Stealing the Mystic Lamb (45 page)

There was so much gold that soldiers were pocketing souvenirs that could help them to an early retirement. Posey wrote to his wife on 20 April: “At the gold mine they filled my helmet with twenty dollar American gold pieces and said I could have it. I couldn’t lift it off the ground—it contained $35,000—so we poured it back in the sacks and left it. I seem to have absolutely no greed for money for I felt no thrill at seeing so much of the stuff. Your poem means more to me.” Kirstein was similarly uninterested in claiming souvenirs. In all his time as an MFAA officer, he only permitted himself to take one keepsake of his adventures: a single Nazi paratrooper’s knife.

With its combination of stolen art and buried gold, Merkers was the first stolen art story to attract international media attention, although the gold was of greater popular interest than the artworks. It is interesting to
note that the U.S. government considered Merkers a financial operation, not one reserved for the MFAA. Eisenhower, Patton, and an assortment of other generals paid an official visit to the mine, further elevating the profile of the discovery. George Patton cracked a joke as the generals slowly descended in the service elevator into the earth: “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be greatly stimulated.” Eisenhower didn’t find it funny.

And what of Hermann Göring’s personal hoard of stolen art? The Allied 101st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne Division found more than 1,000 paintings and sculptures that had composed part of Göring’s collection. They had been evacuated from Carinhall on 20 April 1945 and moved to a series of other residences, in a continued attempt to keep them out of the hands of the Russian army, whose art looting rivaled that of the Germans. Göring left eight days later, ordering Carinhall blown up after his departure. He escaped with only a few small paintings, including six works by Hans Memling, a generation younger than van Eyck and a fellow resident of Bruges; one van der Weyden; and
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
, which Göring was convinced had been painted by Vermeer, when in fact it had been painted by Dutch forger Han van Meegeren only a few years before. Göring was arrested on 5 May 1945. He was tried at Nuremberg but poisoned himself before he could be officially executed.

Justice found its way to Gauleiter August Eigruber, as well. He was arrested by the Third Army mere days after they had reached the mine. He was brought as a witness to the Nuremberg Trials and was put on trial himself in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials. He was sentenced to death by hanging in March 1946 by the Dachau International Military Tribunal and was executed on 28 May 1947.

At the Nuremberg Trials, the counsel prosecuting Nazi war criminals presented slides of a selection of the confiscated material that had been rescued from Alt Aussee. As the slide show ended and statistics on the stolen objects were read, the counsel said, “Never in the history of the world was so great a collection assembled with so little scruple.”

Back with the Third Army in Paris, Captain Robert K. Posey was summoned to meet his commanding officer. He had been awarded the highest honor of the Belgian government, the Order of Leopold—an equivalent to being knighted. It was the duty of the commanding officer to bestow the Order upon Captain Posey, war hero and one among the saviors of the greatest treasure stolen by the Nazis. Posey’s commander enacted the ritual of the Order of Leopold in the traditional fashion: by kissing Captain Posey on both cheeks.

Art is a symbolic magnet for nationalism, more so than any flag. Artworks resemble lambs in an open field by night. The nations are the shepherds. Their ability or failure to defend the lambs, not only from midnight wolves but also from other thieving shepherds, is a sign of their country’s strength. These artworks are imbued with more value than any other inanimate objects. Their preservation has long been considered more important, in times of war, than any quantity of human lives. Should art be displaced from its home nation, that nation loses a piece of its civilization. Should art be altogether destroyed, the civilized world is rendered less civilized.

Through six centuries and countless crimes, Jan van Eyck’s first masterpiece, one of the world’s most important paintings, has survived. In the end, the most desired artwork in history has outlasted its assailants and remains what all great art should be—a treasure cherished by humankind, outliving its hunters and protectors alike, eternally proclaiming the greatest capability of human creation.

Safely back in Belgium at the end of the Second World War, the restless
Ghent Altarpiece
had at last come to the end of its long journey.

Or had it?

C
onservator and Surrealist painter Jos Trotteyn could not stop staring at the panel. It had been his honor to clean
The Ghent Altarpiece
every Easter for the last twenty years. But on this day in March 1974, something was different. He took a step back. The eleven other panels had the tone of old oils and spider web craquelure on the paint’s surface that could only come naturally, with age. But this one had it too: the Righteous Judges.

He knew that the Righteous Judges panel had been painted during the Second World War by another conservator, the now-deceased Jef van der Veken. He had signed it on the back and inscribed it with his enigmatic poem: “I did it for love/And for duty/And to avenge myself/I borrowed/ From the dark side.” There were also the elements van der Veken added, to make the work his own: the profile portrait of the Belgian king, Leopold III; one of the judges no longer hidden behind a fur hat; a ring removed from one finger. These were all elements that distinguished his work from the original.

