The Ghent Altarpiece: How the World's Most Stolen Painting Survived War, Theft, and a Missing Lamb

The warmth of the midday sun, quickly vanished as the cool air of the cathedral washed over us. It was, if you pardon the pun, a blessed relief given Belgium was in the middle of a June heatwave; temperatures hadn't dipped below 30 degrees Celsius for a week, and my fair skin was starting to feel the punishment of so much strong and direct sunlight. So a trip to the cool, vastness of St Bavo's Cathedral felt like an easy and much-needed choice.

The clamour outside, street performers, crowded tour-groups, and trams clattering through the middle of Ghent, was replaced by only the sound of hushed whispering and footsteps on marble floors echoing upwards to the enormous stained glass windows, that flooded the huge space with rainbow coloured streams of light. It will come as no surprise that neither me or Ash are particularly religious, but something about the vast history of cathedrals - their hand-crafted hugeness, and the human devotion it must have taken to build such enormous grandiose buildings - still moves me. Each element, even those not visible to the naked eyes gazing upwards from the aisle, have been crafted over generations with the aim to impress; a monument to, if nothing else, human passion.

However awesome the building is itself, from the outside it's hard to comprehend that what lies behind the altar is one of humanities greatest treasures - a painting so historic, that without it the renaissance would have struggled to get further north than the Alps, and masterpieces of Dutch and Northern European Art would never have existed - The Ghent Altarpiece.

Visiting St Bavo's Cathedral

As we hurried towards the dark chapel, an instant hush fell over us as the gigantic, multi-panelled oil painting gained focus; vivid colours leaping out through the gloom, with angels singing on high (very high in-fact, the artwork is over 11ft tall) and a myriad of saints and prophets advancing towards, right in the centre surrounded by thousands of delicate flowers, the Mystic Lamb. It's eyes immediately catch you, human-like and incredibly detailed, surveying the room.

Gazing for a moment at this vast artwork, I found myself suddenly thinking: this masterpiece has been stolen, smuggled, hidden, and nearly destroyed throughout it's chequered history earning it the title the world's most stolen painting. How did it get here - mostly intact - and stay as glorious as it is today?

The History of the Ghent Altarpiece

The Ghent Altarpiece, or to call it it's true name, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, was painted in the 15th-century to stand in St Bavo's Cathedral, where it still (mostly) stands today, as a statement of civic and religious pride in the, then much more important, port city of Ghent.

It's hard to overstate how much power Ghent had in it's early renaissance heyday. It was then the largest city north of the Alps except for Paris - much bigger than Cologne or Moscow at the time - and the keystone of the complex international wool trade; who's influence reached westwards across the channel deep into British Wool Towns, and southwards across the Alps to Florentine Palazzi, made rich from the booming wool trade of the middle-ages. But this artistic commission, which could have just been a commission for a wealthy church in a wealthy city, became so much more than just a footnote in art history. In fact, it's chequered past and importance to the history of European art started right from it's initial conception in the early 1400's.

For a start, the original painting was commenced by painter Hubert Van Eyck, on the instruction of a wealthy merchant family who wanted a grand altarpiece for their family chapel, but Hubert sadly died before he was able to complete the gigantic masterpiece. The duty for that ultimately fell to his brother, Jan. An inscription on the artwork reads, 'Hubert van Eyck, greater than anyone, started it; Jan van Eyck, second in art, completed it'. Still to this day, no one is sure of who the lion's share of the work belongs to, but one thing is for sure, the developments the Van Eyck brothers made in large-scale oil painting were so revolutionary that techniques mastered by them are still used to this day.

Before their work, the realism seen in the faces of the assembled crowds of worshippers gathered around the Mystic Lamb, and the full, life-sized, nude portraits of Adam and Eve wouldn't have been thought possible. The detail the Van Eycks capture in the delicate brushwork around the various trees and plants, and the detailed embroidery adorning nearly every character in every panel, could never have been captured. In short, many masterpieces that came after this which show realistic depictions of human faces and detailed landscapes in oil paint, just wouldn't have ever existed - this unbelievable leap forward in artistic methods opened the door for everyone from Vermeer to Da Vinci, and it's right here in Ghent, not in a museum but in the very location it was painted for!

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in all of its Glory

A Tale of Theft, Secrets, and War

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the story was that easy - that the artwork made for St Bavo's Cathedral, and is still in the same cathedral, has always been here. But it's the heady blend of being an incredibly important name-to-conjure-with in art history, as well as being a potent symbol of Belgian pride and excellence, that gives it it's almost supernatural allure to pillagers and colonisers alike; why not, remove and hide Belgium's most iconic symbol of it's glorious past?

The first threat to the Ghent Altarpiece was during the religious reformation of the 16th-Century. Less than 100 years after it's completion, raiding iconoclasts swept through the low-countries and torched anything they deemed as being heretical against Protestant teachings - artwork they saw as being idolatry - and set about burning thousands of artworks, melting down relics, and smashing stained glass windows. Luckily, before the angry mob arrived in Ghent, steps were taken to hide and protect the Ghent Altarpiece, and it was disassembled and moved - panel by panel - to separate locations around the city and out of the reach of the Calvinists.

