by Noah Charney
This trend continued unabated through the barbarian plundering of Rome under King Alaric and his Goths in 410 CE, and again under King Genseric and his Vandals in 455. In 535 Justinian, Emperor of Byzantium, sent his general Belisarius to Carthage in North Africa to defeat the Vandals in order to capture the loot that they had taken from Rome, so that he could have it for himself.
The Crusades epitomized the gratuitous declaration of war for plunder. Crusaders diverted their route to liberate the Holy Land from the heathens in 1204 to pillage Constantinople, the world’s wealthiest city—and one populated by fellow Christians. The stories of wars begun, or broadened, to steal art would fill a book of their own, and they reached their zenith under Napoleon. For centuries it had been considered self-evident that war involved the plunder of the defeated.
It was therefore most unusual that there should be an open dialogue in the years preceding the First World War, primarily in articles published in art journals by scholars around the world, on the subject of whether art should be involved in war, when and how art should be protected, and whether it should always remain in its country of origin. This discussion continued into the First World War, the first war in which both sides at least claimed that monuments should be preserved, even at the cost of military advantage, and that plunder of artworks should never occur.
When Germany conquered France and Belgium in the early days of the war, two preservationist officials were assigned the supervision of art and monuments during the German occupation. Dr. Paul Clemen, a professor at University of Bonn, was appointed by German High Command as guardian of monuments in France and Belgium. His colleague, Dr. Otto von Falke, director of the Museum of Industrial Art in Berlin, was made commissioner for art within the German civil administration in Belgium. Both men were dedicated to the preservation of art not only from damage, but also from displacement.
The Leipzig-born Clemen began his career in Strasbourg, where he wrote his dissertation on the portraits of Charlemagne. He was named provinzialkonservator for the Rhineland region, in which capacity he was responsible for cataloguing and conserving art and monuments. He spent the academic year 1907-1908 as a visiting professor at Harvard, before returning to his professorship at Bonn.
Clemen spent much of his tenure in 1914 drawing up official reports on the condition of the monuments entrusted to him. In December of that year, he published an article in the International Monthly Review of Science and the Arts entitled “The Protection of Monuments and Art During War.” This article became a book in 1919 and drew published responses from a variety of fronts, all expressing support for the new concept and policy that art in conflict zones must be protected. That art should be safeguarded was, for the first time, taken as a given. The discussion was rather about whether all sides were taking every possible precaution to ensure the protection of works of art. Clemen was determined to protect the art in Belgium that was under his charge.
Clemen was a preservationist hero, his work distinct from the handiwork of so many of his countrymen during both world wars. His heart-breaking legacy was the extensive list he kept of art and monuments in the Rhineland area of Germany, while serving over forty-six years as editor in chief of the publication series entitled Die Kunstdenkmäler der Rheinprovinz (Monuments of the Rhine Province). Most of the works catalogued were either severely damaged or destroyed during the Second World War. Clemen’s obituary was published in an American journal, which praised his work in Belgium during its occupation by the German army: “Far from despoiling the occupied country of its art objects this commission saw its purpose in the cataloguing and photographing of Belgian monuments.” Clemen was one of the few public figures with power during the First World War whose actions lived up to the standards articulated by the press and academic journals. In an incident of dark irony, his home, including an extensive library of rare books and manuscripts, was destroyed by an air bombardment in 1944.
During the First World War, art provided a lens through which to debate heated sociopolitical issues. When French bomber planes flew across the sky above Alsace, the German press expressed fear for the safety of Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece The Isenheim Altarpiece, which was housed in a monastery at Colmar. The issue bubbling beneath the surface was about the control of Alsace, a region that had only recently moved from French territory to German and that rivaled Belgium as the scarred battleground of European superpowers.
One of Germany’s greatest fears was the looting of its cultural heritage by the Russians, a fear that would be fulfilled to a frightening extent after the Second World War. There was a German tendency at this time to attribute to the Russians barbarities of which they may or may not have been guilty.
One incident particularly raised German hackles. In the autumn of 1914, the Russian army seized and displaced the contents of the Ossolinski Museum in Lemberg, bringing its treasures to Saint Petersburg. This museum was on the recently won Russian side of the frontier with the German Empire. Russians claimed to have removed the art in order to protect it from future conflict. Germans called it plunder. The numbers of objects confiscated from that one museum were staggering:• 1,035 paintings
• 28,000 works on paper (watercolors, drawings, prints)
• 4,300 medallions
• 5,000 manuscript pages
These Polish treasures were never returned.
The majority opinion at this time was that art merited better protection from the damages of war than did human beings. In this discussion the French and Belgians declared that no historical building would be endangered by their soldiery, even if the enemy were concealed within or behind it, irrespective of military advantage or loss of life. Through their writings, they competed for the role of protector of cultural artistic heritage during the First World War.