But scholars and conservators, with an intrinsic knowledge of the art they love, an almost supersensory connoisseurship that defies science, can
feel
authenticity, like a bell that sounds when they see an original artwork. And for Jos Trotteyn, for the first time in twenty years of cleaning the Righteous Judges, alarms were ringing. Suddenly, this forty-year-old panel copy felt like it was the five-hundred-year-old original.

He shook his head. It was impossible. Maybe he needed a holiday.

But just to be certain, he picked up his magnifying glass. He leaned in close to the portrait of Leopold III. That was Leopold, alright. But could he faintly see another face ghosted beneath it? Were there pentimenti suddenly revealing themselves through the surface of the painting?

He called Hugo de Putter, his friend and fellow painter. Together they compared the known original panels with the Judges. De Putter agreed with his friend. The patina of age on the Judges looked identical to that on the other panels. But Trotteyn had never before noted the patina, despite two decades of conservation and direct, up-close contact with the masterpiece.

Trotteyn reported his discovery to the bishopric and the local museum officials. Word leaked out, and a reporter, Jos Murez, ran their story in a Belgian newspaper on 26 March. This led to further reports and drew the attention of the international art community.

The issue at hand was whether or not van der Veken had painted his copy from scratch, using a two-hundred-year-old cupboard shelf for his panel as he claimed. Was there any chance that he had painted
over
the missing original, thereby “returning” it to its place in the altarpiece?

It was an astounding suggestion. It implied that van der Veken was complicit in the theft, or at least inherited information about it that he withheld from the police. And why, after all those years, return the stolen panel? Was this the best way to do so, taking six years to paint over it, so it could be replaced surreptitiously? Why not simply abandon it somewhere and call in an anonymous tip to lead the police to it? And what of the timing of the last ransom attempt, in 1938? The year after this last attempt failed, van der Veken began his copy. Coincidence?

The questions still outnumbered the answers.

The bishopric and university experts ran tests on the Judges panel. In a final irregularity that suggested cover-up, the results of these tests were not published. Rather, they were announced by one of the cathedral staff, Monsignor van Kesel. He said that while the panel had aged remarkably, there was no irregular underpainting detected. The particular mixture of plaster and glue that van Eyck used to make his white gesso preparatory layer was different from that in this copy of the Judges. Wood and grain
particles had been tested. Unfortunately, van Kesel announced, this was indeed van der Veken’s copy and not the missing original.

But many remain unconvinced. Waves of theories have proliferated over the years. The Judges was sliced into sections and hidden in Saint Bavo. The panel was buried in a tomb in the cathedral crypt. It was hidden behind a stone panel on the cathedral façade. It was buried in the coffin with Goedertier. Hitler’s agent Köhn had found it—and secreted it away. Or perhaps van der Veken painted over it and returned it to its place on
The Ghent Altarpiece
, but after thirty years his layers of paint faded, and the original figures and craquelure ghosted through, pentimenti suddenly visible to the naked eye. Perhaps the bishopric was involved in the theft or its cover-up after all? Had someone used van der Veken to return the panel covertly, rather than expose their complicity? This last hypothesis would explain why the test results were not made public.

The investment-group theory, which remains the most compelling explanation for the Judges theft, suggests a solution to the remaining mystery involving Jef van der Veken’s replacement copy of the Righteous Judges. If the investment group tried and failed to extract a ransom, and their debts and broken contracts were glossed over or forgotten during the Second World War, then there would be no reason to retain the missing panel. Who would want it returned more than the diocese itself? It would be out of the hands of the criminals. Could the diocese really be found guilty of theft if they stole their own property, hid it on their own property, and then arranged for a ransom demand to be made to themselves for its return? It is easy to see how those involved could have rationalized their activities as a “no one gets hurt” situation. The Judges panel never left the diocese; it was never in any danger. But the John the Baptist panel was taken away from the cathedral, to be used as the bargaining chip. And it was assumed that the Belgian government would ultimately pay the ransom, as indeed they might have, had Attorney de Heem not demurred; therefore the crime was attempted extortion from the Belgian government. The shoddy police work of both Luysterbourgh and the cheese-focused Chief of Police Patijn may be explained by one of two
possibilities, neither complimentary: They were either lousy police or also complicit.

Perhaps Jef van der Veken had painted over the stolen original, in order to return the panel after the ransom plan failed, and to avoid further inquiries? Van der Veken’s complicity would explain the mysterious poetic couplet he added to the back of his panel—though such a suggestive clue was playing with fire. An ongoing knowledge of the truth, at least among certain members of the Ghent clergy, would explain the refusal of the diocese to publish any of the test results that might have proved Trotteyn wrong, indicating that the Righteous Judges was not the stolen original. Circumstantial evidence leads to this conclusion, but shadows and silence remain.