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| The Ghent Altarpiece, open. Hubert and Jan van Eyck, finished 1432. St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent. |
Then, one night in April 1934, a thief climbed into the cathedral and cut a panel from its frame: the Just Judges, a row of men on horseback riding toward the lamb at the altarpiece’s centre. He left a note behind, demanding one million Belgian francs.
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| The Adoration of the Lamb, detail, the panel the Just Judges once rode toward. |
The note was signed with a symbol, not a name. Police searched for months and found nothing. Then, in November 1934, a Ghent stockbroker named Arsène Goedertier fell gravely ill. On his deathbed, he told his lawyer he alone knew where the panel was… and died before he said another word.
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“I alone know where it is.”
Arsène Goedertier, reported deathbed statement, November 1934
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A copy has hung in the Just Judges’ place since the 1940s, painted by a restorer named Jef Vanderveken. The original has never turned up.
Worse followed. Both Hitler and Hermann Göring wanted the altarpiece for their own collections. German forces seized it in 1942 while it was being moved to the Vatican for safekeeping, then hid it deep inside the Altaussee salt mine in Austria, alongside thousands of other looted works.
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| Lt. Daniel J. Kern inspects the altarpiece at the Altaussee salt mine, Austria, 1945. |
In 1945, a team of Allied officers known as the Monuments Men found it there, undamaged, and brought it home to Ghent. It had survived a king’s threat, an emperor’s army, and two world wars. One panel is still missing.
If you want the theft told well in eight minutes, this is worth your coffee: Theft of the Just Judges from the Ghent Altarpiece →
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Three Things Worth Knowing
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Architecture
Statues Beheaded on the Street
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Notre‑Dame de Paris lost dozens of statues during the French Revolution. Crowds mistook biblical kings carved on the façade for portraits of French royalty and pulled them down, meaning a cathedral survived by accident of iconography, not because anyone spared it.
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Literature
The First Copyright Dispute
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In the sixth century, an Irish court ruled that a monk named Colum Cille had no right to copy a psalter without its owner’s permission. The ruling is still cited as one of the earliest recorded statements on who owns a copied work.
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Le Mot Juste
Provenance
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From the French for “origin.” In the art world, it means the full ownership history of a work, traced owner by owner. A painting with a broken provenance, a gap nobody can explain, is worth far less… and far more likely to be stolen goods.
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Curious & Controversial
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Some historians argue Goedertier never had the panel at all, and that his deathbed claim was theatre, meant to extract a ransom he could never pay out. |
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Belgium formally asked Germany to return two panels seized after the First World War. Germany agreed under the Treaty of Versailles, and some German commentators still call it a forced surrender rather than a return. |
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Jan van Eyck may have painted his own face into his work. This portrait, thought by many scholars to be a self‑portrait, hangs in London’s National Gallery, unrelated to the altarpiece but painted the same year it was finished. |
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| Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, 1433. National Gallery, London. |
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Connoisseur’s Diary
Worth Seeing This Week
The Ghent Altarpiece is on permanent display in the Villa Chapel of St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, behind reinforced glass in a purpose‑built room.
Where: Sint‑Baafsplein, 9000 Ghent, Belgium. Tickets: €8, timed entry, book online. Insider tip: go at opening, 8:30 a.m., before the coach tours arrive. Zoom into every panel at closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be →
Worth Reading
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Stealing the Mystic Lamb — Noah Charney (2010). The fullest account of every theft the altarpiece has suffered, told like a detective story.
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The Art of Forgery — Noah Charney (2015). Widens the lens from theft to fakery, and how forgers exploit exactly the kind of fame this altarpiece has.
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The Age of Van Eyck — Till‑Holger Borchert (2002). The painter in context, and how his oil technique changed what European art could show.
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Explore Further
Watch: Theft of the Just Judges from the Ghent Altarpiece →, an eight-minute account of the still-unsolved case.
Browse: closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be →, a free, ultra-high-resolution viewer built from a Getty-funded imaging project, letting you examine every brushstroke panel by panel.
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