artworks and monuments were first seen as icons of the defeated to be destroyed. Then with the ancient Roman love affair with art collecting, initiated most overtly after the 212 BCE capture of Syracuse, which introduced Rome to the wonders of Hellenistic art, artworks were
trophies to be seized by conquest, even to the point of altering military strategies in order to abscond with the art of the enemy.

This trend continued unabated through the barbarian plundering of Rome under King Alaric and his Goths in 410 CE, and again under King Genseric and his Vandals in 455. In 535 Justinian, Emperor of Byzantium, sent his general Belisarius to Carthage in North Africa to defeat the Vandals in order to capture the loot that they had taken from Rome, so that he could have it for himself.

The Crusades epitomized the gratuitous declaration of war for plunder. Crusaders diverted their route to liberate the Holy Land from the heathens in 1204 to pillage Constantinople, the world’s wealthiest city—and one populated by fellow Christians. The stories of wars begun, or broadened, to steal art would fill a book of their own, and they reached their zenith under Napoleon. For centuries it had been considered self-evident that war involved the plunder of the defeated.

It was therefore most unusual that there should be an open dialogue in the years preceding the First World War, primarily in articles published in art journals by scholars around the world, on the subject of whether art should be involved in war, when and how art should be protected, and whether it should always remain in its country of origin. This discussion continued into the First World War, the first war in which both sides at least claimed that monuments should be preserved, even at the cost of military advantage, and that plunder of artworks should never occur.

When Germany conquered France and Belgium in the early days of the war, two preservationist officials were assigned the supervision of art and monuments during the German occupation. Dr. Paul Clemen, a professor at University of Bonn, was appointed by German High Command as guardian of monuments in France and Belgium. His colleague, Dr. Otto von Falke, director of the Museum of Industrial Art in Berlin, was made commissioner for art within the German civil administration in Belgium. Both men were dedicated to the preservation of art not only from damage, but also from displacement.

The Leipzig-born Clemen began his career in Strasbourg, where he wrote his dissertation on the portraits of Charlemagne. He was named
provinzialkonservator
for the Rhineland region, in which capacity he was responsible for cataloguing and conserving art and monuments. He spent the academic year 1907-1908 as a visiting professor at Harvard, before returning to his professorship at Bonn.

Clemen spent much of his tenure in 1914 drawing up official reports on the condition of the monuments entrusted to him. In December of that year, he published an article in the
International Monthly Review of Science and the Arts
entitled “The Protection of Monuments and Art During War.” This article became a book in 1919 and drew published responses from a variety of fronts, all expressing support for the new concept and policy that art in conflict zones must be protected. That art should be safeguarded was, for the first time, taken as a given. The discussion was rather about whether all sides were taking every possible precaution to ensure the protection of works of art. Clemen was determined to protect the art in Belgium that was under his charge.

Clemen was a preservationist hero, his work distinct from the handiwork of so many of his countrymen during both world wars. His heart-breaking legacy was the extensive list he kept of art and monuments in the Rhineland area of Germany, while serving over forty-six years as editor in chief of the publication series entitled
Die Kunstdenkmäler der Rheinprovinz
(Monuments of the Rhine Province). Most of the works catalogued were either severely damaged or destroyed during the Second World War. Clemen’s obituary was published in an American journal, which praised his work in Belgium during its occupation by the German army: “Far from despoiling the occupied country of its art objects this commission saw its purpose in the cataloguing and photographing of Belgian monuments.” Clemen was one of the few public figures with power during the First World War whose actions lived up to the standards articulated by the press and academic journals. In an incident of dark irony, his home, including an extensive library of rare books and manuscripts, was destroyed by an air bombardment in 1944.

During the First World War, art provided a lens through which to debate heated sociopolitical issues. When French bomber planes flew across the sky above Alsace, the German press expressed fear for the safety of
Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece
The Isenheim Altarpiece
, which was housed in a monastery at Colmar. The issue bubbling beneath the surface was about the control of Alsace, a region that had only recently moved from French territory to German and that rivaled Belgium as the scarred battleground of European superpowers.

One of Germany’s greatest fears was the looting of its cultural heritage by the Russians, a fear that would be fulfilled to a frightening extent after the Second World War. There was a German tendency at this time to attribute to the Russians barbarities of which they may or may not have been guilty.