3.75 meters high, comprising four fixed panels and twenty mobile shutters, this polyptych was produced by Hubert Van Eyck and his little brother Jan, between 1424 and 1432. Admirable of harmony, drawing, action, light , of execution (will write the historian Jules Michelet), the mystical lamb is a masterpiece of Western Art. The youngest of Van Eyck, who perfected the technique of oil painting, has indeed multiplied the details (to lunar craters), and offered liveliness to men, animals, trees and flowers represented on this altarpiece structured around of Christ (Lamb). This one offers his life (symbolized by his blood) and sees flowing angels, holy, clerics and notables who come to love him.
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Even in salt mines
Besides its beauty, the work is not devoid of mysteries. In the sky that overlooks the city, we would distinguish for example human faces. But who? Along the restorations, we discovered a second pair of ears on the head of the lamb that would have supplanted (why?) The first in the 16th century.
It is also the incessant wanderings of the altarpiece that mark historians. In 1566, the Calvinists took power to Ghent. Iconoclasts, the latter wish to ransack the work of Jan Van Eyck which was hidden – in extremis – by Catholics. Two good centuries later, at the request of Joseph II, the mayor of Gand withdrew the two oak paintings on which Adam and Eve appear, too naked in the eyes of the emperor. In 1794, the revolutionaries won the polyptych towards the Louvre, before Wellington brought it back in person to Ghent in 1816. From one sale to the other, part of the work then landed in the hands of the King of Prussia Frédéric III, then at Bode-Museum in Berlin.
We pass so much so that the mystical lamb has become over the centuries the most stolen, dispersed and transbahted picture in the world. And it’s not just ancient history. During the First War, Belgium emmured to Ghent what remains of the work, then recovered in 1918 the panels that were in Berlin. The Nazis will once again seize the work in 1940, and hide it in the Altaussee salt mine in Austria. Threatened with explosion in 1944, she was saved by the group Monuments Men Created by the American general Eisenhower.
In 1862, two Victor Hugo fighted against the death penalty in the pages of Belgian newspapers
A man carrying a bearded
In 1940, however, the Germans had not got their hands on the entire altarpiece. A sign was missing – and still lacks – call. On April 11, 1934, in fact, when he opened the Saint-Bavon Cathedral of Ghent, the sacristan van Volsem discovered that two panels were stolen-that representing the joint judges, and that illustrating Saint-Jean Baptiste.
The police, then, have very little clues to hang on. On the 30th of the same month, however, the bishop of Ghent receives by letter a ransom request from a million Belgian francs signed by the initials Dua Le Prélate ties the dialogue, and the famous Dua then transmits to him a luggage instructions ticket from Brussels-Nord station. On the spot, the instructions of the instruction gives the police a large rectangular package, which contains the panel of Saint John Baptiste. Dua is therefore not a charlatan. But when it is questioned about the physician’s physique, the attendant has only a few memories: he only reviews a man in his fifties bearing a beard. Hardly more.
After the delivery of the first table, the police decide to go further and proposed to pay the ransom via an intermediary, in Antwerp, on June 14, to recover the second table. In the envelope, however, the authorities have placed only 25,000 francs. The thief, furious, does not make the judges honest and the investigation is patina again.
-It was then that, at the end of November 1934, in Dendermonde, during a political meeting, one of the strangest facts of the case came. After having delivered his speech, a man named Arsène Goedertier undergoes a heart attack. Former sacristan, banker of Wetteren worthy of confidence, he reveals on his death bed to be the only one to know where the honest judges are. He pronounces the words “In my office, key, wardrobe, burden, mutuality …“, then dies in a last breath and takes his secret in the grave. In the hope of knowing more, we are looking for the famous binder in the GOEDERTIER office. There is an envelope containing the copies of the thirteen letters of request ransom, but not the slightest trace of the painting …
In 1939, justice considered Arsène Goedertier as the thief of the paintings, without having the last word on the case. As it should be, all possible theories have therefore succeeded since, until the evocation of the presence of the painting in the mortuary vault of King Albert I died in February 1934. In 2018, some mentioned the existence of a Small tunnel under Kalandeberg Street, Ghent Commercial Artery. But no track was successful. In the meantime, order was placed with a copyist who reproduced the painting, painting one of the joint judges in the guise of King Leopold III. And in his novel La fall, Albert Camus imagined one of his characters hiding the original in a wardrobe.
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The investigation continues
The story does not stop there. Contacted by FreeCaroline Dewitte, magistrate at the Ghent prosecutor’s office responsible for 20 years in the file of upright judges, confirms that a search was still conducted in Flanders-Orientale in October. “”There were valid cluesshe underlines, But the table was not found. The prosecution is still inquiry when it receives credible information. We do not wish to close any door, on the one hand, because it is an important work and, on the other hand, for the future, in order to be able to specify that this place has already been verified and that the panel does not ‘Don’t find it. “
“We always have the hope of finding himshe insists. No evidence allows us to say that it would be destroyed. “ If there is therefore no active investigation on the file of the joint judges in the Ghent prosecution, the verification of the tracks and indices relayed by citizens or amateur investigators occupies about 5 % of the working time of the magistrate . “”Each year, on average, there are two or three tracks to investigate. And I’m not alone for that. Two police officers from the Federal Ghent Police acquired experience on this issue and work on these tracks. “
The file is always very lively in Ghent. After the recent articles on the search in October, Ms. Dewitte still received new information.
Jan Van Eyck, chief investigator?
In Art Historyhis reference work, Ernst Hans Gombrich evokes the “tireless patience” by Jan Van Eyck, adding detail on detail so that his painting reflects the visible world. This is what will distinguish for a long time the Flemish painting of the Italian. In the peninsula, the Brunelleschi and others – which do not yet master oil painting – testify to the real not by details, but thanks to the lines, perspectives, scientific reinforcements. Who knows? Like the primitive Flemish, it is undoubtedly the pile of clues, surveys, details and searches, and the tireless patience of magistrates who will one day put the police on the way to the honest judges.
The last phase of the restoration of the mystical lamb
