Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  Coupled with this perceived “worship of graven images,” Calvinists in particular were outraged by the capitalistic tendencies of the church and the inordinate wealth and corruption of the clergy. Buying “indulgences”—paying clergy in exchange for a promise that once you die you’ll get into Heaven faster—was a booming medieval industry. Popes themselves alternately bemoaned and benefited from this endless source of income. The Calvinists found it repulsive that people could buy their way into Heaven through gifts and patronage. They wore only dark clothes and banned singing, dancing, or buying alcohol on Sundays. They condemned the money spent on Catholic decadence, particularly in the form of gilt artworks and overdecorated churches. Iconoclasm, the destruction of icons, carried a symbolic force for Protestant rioters, who destroyed or irrevocably damaged thousands of artworks during the Reformation. The gorgeous, incandescent Adoration of the Mystic Lamb proved an irresistible target.

  To Calvinists, an altarpiece such as The Lamb was the perfect example of what was wrong with Catholicism. In their view, The Lamb encouraged two types of Catholic sin: prayer to an icon and the ungodly payment for indulgences. In paying for such an outstanding religious artwork for his local church, Joos Vijd had essentially bribed his way through the Pearly Gates.

  It had to be destroyed.

  The Lamb was such an obvious target for the destructive rioting Calvinists of Ghent that the Catholics set up an armed guard inside the cathedral, specifically to protect the altarpiece. On 19 April 1566, Calvinist rioters wreaked destruction near and around the cathedral. They tried to open the locked cathedral doors. The Catholic guards inside were vastly outnumbered by the rioters. They would have heard the sounds of the crowd outside, of crackling wood and falling masonry, as they waited breathlessly in the nave for the rioters to break through and burn The Lamb. But the rioters could not get inside. Apparently without a battering ram of any sort, they left.

  Two days later the Calvinists returned. Using a tree trunk as a battering ram, they broke open the cathedral doors. As the doors cracked and splintered, buckling at the center beneath the heave of the ram, the first of the rioters burst through. They carried torches in the night, disturbing the quiet dark of the cathedral interior, so vast and ribbed with arches, like the chest cavity of a great whale. They ran to the Vijd Chapel, prepared to drag the altarpiece into the square outside so that all could see the pyre on which they would burn this inspirer of heresies.

  But when they reached the chapel, the altarpiece was gone.

  In the heat of the riotous night, the Calvinists hadn’t time to stop and think. Perhaps they thought that one of their lot had arrived earlier and taken the painting away. Perhaps they thought its disappearance was an act of God to preserve it. Perhaps they didn’t think at all. They had demolished other art and statuary inside the cathedral, but they never found The Lamb. Where had it gone?

  After the rioters’ first attempt at breaking in, the Catholic guards, realizing that their numbers would be insufficient to protect The Lamb, had devised another plan. They took apart the twelve panels of the altarpiece and hid them at the top of one of the cathedral towers. Each night they stationed guards along the tower’s narrow spiral staircase, easy to defend, as it had to be mounted single file. They then locked the door on the ground floor leading to the tower. As the rioters tore the nave of the cathedral apart, The Lamb’s bodyguards remained undetected in the darkness of the spiral stair. The Calvinists hadn’t the wherewithal to search out the altarpiece. When it was not found where expected, the rioters gave up and moved on. Little did they realize that The Lamb was only a few meters away, in the tower above their heads.

  The Catholics of the city did not wait for the Calvinists to figure out where The Lamb was hiding. After the near miss of the night of 21 April, the Catholics moved the altarpiece to the fortified town hall. The Lamb remained locked there until the riots died down.

