by Noah Charney
With the inscription uncovered, the art world was confronted with a great master whom they had overlooked. Suddenly works that had previously lacked attribution were assigned to Hubert. Many works in the world’s museums are simply labeled as “anonymous” or “unknown artist.” When one or more works seem to share an authorial style, art historians may give a name to the anonymous artist, whose real name has been lost over the centuries. A notable example is the work of the great Robert Campin, one generation older than Jan van Eyck (and possibly his master). His name was unknown until recently. Before it was discovered, his works, including the world-famous Merode Altarpiece now at the Cloisters in New York, were attributed to “The Master of Flemalle.”
Was Hubert van Eyck the real name of one of these lost masters? After the discovery of the inscription, a number of well-regarded paintings, all in the style of mid-fifteenth-century Flanders, were suddenly attributed to Hubert. These include the Crucifixion and Last Judgment in the Hermitage, the silver-point drawing The Betrayal of Christ in the British Museum, the Portrait of John the Fearless in Antwerp, a Crucifixion at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, and The Holy Women at the Sepulchre from the Cook Collection in Richmond, England, among others. These works were attributed to Hubert, with a prominent question mark, based on the fallible and rather unscientific method of stylistic comparison. The comparison, of course, was to The Ghent Altarpiece—none of which may have been painted by Hubert. As the famous art historian Max Friedlander wrote in 1932, “Having read the entire literature on van Eyck . . . only one thing about the Ghent Altar is sure, namely that its famous inscription has caused stylistic criticism greater embarrassments than this discipline, not exactly short on blunders, has ever known before.”
Despite the hunger to provide paintings for this newly discovered master painter, it is not clear that any of Hubert’s paintings are extant. Still, Hubert van Eyck’s association with The Ghent Altarpiece is further indicated by the fact that he was buried in the Church of Saint John, in the wall of the Vijd Chapel—the church and the chapel for which The Ghent Altarpiece was painted. The grave was later moved and lost when the church’s dedication was changed from Saint John to Saint Bavo. But the epitaph on Hubert’s tomb is recorded in the 1550 notes of a traveler named Marcus van Vaernewyck. This epitaph gives Hubert’s death date as 18 September 1426—perhaps only weeks after The Ghent Altarpiece was begun.
We may infer from this that, if Hubert van Eyck was indeed a painter associated with The Ghent Altarpiece, then his contribution to it included the layout, design, and perhaps a few unfinished figures, but little more. He died long before he could have made a major, or even substantially visible, contribution. Although the exact date of the commission of the altarpiece is unknown, the very fact that Hubert died in 1426 and the painting was not completed until 1432 indicates the extent of work still required as of 1426. In the six years following his brother’s death, it was Jan who did the painting.
Yet travelogues from two other nearly contemporary tourists indicate that very soon after the completion of the altarpiece, Hubert was considered to have been its painter. Hieronymous Münzer, who visited Ghent in 1495, wrote that “the master of the altarpiece is buried before the altar.” Jan van Eyck was buried in Bruges, so Münzer can only be referring to Hubert. The second tourist was Antonio de Beatis, secretary to a visiting ecclesiastical dignitary, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona. De Beatis wrote of his 1517 visit that the “canons” of the church had told him that The Ghent Altarpiece had been painted by an artist from “ La Magna Alta” (the old term for Germany, from which is derived the country’s French name, Allemagne ) by the name of Roberto and that Roberto’s brother completed the work. Perhaps the Italian De Beatis Italianized the name he thought he heard, whether it was Hubrechte, Luberecht, or Ubrecht, and transformed it in his memory into Roberto.
But these archival documents suggesting that there was indeed a Hubert van Eyck painting in Ghent in the 1420s were only discovered in 1965. Many still consider that all-important inscription to be a sixteenth-century forgery. If so, it would be the first of thirteen crimes involving this one ill-fated painting.
In 1933, art historian and collector Emile Renders published an article claiming that the inscription was a forgery, perpetrated by Ghent Humanists who were dismayed that their city’s treasure should have been painted by an artist associated with the rival city of Bruges. Renders argues that these forgers invented a brother from Ghent, Hubert, whose hand in the altarpiece could make it seem that Ghent’s greatest treasure had been created by one of its own citizens. A contemporary equivalent of this theory might be to say that the greatest treasure of the city of Boston had been created by a New Yorker. Renders’s theory remains intriguing and plausible. Just because archives have proven that a painter named, approximately, “Hubert” was working in Ghent in the correct century does not mean that Hubert was involved in The Ghent Altarpiece, nor that the inscription is original.