In an issue of the respected art journal Die Kunst, scholar Georg Swarzenski, the director of the Frankfurt Museum of Art who would later direct the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1939, when he escaped Nazi Germany, until 1957, wrote:Popular sentiment will, indeed must, declare that we have not sacrificed life and property in order to add to our artistic possessions. The damage done by war, the values it destroys, are so great that we must not regard even a fraction of these spiritual values as an indemnity. [This would imply that] the purpose of war was not the insurance and strengthening of a country’s own economic and political life, but the weakening and destruction of the enemy’s spiritual and cultural existence. This aim, which would lead to the impoverishment of mankind, is not perhaps acceptable to any of the countries at war, and certainly not to the German Empire.
It sounded good, but in the heat of the war, would German actions match the high-minded banter in the press and in academic journals? All wars involve casualties, whether intentional or not. But only in rare cases had there been incidental battle damage to art before the First World War. During the Medici reclamation of Florence in 1512, Michelangelo had frantically gathered mattresses to buttress the wonderful frescoes of San Miniato al Monte, which were put at risk by the vibrations from a cannon placed in the church bell tower to shower Florence with shells. The Akropolis in Athens was damaged in an explosion from a Venetian bombardment in 1687, aggravated by the fact that the occupying Ottoman forces used the Parthenon as a powder magazine. Notable exceptions aside, historical monuments had not suffered accidental subsidiary damage in past wars. Art was either targeted for destruction, looted, or left intact.
This war, however, was different. Advances in military capability presented new threats to monuments and historic buildings. The firepower involved, the use of airplanes, and the skirmishes throughout Europe’s landscape, not restricted to open battlefields and besieged city walls, meant that historical buildings were commandeered by soldiers, and errant bombs and artillery would cause unintended cultural casualties. An early example in the Great War was the 1914 destruction of the Belgian city of Louvain, including its richly endowed university library.
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August 1914, the small city that sat between Brussels and Liège was almost completely destroyed. The tragedy of the situation was that Louvain had surrendered to the German First Army on August 19. The city was intact, and peaceably accepted the German occupation for six days, before the German army was attacked by a Belgian relief force that had come from Antwerp, just outside the city. The army units withdrew into Louvain, causing a panic among the other soldiers in the city, who fell victim to the rumor that the Allies were launching a major attack. When the Germans realized that this was not the case, the occupying leaders convinced themselves that the confusion of their own soldiers had been sown by local citizens. In reprisal, the Germans looted and burned Louvain for five days. Hundreds of citizens were executed. The University of Louvain’s library of ancient manuscripts, the cathedral of Saint Pierre, and more than one-fifth of the buildings in the city were destroyed. The German army saw the ravaging of Louvain as a useful tool to intimidate the rest of Belgium into quick submission.
This incident horrified the world, igniting the very fears that so much righteous preservationist dialogue had sought to quell. International headlines unified the general public against German barbarism and sent dread of another Napoleonic art earthquake coursing throughout the rest of Europe.
To excuse the destruction of the library at Louvain, Kunstchronik, another internationally read German art journal, wrote: “Implicit confidence may be placed in our Army Command, which will never forget its duty to civilization even in the heat of battle. Yet even these duties have their limits. All possible sacrifices must be made for the preservation of precious legacies of the past. But where the whole is at stake, their protection cannot be guaranteed.” The First World War consumed one-third of the population of Europe. When the strategies of generals paid little heed to the lives of soldiers, it reads as ironic that so much ink was spilt in demanding the protection of artworks. And yet art was seen as the eternal heritage of any civilization. It had outlived, would outlive, must outlive every human who played a part in the war.
In the first years of the Great War, the theory held that war was a matter of weapons and armies and that monuments and artworks should be protected from conflict. Article 27 of the 1907 Hague Convention declares:In sieges and bombardments all available precautions must be adopted to spare buildings devoted to divine worships, art, education, or social welfare, also historical monuments, hospitals, and assembly points for the wounded and the sick, provided that they are not being used at the same time for military purposes. It is the duty of the besieged to mark these buildings and assembly points with easily visible marks, which must be made known beforehand to the besieging army.
As the war continued, however, the hopeful ideology of preservation, which proved increasingly difficult to assure, fell by the wayside. In the heat of battle, contingencies arose as monuments fell. Louvain was only the first victim.
At the outset of the war, despite the preservationist dialogue in art publications, there was a justified fear that the German army was willing to destroy art and monuments if they stood to gain strategically. In these early days of the war, the rules of engagement, if any rules were to be actually implemented, were as yet unknown. But the German army had looted not only in Louvain but also in Malines, setting an initial standard of destruction despite their publications to the contrary.
When the first bullets of the First World War cut through the air, the twelve panels of The Ghent Altarpiece were scattered. But The Lamb’s wild ride had just begun.
When Germany invaded Belgium, the officials of Ghent and Brussels feared that their respective panels from The Lamb would become targets. After all, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin already had the wings, thanks to the nocturnal opportunism of Vicar-General Le Surre and subsequent sales. It was an easy step for the German imperialists to seize the panels still in Belgium and reunite one of the world’s greatest masterpieces in Berlin.
An unlikely hero stepped forward to protect the altarpiece during the Great War: Canon Gabriel van den Gheyn of Saint Bavo Cathedral. In addition to his ecclesiastical duties, Canon van den Gheyn was custodian of the cathedral treasures. This suited him well, as his true passion was archaeology. When asked, he described himself as an archaeologist and historian first, a cathedral canon second.
