Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  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.

  The truth may be revealed in the near future. In 2010, the Getty Foundation, in conjunction with the Belgian government, announced plans to fund a thorough restoration of The Ghent Altarpiece. The eyes of the world will follow this process and eagerly await word of what lies beneath the Righteous Judges.

  Part of the pleasure of this lingering mystery is that it remains unsolved. Perhaps one day the truth will come to light, the Judges panel will be found, and The Ghent Altarpiece may be whole once more—if it is not already.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I cannot thank my wife enough for her patience, support, and assistance. My primary research assistant as well as my best friend, she is inordinately patient, as she hears me talk about art and art crime far more often than most sane people could handle. Urška, te ljubim in bom za vedno. She even permitted me to name our dog Hubert van Eyck, which is several steps beyond the call of duty. I like the idea that Jan’s mysterious brother might be reincarnated as a Peruvian Hairless, and this allows me to say, with some regularity, that I wake up to Hubert van Eyck licking my face.

  The seed for this book was planted when I founded ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art—an international nonprofit think tank and research group. Special thanks for the tremendous support ARCA has received since its inception, from trustees, staff, volunteers, and colleagues around the world. Art crime has never been better understood, and by so many people, than it is today, thanks in a great part to your efforts.

  Thanks go to the institutions who hosted me while this book was being written and supported the work that this book expresses: Yale University, Yale Art Gallery, the Institute of Criminology in Ljubljana, University of Ljubljana, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Yale British Art Center, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Venice in Peril, the Royal Geographic Society, the National Library of Spain, the University of Cambridge, Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection, the European Society of Criminology and the American Society of Criminology, the Union des Avocats, the American Bar Association, Saint Stephen’s Academy, and the American University of Rome, to name a few.

  Thanks for the research assistance of Lee-Ann Rubinstein, Nathalie di Sciascio, and Aaf Verkade, whose assistance with Flemish and Dutch sources was invaluable. Pioneers in research on the Righteous Judges theft were of great help: Johan Vissers, Karel Mortier, and particularly Patrick Bernauw. I am grateful to my writer friends, great editors and patient listeners: Nathan Dunne and fellow Slovenophile, John Stubbs.

  Thanks are due to my priceless agents, Eleanor Jackson in the United States and Laetitia Rutherford in the United Kingdom, who sculpted this project along with me. And to the PublicAffairs team, especially Morgen van Vorst, Clive Priddle, and Lindsay Jones, who saw the promise in this book and made it a reality.

  I would never have become an art historian had n
ot three wonderful professors steered the course for me and inspired in me a lifelong passion for the story of art: David Simon, Michael Marlais, and Veronique Plesch. It was David Simon who first mentioned not only that The Ghent Altarpiece was the most frequently stolen artwork in history but that it was also a candidate for the title of most desired object of all time.

  Thank you for reading—and try not to steal anything.

  To learn more about art crime and about ARCA, please visit www.artcrime.info.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  The story of The Ghent Altarpiece, and the history of art crime mirrored within it, is interdisciplinary. It is a story that traverses the continent of Europe and spans six centuries. It is a history of art and of crime, but also of collecting, religious and political intolerance, conservation, war, policing, and the sociopolitics of cultural heritage. As a result, the sources are diverse, as are the research languages, which include English, French, Italian, German, and Flemish. Some translations are from the secondary sources in which they were found, and primary sources were translated by me with the help of translation software for the Flemish and Dutch, supplemented by help from Dutch and Belgian friends and colleagues.

  It was particularly difficult to find primary source material for many of the crimes discussed in this book, since all of the files on the history of The Mystic Lamb from the Ghent diocese and city hall disappeared after the 1934 theft—further suggesting cover-up. If the Nazi art detective Heinrich Köhn, with the persuasive methods available to him during the Second World War, was unable to make headway, then the chances of primary source material falling into the hands of a less-intrusive researcher in the twenty-first century were slim indeed. As a result, for many of the earlier thefts, as well as the 1934 theft, I have had to rely more than I would like on secondary sources.

  Information that sets the scene for the various incidents involving The Mystic Lamb is largely based on the secondary sources. Likewise many of the quotations included here may be found in these secondary sources, and I have not necessarily listed the primary source of them in the bibliography. A surprisingly strong field of Mystic Lamb scholarship has risen online. In the Selected Bibliography I have listed these websites, almost all in Flemish, which provide a wealth of photographs and theories, ranging from the probable to the conspiratorial, all of which helped me to map out the story of The Lamb and to select the versions of the truth that I found most convincing based on my analysis of the material available.

  Regarding the altarpiece itself and the story of Jan van Eyck, Hubert van Eyck, and their contemporaries, excellent art history books cover the material from a variety of theoretical angles. Often the best art history books are the most concise, and the Taschen Jan van Eyck by Till-Holger Borchert summarizes the past few centuries’ theories and arguments, as well as furnishing a number of quotations from famous thinkers in praise of the artist and the altarpiece, from Goethe to Hegel, from Lessing to Dürer, from Burckhardt to Panofsky. I have not referenced the original sources of these quotations of passing praise, as they may be found in many of the secondary sources. Nor have I included in the bibliography every book and academic article on van Eyck, when the most recent and strongest summarize those previous, and help the art historian to discern which past theories are the fruit of incomplete information and which remain at the fore. The stories of Ghent, Philip the Good, and Saint Bavo Cathedral are available in any good guidebook or history of the area, several of which are cited.

