Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece

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Almost from its conception, the large-scale 15th century Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent, Belgium was plagued by problems. Hubert Van Eyck began the project in the early 1420s, but he died before this ambitious project of 12 panels and 24 compartmented scenes could reach fruition. After his 1426 demise, the work was taken up and completed by younger brother Jan. But, as Noah Charney's new book shows, the travails of this Middle Ages masterpiece had just begun. In century after century, the so-called Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was dismembered, hidden, looted, pawned, mutilated, stolen, smuggled, ransomed, burned, forged, and used as war reparations. In fact, this incomparable panel painting holds the dubious distinction of being the most stolen artwork of all time. A subject even more captivating than the author's novel The Art Thief.

From the Publisher

Kirkus Reviews

Charney (Art History/American Univ. of Rome; The Art Thief, 2007, etc.) unsnarls the tangled history of Jan van Eyck's 15th-century The Ghent Altarpiece(akaThe Mystic Lamb), "the most desired and victimized object of all time."

With a novelist's sense of structure and tension, the author adds an easy familiarity with the techniques of oil painting and with the intertwining vines of art and political and religious history. He begins near the end of World War II. As the Reich's military fortunes crumbled, the Allies scrambled to find where the Nazis concealed their tens of thousands of stolen artworks, many slated for Hitler's proposed "super museum." Among them was the Altarpiece. Charney pauses to describe the large work, which comprises 20 individual painted panels, hinged together. Art historians admire it not just for its supreme craftsmanship—described clearly by the author—but also for its historical significance as the world's first major oil painting. Charney also lists a number of "firsts" that the work represents (e.g., the first to use directed spotlighting) and sketches the biography of van Eyck, which makes Shakespeare's seem richly detailed by comparison. Commissioned to create the altarpiece for the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, van Eyck took some six years to complete it. As religious and political strife waxed and waned, the painting was always in danger. The Calvinists didn't like it (the Catholics promptly hid it); Napoleon, perhaps history's greatest art thief, craved it; a cathedral fire threatened it; the Germans came for it in WWI and again in WWII. Even now, one panel remains at large, though some argue that the replacement copy is actually the original.

A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry and passion.