Stealing the Mystic Lamb (14 page)

In 1584 the tide of religious supremacy turned once again, as the city was occupied by the Spanish Hapsburgs. A Hapsburg ruler, Alexander Farnese, was instated, and the city was once more Catholic. With the Catholic ruler,
The Lamb
was returned to the Vijd Chapel in the cathedral, once more displayed as it was meant to be. It was already without its predella, which had been ruined prior to 1550, but the rest of the altarpiece was intact. It would remain there, undisturbed even through further religious changes, until 1781.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, decimated and divided by religious conflict, the city of Ghent fell into a long recession. The situation began to improve beginning in 1596, under the reign of the Austrian Hapsburg Archduke Albert VII and his wife, Isabella, who financed the cutting of a canal between the harbor of Ghent and the city of Ostende. This renewed Ghent’s position as a center for trade.

But Flanders was, and would continue to be, a battleground for the power-hungry empires of Europe. King Louis XIV of France repeatedly tried, and failed, to conquer Austrian-controlled Flanders in 1678. After his thwarted attempts, Ghent saw another brief period of quiet and economic prosperity. The Austrians brought new industry to the lands outside of Ghent in the form of refineries for sugar (imported from the colonies), kick-starting its economy once more.

Then the Holy Roman Hapsburg emperor Joseph II of Bohemia and Hungary arrived. Patron of Mozart and Beethoven, Emperor Joseph was an aficionado of Enlightenment thought, believing that reason should govern all. He cited Voltaire as his formative influence and Frederick the Great as his hero. When Frederick II of Prussia met Emperor Joseph in 1769, he described the emperor as impressive but not likeable, ambitious and “capable of setting the world afire.”

The emperor’s Enlightenment rationalist views condemned religious fanaticism, particularly of the Catholic persuasion, although he himself had been baptized as a Catholic. While he was no violent iconoclast, his opinions dictated what others were permitted to think and to believe, at least publicly.

Emperor Joseph’s mother, Maria Theresa, had been a devout Catholic. An outwardly obedient son, the emperor waited until the death of his mother in 1781 to redirect the government in a manner he found more suitable. Strong religious practices would not be persecuted, but they would be discouraged. Education, the rock of the empire’s greatness, would be prized above all.

In that year, Emperor Joseph implemented a decree known as the Patent of Tolerance, which provided a limited guarantee of freedom of worship. Rather than forcing unity of the empire through religion, the most common route of kings and emperors for the past millennium, Emperor Joseph sought unity through language. His subjects could practice what religion they wished, but everyone would speak German.

As a decree of a Rationalist despot, Emperor Joseph’s Patent of Tolerance accorded with Enlightenment thought. Education would be the top
priority. Church lands and possessions would be secularized; religious orders would submit all of their powers of governance and justice to the state. But religions would be neither persecuted nor outlawed.

To preserve religious artworks for their beauty but strip from them their iconic religious status, the emperor ordered a large number of artworks to be moved from their original location in churches and displayed in museums. In one year, 1783, and in one region, the Austrian Netherlands (comprising what is now Belgium minus the East Cantons and Luxembourg), the emperor secularized 162 monasteries and abbeys, sending thousands of works of art found within them to museums across his empire or selling them abroad for a hefty profit. When Sir Joshua Reynolds, the British master portraitist and director of the Royal Academy of Arts, heard about the emperor’s sales of ecclesiastical artistic holdings, he set off for the Austrian Netherlands at once. In 1795 he wrote back to England that he had purchased “every picture from Brussels and Antwerp which was for sale and worth buying.”

In that same year, Emperor Joseph traveled to Ghent, one of his empire’s most prosperous industrial cities. During his visit, he went to Saint Bavo Cathedral to see its world-famous treasure. As a good Enlightenment thinker, the emperor admired art for its beauty and its ability to morally elevate the viewer. But he disdained Catholic decadence and the worship of icons, and his rationalism carried with it a sense of moral prurience. He would exert his influence on
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
, but not in the way that Ghent feared.

The emperor did not seek to strip Ghent of its prized artwork. One reason for this may have been
The Lamb
’s fame as a work of art since its creation. In the view of the late eighteenth century, it was not worshipped as an icon but venerated for the artistic ability of its creator and as the mascot of the city of Ghent. In this capacity it had always been a destination for the educated tourist. When one went to Ghent, one paid a visit to
The Ghent Altarpiece
. Pilgrimages to it were undertaken by connoisseurs of art, not pious Catholics. In this way it posed no threat to the Rationalist emperor.

But the altarpiece did serve to shock. While Emperor Joseph admired its beauty, its skilled execution, its emotional power and scope, he was scandalized by two of the panels: the nude Adam and Eve. The extreme naturalism of these panels was, in his view, gratuitous, pornographic, and—worse—likely to incite irrational behavior.

