Stealing the Mystic Lamb (30 page)

Most difficult to swallow is Canon van den Gheyn’s cooperation in a scheme to dismember the very treasure that he had risked his life to protect during the First World War and that he continued to defend. He
may have been coerced into involvement in the Judges scheme, particularly because of the role of Bishop Coppieters. Were he to expose the bishop or not play along, he might have put the good name of the diocese on the line. Van den Gheyn’s dedication to the diocese and to the Catholic Church may have forced at least a silent acceptance.

Though his role in the theft and the motivation behind it remain very much a mystery, it is generally agreed that Goedertier was behind the ransom notes. In addition to the discovery of the carbon copies of the ransom note and the eventual finding of the typewriter on which they were written (about which we must take Georges de Vos’s word), Goedertier’s enthusiasm for the detective novels of Maurice LeBlanc, which feature the famous fictional art thief Arsène Lupin, provides a fruitful line of inquiry.

Goedertier’s wife spoke of his feeling of some personal connection, almost an idolatry, for the Lupin character, who, after all, shared Goedertier’s first name. Of his fictional creation, LeBlanc wrote: “[He does] everything above average, and he deserves to be admired. This man beats everything. From his thefts come a wealth of understanding, strength, power, dexterity, and a nature which I unabashedly admire.” If Goedertier were to model himself on someone whose manner could acquit him of some of the moral guilt of committing a crime, Arsène Lupin was the fellow to choose.

It was the fantasy writer Jean Ray who first noted the link between Arsène Lupin and Arsène Goedertier. Lupin is a gentleman cat burglar whose primary target is paintings. Goedertier’s attempts to ransom the Judges painting recall Lupin’s preferred modus operandi, negotiating a ransom for stolen paintings through newspaper advertisements, which he signs with the initials ALN, an abbreviation for his own name. Goedertier’s various ransom letters reveal a childlike sense of betrayal at his counterpart’s refusal to play by the rules of the game—in novels like LeBlanc’s, the elegant criminal is rewarded for his efforts by the ransom payment. Lupin is a master of disguise, variously concealing his identity in the guise of a painter, a banker, and a politician—all of which were Goedertier’s professions. In one instance, Lupin concealed an artwork at the scene of the crime itself, all the while negotiating for the ransomed
return of the painting that had never been removed from the property of its owner. Could this indicate a solution to the mystery of the Righteous Judges?

In LeBlanc’s 1909 novel
L’Aiguille Creuse
(
The Hollow Needle
), Lupin is on the hunt for a hollowed-out stone, roughly in the shape of a needle, which was a secret treasure storehouse for the kings of France. The location is hidden in code, but Lupin deciphers it and finds the stone on the coast of Normandy. The “hollow needle” is used to hide two artworks: a painting of the “Virgin and Agnus Dei” by Raphael and a statue of Saint John the Baptist. The world’s most famous Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, is
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
by Jan van Eyck, and the recto of the stolen Judges panel showed the grisaille rendition of John the Baptist. These particularities, in addition to Goedertier’s lifelong love of LeBlanc’s novels, suggest that Goedertier modeled himself, and his crime, on his hero Arsène Lupin and
The Hollow Needle
.

There would be a series of codas to the Judges theft, like the false endings to Beethoven symphonies, each one leading to further mysteries—but that ultimately point to one logical, however improbable, conclusion.

In 1938, Belgian minister of the interior Octave Dierckx was approached by a lawyer who, on behalf of an anonymous client, offered to return the Judges panel for 500,000 francs. The minister contacted the bishop. Bishop Coppieters was willing to pay and claimed that he could get the money. The matter was brought before the Belgian prime minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, who rejected the negotiations out of hand. He said, “One doesn’t do business with gangsters. We’re not in America.”

One year later, a Belgian conservator would begin work on an excellent replacement copy of the Righteous Judges—a copy that many, to this day, think is far too good to be a copy.

In 1939, under his own auspices, the conservator to the Royal Fine Arts Museum, Jef van der Veken, began to paint a copy of the missing Judges panel. He used as his support a two-hundred-year-old cupboard door of
the precise correct dimensions and painted with the aid of photographs and the Michiel Coxcie copy in order to re-create the panel as accurately as possible. Van der Veken made only three alterations from the original in his version of the Judges. He added a portrait of the new Belgian king of the time, Leopold III, whose face was placed on one of the judges in the painting in profile. He removed a ring from the finger of one of the judges. And he manipulated one of the judges so that his face was no longer hidden behind a fur hat.

Born in Antwerp, Jef van der Veken was an amateur Surrealist painter and a conservator of the highest acclaim. Specializing in the fifteenth-century Flemish masters, he was entrusted with the restoration of some of Belgium’s greatest masterpieces, including van Eyck’s
Madonna with Canon van der Paele
and Rogier van der Weyden’s
Madonna and Child
. The latter was tested in 1999 and found to be primarily the work of van der Veken, not van der Weyden. His incredibly skillful but heavy hand in restoration prompted an exhibit in 2004 at the Groeningmuseum in Bruges called Fake or Not Fake, exploring the limits of acceptable restoration practices.