Eventually, religious reformation died down in Europe and religious tensions settled, but another type of reformation would bubble up in it's place and provide an unexpected threat to the Ghent Altarpiece - The French Revolution. Belgium would again prove to be an important battleground in the wars that followed the revolution, and eventually Napoleon would ride into Ghent, having driven off the Austrian and Prussian forces, and seize the panels for the glory of France. From St Bavo's they were taken to the Louvre in Paris, the French Republic's new humanist use for a former symbol of royal power, where the panels stayed until the liberation of Belgium after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Another twice in history Belgium would become the battleground in international conflict, and both times would have a profound impact on The Ghent Altarpiece. The artwork was first hidden during World War I to escape the destruction that swept across Flanders, and would be returned as a key stipulation of the Belgian government at the Treaty of Versailles. However this wouldn't stop it from being targeted on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler during the occupation of Belgium during World War 2, and once again removed from the cathedral and taken as a token of imperialism over Belgium. Hitler himself recognised that the painting had a deep spiritual significance for the Belgian people, and instructed the painting to be transported and hidden in a salt mine near Salzburg in Austria, awaiting completion of a Nazi super-museum for such raided artefacts. As the tide of war changed, the hidden artwork was eventually found and liberated by the Monuments Men, an allied force devoted to liberating lost treasures captured by the Nazis during their sweep across Europe, and returned to nations, museums, and individuals alike.

But even Hitler didn't manage to take all of it, as on the outbreak of the Second World War, the artwork was actually incomplete. In 1934, two panels of the Altarpiece were stolen in the dead of night, and vanished without a trace. One panel; a small black and white depiction of John the Baptist, and the other; a much larger, vivid depiction showing a procession of Kings, Judges, and Knights. After the theft, police concluded that there was no sign of forced entry so it must have been an inside job. Before searches could conclude, a ransom note demanding 1 million Belgian Francs for the panel's safe return was sent to a local police station in Ghent, signed enigmatically by D.U.A. . Despite negotiations stalling, with the church unwilling or unable to pay, the smaller panel of the two mysteriously appeared wrapped loosely in brown paper in the Lost Luggage office of Brussels-Nord Train Station later on that year.

A couple of weeks later, a Ghent churchwarden and stockbroker, Arsene Goedertier, collapsed at a political rally and - on his deathbed - seemingly confessed to being the only person who knew of the final panel's location. He died never revealing this last tantalising secret, and to this day no-one has been able to locate the lost artwork. The current panel we see today is a painstakingly made replica, completed in the 1940's. Since then, much speculation has gone into the location of the lost panel, and many have concluded that it can't be far away, for how could an elderly churchwarden transport a huge artwork unnoticed and working alone, even in the dead of night? Perhaps, in fact, and has been hidden in the walls or in the crypt the whole time and is still waiting to be found.

Look at the detail!

Standing in front of it

After all that speculation, it takes me a moment to snap my thoughts back to the spot I'm standing in, being gazed at by the Mystic Lamb. It takes a moment to refocus my eyes to ogle the humongous depiction of God in the highest panel of the work, wearing a metallic gold mitre crowned with numerous sparkling jewels. He's flanked by Adam and Eve; Eve holding the fruit of original sin tormentingly close to her lips, but this time not an apple but a citron (an ancient precursor to lemons) poised and ready to inadvertently kick-start humanity's fall from grace.

Yes, the history of the Altarpiece is fascinating, but for an art-lover like me there's details in the painting you can't help but be bewitched by. The microscopic detail like inscriptions of prayers and psalms in the robes and halos of the assembled crowd, so small it seems impossible to have been completed without the use of magnifying lenses. Individual blades of grass, so fine as to have been painted using only one hair in a brush, must have taken hours and hours of focused work and an incredibly steady hand. The tiny reflections within the jewels and armour, matching perfectly the windows and light-sources of St Bavo's cathedral, further showing Van Eyck's obsession with capturing detail and realism throughout the work. And lastly the Lamb itself, small within the composition but a powerful symbol of Christian faith, standing calmly on an altar surrounded by glowing light, with a tiny trickle of blood pouring from an open wound into a chalice, illustrating - almost imperceivably - Christ's sacrifice for human redemption. Eyes, humanlike yet omnipresent, and so detailed that even at their small size, a modern photograph can barely capture the same enormous detail.

Still, despite it's awesome scope and importance, as a gay traveller I can't help but find something profound, not in it's subject, but in it's turbulent history. It's resilience throughout multiple waves of history - from the cultural upheaval of the Reformation, to Imperialism, and the symbol claiming and attempted identity erasure of the World Wars - feels something like the waves of ever changing history that the LGBTQ+ community have faced; hidden, stolen, erased, lost, restored, and sometimes even eventually admired. And as I stand here holding my husband's hand, in a church in the 21st Century - non-religious though we may be - I can't help but feel like we, much like the Ghent Altarpiece, live in a golden moment where we are (mostly) complete and in totally the place we are meant to be.

The Huge Ghent Altarpiece

If you're visiting Ghent and want to know more about visiting the Ghent Altarpiece, then check out our Ghent City Guide for more details about how to visit and what to expect.

Have you ever seen something this stolen and this sacred in person? Tell us your thoughts—or tag us in your own #GhentAltarpiece moment @BigGayWorldTravel on IG.