  By 1567 the firm and retributive Catholic Duke of Alba assumed complete control of Ghent. He executed a great many of the Calvinist leaders, scattering the local Protestant communities to lands outside of Ghent. The Duke of Alba ruled until 1573. But the city’s allegiance continued to shift. From 1577 to 1584 Ghent was officially Calvinist. During this period, the altarpiece remained in storage in the town hall. There was talk among the Calvinist leaders of sending it to Queen Elizabeth I of England as a token of their appreciation of her support, both moral and financial, of Protestant seizure of control of the city. It would be sent to the Protestant queen not as an icon but simply as a beautiful artwork. But a respected member of the community and descendant of the original donor, by the name of Josse Triest, insisted that the altarpiece remain in Flanders. His request was granted, and The Lamb remained sequestered in storage.

  In 1584 the tide of religious supremacy turned once again, as the city was occupied by the Spanish Hapsburgs. A Hapsburg ruler, Alexander Farnese, was instated, and the city was once more Catholic. With the Catholic ruler, The Lamb was returned to the Vijd Chapel in the cathedral, once more displayed as it was meant to be. It was already without its predella, which had been ruined prior to 1550, but the rest of the altarpiece was intact. It would remain there, undisturbed even through further religious changes, until 1781.

  In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, decimated and divided by religious conflict, the city of Ghent fell into a long recession. The situation began to improve beginning in 1596, under the reign of the Austrian Hapsburg Archduke Albert VII and his wife, Isabella, who financed the cutting of a canal between the harbor of Ghent and the city of Ostende. This renewed Ghent’s position as a center for trade.

  But Flanders was, and would continue to be, a battleground for the power-hungry empires of Europe. King Louis XIV of France repeatedly tried, and failed, to conquer Austrian-controlled Flanders in 1678. After his thwarted attempts, Ghent saw another brief period of quiet and economic prosperity. The Austrians brought new industry to the lands outside of Ghent in the form of refineries for sugar (imported from the colonies), kick-starting its economy once more.

  Then the Holy Roman Hapsburg emperor Joseph II of Bohemia and Hungary arrived. Patron of Mozart and Beethoven, Emperor Joseph was an aficionado of Enlightenment thought, believing that reason should govern all. He cited Voltaire as his formative influence and Frederick the Great as his hero. When Frederick II of Prussia met Emperor Joseph in 1769, he described the emperor as impressive but not likeable, ambitious and “capable of setting the world afire.”

  The emperor’s Enlightenment rationalist views condemned religious fanaticism, particularly of the Catholic persuasion, although he himself had been baptized as a Catholic. While he was no violent iconoclast, his opinions dictated what others were permitted to think and to believe, at least publicly.

  Emperor Joseph’s mother, Maria Theresa, had been a devout Catholic. An outwardly obedient son, the emperor waited until the death of his mother in 1781 to redirect the government in a manner he found more suitable. Strong religious practices would not be persecuted, but they would be discouraged. Education, the rock of the empire’s greatness, would be prized above all.

  In that year, Emperor Joseph implemented a decree known as the Patent of Tolerance, which provided a limited guarantee of freedom of worship. Rather than forcing unity of the empire through religion, the most common route of kings and emperors for the past millennium, Emperor Joseph sought unity through language. His subjects could practice what religion they wished, but everyone would speak German.

  As a decree of a Rationalist despot, Emperor Joseph’s Patent of Tolerance accorded with Enlightenment thought. Education would be the top priority. Church lands and possessions would be secularized; religious orders would submit all of their powers of governance and justice to the state. But religions would be neither persecuted nor outlawed.

  To preserve religious artworks for their beauty but strip from them their iconic religious status, the emperor ordered a large number of artworks to be moved fro
m their original location in churches and displayed in museums. In one year, 1783, and in one region, the Austrian Netherlands (comprising what is now Belgium minus the East Cantons and Luxembourg), the emperor secularized 162 monasteries and abbeys, sending thousands of works of art found within them to museums across his empire or selling them abroad for a hefty profit. When Sir Joshua Reynolds, the British master portraitist and director of the Royal Academy of Arts, heard about the emperor’s sales of ecclesiastical artistic holdings, he set off for the Austrian Netherlands at once. In 1795 he wrote back to England that he had purchased “every picture from Brussels and Antwerp which was for sale and worth buying.”