In the pre-World War II period, restorers tended to paint with a free hand, bringing back a damaged work to the most complete state possible but often adjusting the artist’s intended design to match the values and beliefs of the time. Famously, Bronzino’s
Allegory of Love and Lust
was subject to censorious restoration when it was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in London in 1860, the restorer adding a flower to cover the rear end of the adolescent, sexualized figure of Cupid, covering over one of Venus’s exposed nipples, and retracting Venus’s tongue, which in the original was extended to kiss Cupid, her son. In 1958 these prurient Victorian restorations were removed, the painting reverting to its original state, nipples, tongues, and all. Today, the prevalent theory is one of conservation rather than restoration—conservators seek to prevent deterioration and further damage to works of art, while touching up the work as little as possible. When conservators do add to paintings, in order to fill in damaged portions of the composition, they do so in a way that is
true to the original work but does not try to trick viewers into thinking that the work has not been restored. The restored portions are unapologetically distinct from the original parts of the painting, the restoration efforts are rigorously photographed and documented, and the paints used are chemically divergent from the original paints, so that they can be removed by future conservators if necessary without damaging the original paint. Not so in the 1930s, when van der Veken was at the peak of his career. In van der Veken’s time, restorers were praised for their skill, if their additions to an artwork were indistinguishable from the original.

The great restorer’s expertise and connoisseurship made him the preferred consultant of Emile Renders, a wealthy Belgian banker who assembled the world’s most important private collection of Flemish Primitives, as fifteenth-century Flemish painters were sometimes called, in the years before the Second World War. He was also the author of the 1933 article that suggested that the inscription discovered on the back of the Joos Vijd panel, introducing Hubert van Eyck to the art world, was a sixteenth-century forgery by Ghent Humanists. Hermann Göring bought the entire Renders Collection in 1941 for three hundred kilograms of gold (about $4-5 million today), with the help of the Schmidt-Staehler organization, the Netherlands-based equivalent to the ERR, the Nazi art theft unit. Emile Renders maintains that he was coerced into selling his collection to Göring, though some sources believe that he was not the victim he made himself out to be. Whether van der Veken was involved in this wartime sale is unknown.

Van der Veken enjoyed a sideline in making “new” Flemish Primitives, copies of famous paintings or portions of them, using centuries-old panels as the support. He would then artificially age the works to give them the craquelure and patina of age. What distinguished him from a forger is that there is no record that he ever tried to pass off his own work as a Renaissance original.

There is a long and rich history of artists copying the work of more famous artists in order to learn their techniques. For a restorer, the ability to mimic the work of the masters whose work is theirs to preserve is a
critical component of their professional success. Copying and even aging works is only a crime when the creator tries to profit from his imitation, passing it off as an original. Though van der Veken, as far as is known, never tried to do this, his ability to mimic the great Flemish Old Masters is beyond question. As senior conservator at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, he was the logical choice to create a replica of the lost Judges panel, which could once again “complete”
The Ghent Altarpiece
, filling the gaping hole in its lower left side.

Van der Veken finished his copy in 1945. It was placed in the frame along with the recovered Saint John the Baptist and the eleven original panels in 1950.

But some have suggested that van der Veken was involved in some aspect of the theft itself. It was odd that he began to make the replacement copy on his own, without the official prompting of the diocese. There is a touch of black humor in the restorer’s choice to work on a copy of a panel that was still missing and that only a year before had been the subject of a renewed ransom attempt, four years after Goedertier’s failure.

Oddest of all, on the back of the panel, still in place to this day, is a confusing inscription from the artist. Van der Veken wrote the following in Flemish rhyming verse:

It is signed Jef van der Veken, October 1945.

Van der Veken was interviewed on multiple occasions but each time replied that he knew no more than anyone else about the 1934 theft. His reticence made people believe that he knew more than he let on, but there was never any concrete evidence to suggest as much.

Questions about the replacement panel should have been raised in November 1950, when the defender of
The Lamb
during the First World
War, Canon Gabriel van den Gheyn, gave a lecture to the Ghent Historical and Archaeological Society entitled “Three Facts Related to the Mystic Lamb.” He told the story of the adventures of
The Lamb
, from its theft by the French in 1794 through its theft by the Nazis, to which we turn next. In the course of his fifteen-page speech, no mention whatsoever was made of the 1934 theft. This is particularly strange, as the audience for the lecture would certainly remember the theft, and it would have seemed to them, as it does today, a conspicuous lacuna in an otherwise historically thorough presentation.

Was the one-time savior of the altarpiece party to the 1934 theft or its cover-up conspiracy? Van den Gheyn wore many hats: In addition to being an amateur archaeologist, he was custodian of the cathedral treasures, the diocese treasurer, and also the chief conservator of the cathedral artworks. So it is stranger still that he would not mention the theft even indirectly, in referring to the recently installed copy of the Judges panel by fellow conservator van der Veken. He had so tirelessly defended the altarpiece during the First World War. If the investment-group theory of the 1934 theft is true, then he was involved in the 1934 theft and conspiracy. During the Second World War, it was he who would accompany the Nazi art detective Oberleutnant Heinrich Köhn on his search for the Righteous Judges panel. Could van den Gheyn have been a Nazi collaborator, or was his accompaniment of Köhn a means to divert the Nazi art detective from his task? Köhn and van den Gheyn first spoke in September 1940, but Köhn’s investigation continued through 1942. On 12 May 1942 van den Gheyn and Köhn toured the cathedral archives but found nothing that would lead them to the panel. It was then that they made the discovery that all of the files related to
The Ghent Altarpiece
, including the files that detailed the 1934 theft and investigation, had disappeared. Perhaps the canon had disposed of the files in anticipation of Köhn’s investigation. They have never resurfaced, leaving a trail strewn with question marks.

This case is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of art theft. It colored the popular imagination, even winding its way into literature. Albert Camus’s 1956 novel
La Chute
(“The Fall”) is a monologue
in which a character speaks with a new acquaintance on a series of nights, while drinking at a seedy bar in Amsterdam. In the novel, the Judges panel had hung on the wall of this Amsterdam bar during the years following the theft. The reader later learns that it is currently hidden in a cupboard in the narrator’s apartment. Camus uses the Righteous Judges to raise existential questions about the personal judgments and life decisions of the protagonist narrator, who refers to himself ambiguously as a “judge-penitent.”