Nudes had been portrayed before, of course. The sixteenth century had seen hundreds of reclining nudes as Venus, goddess of love. But they had always been painted in an idealized manner, removed from the way humans really look, and modeled on classical nude statuary. In Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, painted in 1426, which van Eyck may have visited on an undocumented trip to Florence, a nude Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden by a sword-wielding angel. Though they are fully naked, their bodies adhere to the acceptable classical ideal. But Emperor Joseph might have been inspired by Cosimo III de Medici, ruler of Florence, who one generation earlier had ordered fig leaves to be painted over the genitals of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve.

Van Eyck’s figures both cover their genitals with well-placed hands and therefore might have been less shocking than Masaccio’s nudes. Yet they were highly offensive to the Enlightenment moralist Hapsburg emperor. Van Eyck’s Adam and Eve were too earthly. They held a mirror up to nature, showing pock-marked Man, naked as a jaybird, physically flawed, and therefore degraded. One could count the individual hairs painted against Eve’s skin, and, perhaps most suggestively, one can see the tops of pubic hair on both figures, barely emerging from behind their hands.

For Emperor Joseph, this was too real. It was not the morally elevating nudity of classical Greece. To the Enlightenment thinker, van Eyck’s nudes demeaned; they made Man look awkward. They had to go.

It is not clear whether Emperor Joseph threatened to confiscate the altarpiece if the Adam and Eve panels were not removed or if he specifically ordered them to be replaced. But the mayor of Ghent, not wishing to be in the emperor’s bad graces, acted immediately. He placed the Adam and Eve panels in storage in the cathedral archives. Eighty years later, the city
of Ghent would commission an artist to paint exact copies of those panels, with the unacceptable nudity covered over by the addition of bearskin clothing.

The altarpiece would remain in Ghent for only thirteen years more before being swept away.

The stealing was about to begin.

T
wo consecutive events in French history resulted in a massive movement of European art, the scale of which would not be rivaled until the Second World War: the plunder of the French revolutionary army, followed by that of the army under Napoleon. The evolution of French revolutionary and Napoleonic policies on the seizure of art would influence the fate of
The Ghent Altarpiece
, along with many of Europe’s artistic treasures.

To understand the French theft of art during and after the Revolution, it is useful to know a bit about how art had functioned before the French Revolution forever altered who art was for and why art was created.

Before the seventeenth century, artists did not create simply for pleasure or in hopes of future sale. They worked almost exclusively on commission for the wealthy: princes and dukes and cardinals and kings. During the seventeenth century, this began to change in the Netherlands, as a rising merchant middle class began to buy art for home display and enjoyment. This was a new clientele for painters, who for the first time created works on spec for sale in galleries. This movement was slow to spread beyond the Netherlands. Elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in Italy, art still consisted of commissions by the wealthy and the powerful. While artists were respected in Holland and in Italy, at the same time Spain’s greatest artist, Diego Velazquez, struggled for acceptance despite his renowned skill, forced to take on a series of time-consuming jobs in the king’s entourage in order to gain status and earn a living, leaving little time to paint. In most countries, artists were considered little more than
skilled craftsmen, making art for the socioeconomic elite of the clergy and nobility, as they had always done.

Then came the French Revolution, and with it a new attitude towards art collection and looting. From 1789 onwards, art collecting in Europe would no longer remain the realm of aristocrats, kings, and clergy. The period saw a radical change in the sociopolitical fabric of Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for its entire history was overthrown, and with it the trappings of aristocratic privilege, serfdom, court favoritism, and the entire mechanism on which medieval Europe relied. The new emphasis was on Enlightenment principles of the inalienable rights of human beings, citizenship, popular representation, and at least some measure of equality and democracy, although it would be some time before democracy would take hold as we know it today.

The scale of art theft, in the form of the systemized looting that took place during the French revolutionary and imperial periods, knew no precedents. Individual cities had been plundered before, to be sure, but the looting of this era began with the entire nation of France, stripped of its treasures by the revolutionaries and then extended with the Republican and then imperial armies throughout the continent. Knowledge of the causes of the French Revolution is critical to understanding why this massive movement of art took place and how the art market would be forever changed in its aftermath.

When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, the common people took to the streets of Paris and began mob riots. The royalty fled the city. The soldiers of the French army, now leaderless and of common stock, sided with the rioters. The city armory, the Bastille fortress, was taken on 14 July. Now the common people had arms and control of Paris. Riotous mobs rose throughout France, destroying the frills of title and aristocracy. They burned deeds and contracts, killed aristocrats, looted castles, inciting general mayhem in what became known as the Great Fear.

Other monarchs of Europe offered aide to King Louis XVI, but he rejected this as potentially treacherous. The European monarchies feared that the wildfire success of a revolution in France would provide a dangerous
precedent for their own nations to rebel. They also saw, in France’s inner turmoil, an opportunity to wrest power for themselves. On 12 April 1792 the Austro-Hungarian Empire solicited allies for future action against France. A Republican convention in France responded by declaring war on the empire. The people wanted to export their revolutionary principles to neighboring oppressed states, thereby strengthening the Revolution at home. Meantime, Louis XVI saw war as a chance to increase his popularity, seize booty for profit, and reassert his authority. It provided an opportunity to unify disparate groups under the banner of nation.