  In that same year, Emperor Joseph traveled to Ghent, one of his empire’s most prosperous industrial cities. During his visit, he went to Saint Bavo Cathedral to see its world-famous treasure. As a good Enlightenment thinker, the emperor admired art for its beauty and its ability to morally elevate the viewer. But he disdained Catholic decadence and the worship of icons, and his rationalism carried with it a sense of moral prurience. He would exert his influence on The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, but not in the way that Ghent feared.

  The emperor did not seek to strip Ghent of its prized artwork. One reason for this may have been The Lamb’s fame as a work of art since its creation. In the view of the late eighteenth century, it was not worshipped as an icon but venerated for the artistic ability of its creator and as the mascot of the city of Ghent. In this capacity it had always been a destination for the educated tourist. When one went to Ghent, one paid a visit to The Ghent Altarpiece. Pilgrimages to it were undertaken by connoisseurs of art, not pious Catholics. In this way it posed no threat to the Rationalist emperor.

  But the altarpiece did serve to shock. While Emperor Joseph admired its beauty, its skilled execution, its emotional power and scope, he was scandalized by two of the panels: the nude Adam and Eve. The extreme naturalism of these panels was, in his view, gratuitous, pornographic, and—worse—likely to incite irrational behavior.

  Nudes had been portrayed before, of course. The sixteenth century had seen hundreds of reclining nudes as Venus, goddess of love. But they had always been painted in an idealized manner, removed from the way humans really look, and modeled on classical nude statuary. In Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, painted in 1426, which van Eyck may have visited on an undocumented trip to Florence, a nude Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden by a sword-wielding angel. Though they are fully naked, their bodies adhere to the acceptable classical ideal. But Emperor Joseph might have been inspired by Cosimo III de Medici, ruler of Florence, who one generation earlier had ordered fig leaves to be painted over the genitals of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve.

  Van Eyck’s figures both cover their genitals with well-placed hands and therefore might have been less shocking than Masaccio’s nudes. Yet they were highly offensive to the Enlightenment moralist Hapsburg emperor. Van Eyck’s Adam and Eve were too earthly. They held a mirror up to nature, showing pock-marked Man, naked as a jaybird, physically flawed, and therefore degraded. One could count the individual hairs painted against Eve’s skin, and, perhaps most suggestively, one can see the tops of pubic hair on both figures, barely emerging from behind their hands.

  For Emperor Joseph, this was too real. It was not the morally elevating nudity of classical Greece. To the Enlightenment thinker, van Eyck’s nudes demeaned; they made Man look awkward. They had to go.

  It is not clear whether Emperor Joseph threatened to confiscate the altarpiece if the Adam and Eve panels were not removed or if he specifically ordered them to be replaced. But the mayor of Ghent, not wishing to be in the emperor’s bad graces, acted immediately. He placed the Adam and Eve panels in storage in the cathedral archives. Eighty years later, the city of Ghent would commission an artist to paint exact copies of those panels, with the unacceptable nudity covered over by the addition of bearskin clothing.

  The altarpiece would remain in Ghent for only thirteen years more before being swept away.

  The stealing was about to begin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thieves of Revolution and Empire

  Two consecutive events in French history resulted in a massive movement of European art, the scale of which would not be rivaled until the Second World War: the plunder of the French revolutionary army, followed by that of the army under Napoleon. The evolution of French revolutionary and Napoleonic policies on the seizure of art would influence the fate of The Ghent Altarpiece, along with many of Europe’s artistic treasures.

  To understand the French theft of art during and after the Revolution, it is useful to know a bit about how art had functioned before the French Revolution forever altered who art was for and why art was created.