Gabriel van den Gheyn had a boyish face, accentuated by the close-cropped haircut smoothed flat on either side of a central part that gave him an air of a local newspaper boy hiding inside a corpulent body. His infectious enthusiasm for history, art, and, in particular, Catholic mysticism shone through, despite the gently downward-sloping eyes of a man sadder and wiser than his age suggested. The young canon would prove to be a central figure in the story of The Ghent Altarpiece in both world wars and in the infamous theft of one panel in 1934. But for the time being, the greatest worry was for the safety of the altarpiece in the face of the fast-approaching German army at the start of the First World War.
With genuine concerns about the safety of the central panels of the altarpiece, Canon van den Gheyn met with the bishop and the burgomaster, or principal magistrate, of Ghent to decide on a plan. Portly, rose-cheeked, almost Rubenesque, Burgomaster Baron Emile Braun was given the affectionate nickname Miele Zoetekoeke, “sweet cake,” by his constituents. Emile-Jan Seghers was the twenty-sixth bishop of the diocese of Ghent. Wise and wily, the bishop was willing to hear out the canon’s plan, even to risk death to protect the treasures of his church. To do nothing but wait for the German army to arrive was unacceptable. The three men determined that The Lamb should be smuggled out of Ghent and hidden until the war ended.
But time was short. The German advance had been so rapid, the army would be on them any day. There was also the fear of German repercussions upon the discovery that the trophy of the city of Ghent had been denied them. It was so certain that the Germans would resort to torture and wanton destruction in retaliation for having been denied the treasure they sought that Burgomaster Braun refused to take any action. Better to hand over The Lamb intact and appease the German dragon than risk retributive death and destruction by attempting to hide it. Bishop Seghers was torn. Only Canon van den Gheyn firmly believed that The Lamb could, and must, be saved.
There were patriotic and symbolic reasons to preserve the Belgian national treasure, beyond any artistic interest. The Lamb had long been a symbol of the highest artistic achievement of Belgian culture, the rock of their patrimony. In times of war, such a treasure became a battle standard. The Lamb was for Belgium what Michelangelo’s David might be for Italy, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People for France, the Brandenburg Gates for Germany. Should it fall into enemy hands, the impotence of the country, unable to defend it, would be brought to the fore. The flag would be gone.
The canon believed that The Lamb must be defended. And what he lacked in might, he made up for in cunning. He convinced Bishop Seghers to agree, in secret, to at least passively aide him in the hiding of The Lamb. The condition was that the bishop should never know any details about it, as he would certainly be the first one questioned.
With the Burgomaster of Ghent bowing out of operations, the canon then turned to a Belgian cabinet minister, whose name has remained secret. The minister agreed that The Lamb should be protected, but what could he do? It was too late and too dangerous to have it shipped abroad.
The canon had a plan. During lunch hour, when the cathedral was closed, he and four Ghent residents took the panels from the archives of Saint Bavo into the Episcopal Palace, which adjoined. The names of these four friends, whose help was so essential, have not been preserved—wartime heroism is often cloaked in anonymity. Because of the turbulence of the times, fear and confusion at the impending German occupation, and the panels’ having been kept in the archive, several days passed before any of the cathedral staff noticed that The Lamb was missing. There was a brief panic among the staff, who feared that it had been looted already. The canon assured them that The Lamb was safe, and invented the whi
te lie that it had been taken abroad for safekeeping. This was designed to protect his staff against interrogation.
How to move the altarpiece from the Episcopal Palace out of town? The canon and his colleagues prepared four large wooden cases in which to transport the altarpiece. The cases had to be brought to the palace in pieces and assembled there, so as not to arouse suspicion. The difficulty in hiding cases large enough to fit The Lamb, even subdivided into more portable panels, cannot be exaggerated. They must have felt the eyes of the city upon them. If anyone saw the cases being brought to the bishop’s residence, they would have guessed that The Lamb was inside, and the operation would have been blown. Possible German collaborators lurked everywhere.
By night in the Episcopal Palace, against the glow of lamplight, they cleaned The Lamb of dust and moisture, wrapped it in blankets, and sealed it inside the wooden cases. But how could they move four enormous cases containing a painting the size of a barn wall and the weight of an elephant? The canon had an idea.
At the time it was not irregular for junk merchants to travel through the city, selling a wide variety of wares from a horse-drawn cart. From a sort of portable flea market on wheels, they would sell objects both new and used, from kitchenware to clothing, from blankets to carpets, from farm equipment to horseshoes. Nothing would look suspicious on the back of a junk cart as it wheeled its way through town.
The canon commandeered a junk cart, already loaded with bric-a-brac. On 31 August 1914, his friends drove it through town by night, its contents clattering along the cobbled streets. They backed the cart into the courtyard of the bishop’s residence and closed the gate. In the dark of night they carefully, as quietly as possible, unloaded the junk from the cart: pans and pots, carpets and lamp sconces, brooms and scythes, books and bridles. They slid the four wooden cases onto the bottom of the empty cart, then began to reload it. First they spread out carpets; then they carefully piled on the rest of the junk so that the appearance was haphazard.
