Art › Ghent › St Bavo’s Cathedral
The Ghent Altarpiece
Het Lam Gods
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the Van Eyck brothers’ masterpiece and the most stolen painting in the world.
Joos Vijd and his wife Elisabeth Borluut paid for it for their chapel in the church of St John, now St Bavo’s. The verse on its frame says Hubert van Eyck began it and his brother Jan finished it, and it was unveiled on 6 May 1432. Open, it shows God, Mary and John the Baptist above, Adam and Eve at the ends, and below them crowds of saints, judges, knights, hermits and pilgrims coming to worship the Lamb on an altar in a meadow full of flowers.
Few paintings have had more adventures. Napoleon took the middle panels to the Louvre; the wings were sold and hung in Berlin until the Treaty of Versailles brought them back in 1920. In 1934 the panel of the Just Judges was stolen, and it has never been found. The Nazis carried the rest off to a salt mine in Austria, where the Monuments Men found it in 1945.
A restoration since 2012 took off centuries of overpainting, and in 2020 the Lamb looked out again with the strangely human face the Van Eycks gave it. Stand before it in 3D ›