  Before the seventeenth century, artists did not create simply for pleasure or in hopes of future sale. They worked almost exclusively on commission for the wealthy: princes and dukes and cardinals and kings. During the seventeenth century, this began to change in the Netherlands, as a rising merchant middle class began to buy art for home display and enjoyment. This was a new clientele for painters, who for the first time created works on spec for sale in galleries. This movement was slow to spread beyond the Netherlands. Elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in Italy, art still consisted of commissions by the wealthy and the powerful. While artists were respected in Holland and in Italy, at the same time Spain’s greatest artist, Diego Velazquez, struggled for acceptance despite his renowned skill, forced to take on a series of time-consuming jobs in the king’s entourage in order to gain status and earn a living, leaving little time to paint. In most countries, artists were considered little more than skilled craftsmen, making art for the socioeconomic elite of the clergy and nobility, as they had always done.

  Then came the French Revolution, and with it a new attitude towards art collection and looting. From 1789 onwards, art collecting in Europe would no longer remain the realm of aristocrats, kings, and clergy. The period saw a radical change in the sociopolitical fabric of Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for its entire history was overthrown, and with it the trappings of aristocratic privilege, serfdom, court favoritism, and the entire mechanism on which medieval Europe relied. The new emphasis was on Enlightenment principles of the inalienable rights of human beings, citizenship, popular representation, and at least some measure of equality and democracy, although it would be some time before democracy would take hold as we know it today.

  The scale of art theft, in the form of the systemized looting that took place during the French revolutionary and imperial periods, knew no precedents. Individual cities had been plundered before, to be sure, but the looting of this era began with the entire nation of France, stripped of its treasures by the revolutionaries and then extended with the Republican and then imperial armies throughout the continent. Knowledge of the causes of the French Revolution is critical to understanding why this massive movement of art took place and how the art market would be forever changed in its aftermath.

  When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, the common people took to the streets of Paris and began mob riots. The royalty fled the city. The soldiers of the French army, now leaderless and of common stock, sided with the rioters. The city armory, the Bastille fortress, was taken on 14 July. Now the common people had arms and control of Paris. Riotous mobs rose throughout France, destroying the frills of title and aristocracy. They burned deeds and contracts, killed aristocrats, looted castles, inciting general mayhem in what became known as the Great Fear.

  Other monarchs of Europe offered aide to King Louis XVI, but he rejected this as potentially treacherous. The European monarchies feared that the wildfire success of a revolution in France would provide a dangerous precedent for their own nations to rebel. They also saw, in France’s inner turmoil, an opportunity to wrest power for themselves. On 12 April 1792 the Austro-Hungarian Empire solicited allies for future action against France. A Republican convention in France responded by declaring war on the empire. Th
e people wanted to export their revolutionary principles to neighboring oppressed states, thereby strengthening the Revolution at home. Meantime, Louis XVI saw war as a chance to increase his popularity, seize booty for profit, and reassert his authority. It provided an opportunity to unify disparate groups under the banner of nation.

  On 20 April 1792 France declared war on Austria, with Prussia joining the defense of Austria a few weeks later. It was this war in which the young Corsican Napoleone da Buonaparte, who later “francified” his name into Napoleon Bonaparte, would shine as a general, eventually taking over control of the French army and later declaring himself emperor.

  Responding to the declaration of war, a joint Austrian and Prussian force invaded northeastern France in August 1792, capturing Verdun on 2 September. The rights of the French monarchy had been suspended a month earlier, and the monarchy was officially abolished on 21 September 1792. France was declared a republic.

  The Republican army confronted Austrian and Prussian forces on 20 September at Valmy. The unusual battle involved much bluster and few deaths. It was recorded that 40,000 cannon rounds were fired, but the total number of deaths on both sides combined amounted to fewer than five hundred. It was a French victory nonetheless. The invading army withdrew to the far side of the Meuse River that flows east-west across Belgium. Seizing the opportunity, the French army followed the retreating coalition, and by early November Austria had abandoned most of the Austrian Netherlands. The French army continued to victory at Aachen, securing all of the territory once known as Flanders, later known as Belgium, including the city of Ghent.

  This area was officially annexed by France in 1795. The territory of Flanders /Austrian Netherlands/Belgium, an area the size of Maryland, was destined to remain the battlefield of major European powers for centuries to come, the taut and fraying rope at the center of the imperial tug-of-war.