Another scholar, Lotte Brand Philip, wrote in 1971 that the inscription, while original, had in fact been misread. Hubert van Eyck was actually listed as fictor, not pictor. This would mean that Hubert created the sculptural framework for the altarpiece, while Jan did the painting. The deterioration of the inscription, in which certain words are completely obliterated, makes a misread plausible. This remains a possibility championed by a number of scholars, although it is contradicted by one of the aforementioned documents, from March 1426, which mentions an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Saviour that is still in the workshop of “Master Hubrechte the painter,” which would make him a pictor and not a fictor.
To this day, art historians are divided on the authorship of The Ghent Altarpiece. Sit in on lectures by different art historians, and half will teach that the altarpiece is by the van Eyck brothers, and half that it is by Jan van Eyck alone.
Though the existence of an artist called Hubert in early-fifteenth-century Ghent is now beyond doubt, his involvement in The Ghent Altarpiece remains an unsolved mystery. It seems probable that he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece but died so soon after the commission that none of his work may be seen in the finished painting, which was taken up by his brother Jan, with the blessing of Duke Philip the Good. Unless some new clue rises from the silt, the precise origins of the altarpiece will remain an enigma. And perhaps that is part of its allure? When all of the questions have been answered, we might cease to look. The Ghent Altarpiece proffers many tantalizing questions, supports intriguing answers, yet refuses to yield up definitive solutions. It haunts us still, as it has haunted and beckoned six hundred years of art lovers and thieves—all the more powerful because of the unparted mists that remain around it.
A work of art rarely has intrinsic material value—so much painting is just wood and linen and pigment. It is the way these materials are used, and even more so the story of their past and what they have meant to people and nations, that imparts value to humble ingredients. Rarely discussed by scholars, the history of art crime is a human psychological drama, a tug-of-war of ownership woven with ideological, religious, political, and social motivations that are provoked or embodied by the art in a way that no other inanimate object sustains. And The Ghent Altarpiece , with its biography of twists and turns, is an ideal lens through which to examine this phenomenon.
Now let us turn to the story of the painting as a physical object: coveted, desired, reviled, damaged, nearly destroyed, stolen, smuggled, and recovered, only to be stolen again. We shall see how the masterwork that began as a point of pride for the community in which it was housed, the treasure of the city of Ghent, evolved into the icon of the country of Belgium, and became ultimately a symbol for the preservation of civilization against evil.
CHAPTER THREE
The Burning of the Lamb
The first century of The Ghent Altarpiece’s existence was the only period in which it was unmolested. Beyond the Hubert van Eyck mystery, which many scholars still feel was the result of an early-s
ixteenth-century forgery, and the damage done by cleaning that resulted in the loss of the predella, The Lamb’s first 140 years were quiet. Then, in 1566, The Lamb became the victim of an unprecedented and unparalleled string of crimes. It began as the whipping boy for a series of ideological causes, each framing the altarpiece as a symbol of all they hated.
The Lamb’s hometown, the stalwart and oft-burgled city of Ghent, has a fascinating history, one inextricably linked to the story of its masterpiece. Ghent (Gent in the local language, Flemish, Gand in French) has retained the flavor of its rich and dark history, as the city was largely spared damage from the many wars that charged across its threshold. The story of Ghent is integral to the understanding of what happened to the city’s greatest treasure, particularly in the early period of The Lamb’s history as the victim of crimes.
Though archaeological elements have been found at Ghent dating back to prehistoric times, the city began, as so many European cities did, as a Roman fortified encampment. The name of the city probably comes from the Celtic word ganda, meaning the confluence, or meeting point, of several bodies of water—in this case the rivers Lys and Scheldt. What began as a simple settlement rose to prominence in 630 with the establishment of the Abbey of Saint Peter, soon to be renamed the Abbey of Saint Bavo. A second abbey, called Blandijnsberg, followed. Abbeys at the time were not only religious centers but nuclei of trade. A town rose out of the gathering of craftsmen and traders around these abbeys.
It was about this time that a wealthy local landowner by the name of Allowin was born in the nearby settlement of Brabant. Allowin married and had a daughter, but felt unhappy despite his wealth and family. When his wife died, Allowin had something of a midlife crisis. He turned to God, giving away all of his land and possessions to the poor, entrusting himself as disciple to a wandering bishop who later became Saint Amand of Maastricht.
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 resor
ted 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.