  The earliest crimes involving The Lamb, including the attempted destruction of it during the sixteenth-century Calvinist riots and the censorship related to the visit of Emperor Joseph II, are summarized in a number of excellent Flemish books that focus on the 1934 theft, including works by Karel Mortier, Patrick Bernauw, and Maria de Roo, as well as in the histories of Ghent and Belgium listed in the bibliography.

  The Napoleonic era is well covered in biographies of Napoleon and Denon, as well as some of the broader histories of art looting, of which the best is Karl Meyer’s The Plundered Past. Quotations related to the gathering of looted art in Paris and the foundation of the Louvre, such as those by Citizen Barbier and Napoleon himself, are found in the books on Denon, as well as French sources like Edouard Pommier and Dominique Poulot, and above all in Cecil Gould’s excellent Trophy of Conquest: The Musée Napoléon and the Creation of the Louvre. The chapter on nineteenth-century collecting and “illicit art tourism” owes a debt of gratitude to Jennifer Graham’s informative Inventing van Eyck, which discusses the “van Eyck mania” that seized Europe in the nineteenth century. The majority of the quotations by nineteenth-century commentators may be found in her book, including the quotations from the Manchester Guardian, George Darley, and Eugene Fromentin.

  The story of art during the First World War is strikingly underdocumented, particularly in comparison to the riches of scholarship on looting in the Second World War. The quotation from Paul Clemen’s obituary was published in the College Art Journal in 1953. Material for this period has been culled from a variety of sources that touch on it indirectly, both from works on German art collecting, including Bruno and Paul Cassirer, Günther Hasse, and Peter McIsaac, and from the historical summary sections of books devoted to the Second World War, including those by Jonathan Petropoulos and George Mihan. The best two histories of the looting of art during war remain Karl Meyer’s The Plundered Past and Peter Harclerode and Brendan Pittaway’s The Lost Masters, both of which contributed to this chapter.

  Instrumental to research of the elusive 1934 theft and its many conspiracy theories, the adventures of Canon van den Gheyn, and the later suspicions of conservator Jos Trotteyn were a number of highly informative, well-researched websites. These sites are particularly impressive for their scholarly citations—not in the form of footnotes but in the reproduction of actual digitized articles from a century of Belgian newspapers, scanned photographs, and the careful mapping out of various theories. The sites are, in the main, dedicated to the Righteous Judges mystery, but in exploring it, they provided a good deal of information about the other crimes, offering up gems that would otherwise have taken months of archive trawling to uncover. The quotations from Belgian newspapers come from these sites, listed in the bibliography. The site judges.mysticlamb.net, for instance, will be an invaluable supplement to readers of this book, as it reproduces scanned copies of Goedertier’s ransom letters, with the complete text of each, among other valuable images. The site users.kbc.skynet.be/drr/, run by Johan Vissers, is the primary source of the investment-group theory about the Judges theft; it includes brief biographies of the many people involved, with photographs. Likewise speurrsite.erdasys .com brims with digital reproductions of Belgian newspaper articles about the Judges theft and, if you can read the Flemish, provides invaluable primary source material. It also has stills from the 1994 documentary film Trix produced by KRO Reporter out of the Netherlands. The movie includes interviews with Karel Mortier about his investigation. These multimedia sources complemented the various Flemish books on the subject, none of them available in English. Those by Mortier and Bernauw were particularly helpful.

  The Second World War has been the subject of extensive, excellent scholarship. The best summaries of the fate of art during the war are the books by Petropoulos and Lynn Nicholas, and many of the quotes reproduced here, including those of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, may be found within them. Two strong books from 2009 summarize the activities of the Monuments Men, and I recommend them for further reading. Ilaria Dagnini Brey’s The Venus Fixers and Robert Edsel and Brett Witter’s Monuments Men are an ideal pair, as Edsel and Witter cover the activities of the Monuments Men throughout Europe without dwelling on Italy, while Brey’s book tells the story of Italy alone. Edsel and Witter’s work in particular is full of quotations from the likes of Posey and Kirstein, taken from documents and archives preserved by the admirable Monuments Men Foundation.

  Numerous German-language sources contributed to tell the story of t
he salvation of the Alt Aussee salt mine. The article by Christian Reder provides a thoroughly researched summary of Gaiswinkler’s role and was helpful in unraveling the conflicting testimonies of the Austrians who each claimed to have spearheaded the resistance at Alt Aussee, as was Harclerode and Pittaway’s The Lost Masters, which remains the book I assign to my university and postgraduate students as the best summary of twentieth-century art looting in war. The Red-White-Red Book and Gaiswinkler’s memoir must be read with a grain of salt, as they are clearly propagandistic, but that does not mean that they are untrue. I have attempted to provide an unbiased account of the Alt Aussee salvation, as most versions I have read are skewed in favor of the Austrians or the Allies, each side discounting the efforts of the other in favor of its own story.

  My thanks go out to all of the scholars, detectives, and passionate investigators on whose fine work this book is built.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  JAN VAN EYCK, GHENT, AND THE GHENT ALTARPIECE

  Baldass, Ludwig von. Jan van Eyck. London: Phaidon, 1952.

  Blom, J. C. H., and E. Lamberts, eds. History of the Low Countries. Trans. James C. Kennedy. New ed. New York: Bergahn, 2006.

  Bol, L. J. Jan van Eyck. Trans. Albert J. Fransella. London: Blandford, 1965.

  Borchert, Till-Holger. Jan van Eyck. London: Taschen, 2008.

  Boulger, Demetrius C. The History of Belgium. 2 vols. London: Demetrius C. Boulger, 1902-1909. Reprint, Boston: Adamant Media, 2001.

  Cammaerts, Emile. A History of Belgium from the Roman Invasion to the Present Day (1921). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.