The Just Judges

Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, houses the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — known in English as the Ghent Altarpiece — painted between 1426 and 1432 by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Twelve oil panels, hinged together as a polyptych, depicting a complex theological vision of the Lamb of God surrounded by saints, prophets, judges, knights, hermits, and pilgrims. Ten feet wide and sixteen feet tall when fully open. One of the foundational works of Northern Renaissance painting.

The altarpiece has been, in the six centuries of its existence, the subject of multiple thefts. It was looted by French revolutionary armies in 1794. Recovered. Looted by Nazi Germany in 1940. Recovered, by the Monuments Men, from a salt mine in Austria in 1945. It is, by the standards of European cultural property, the single most-stolen artwork of all time. All of those thefts have been recovered.

Except one panel, of the twelve, that has been missing since the night of the tenth and eleventh of April 1934. It is the lower-left panel of the open altarpiece, on the wing depicting the Adoration of the Lamb. It depicts a group of mounted figures in fifteenth-century Burgundian dress, riding through a stone landscape. The panel is titled the Just Judges. It represents, in the iconography of the altarpiece, the temporal authority of the law in service to the divine.

The night

On the night of the theft, after the cathedral had closed and the night watchman had completed his rounds, two panels of the open polyptych were removed: the Just Judges in the lower-left, and the John the Baptist on the lower-right. The next morning, the cathedral staff arrived and discovered both panels missing. The John the Baptist panel was found, several hours later, propped against a pillar nearby. The Just Judges was gone.

The letters

Within weeks of the theft, the Bishop of Ghent began to receive letters demanding a ransom. The letters were typewritten. They were signed with the initials D.U.A. The first letter requested one million Belgian francs in exchange for the return of both panels. The Bishop opened negotiations.

Over the course of the following six months, between April and October 1934, the unidentified writer of the letters and the Belgian Catholic Church exchanged correspondence on the matter of the panels. As an act of good faith, the writer indicated where the John the Baptist panel could be retrieved — from a luggage locker at the North Station in Brussels. It was retrieved. It was authenticated. It was returned to the cathedral. The Just Judges panel, however, was not surrendered. The negotiations continued. The price was haggled. The conditions of transfer were debated. The letters became, over time, increasingly elaborate.

The deathbed

On the twenty-fifth of November 1934, a man named Arsène Goedertier had a heart attack at a public event in Dendermonde, a small Belgian town. He collapsed. He was carried to a back room. He was conscious, briefly. He called for his lawyer. He told his lawyer, in his final minutes, that he was the only person who knew where the Just Judges panel was hidden — and that the location was identified in a series of documents in a drawer in his desk. He died approximately twenty minutes later.

Goedertier was a Belgian businessman in his mid-sixties. A respected member of the local Catholic community. A church functionary in his parish. A man with no previous involvement in art crime, no obvious motive, no observable financial difficulty. He was, by every available measure, the least likely candidate for an art theft of this scale that the Belgian police had ever investigated.

The lawyer went, the following day, to Goedertier's home in Wetteren. He searched the desk. He found the drawer. He found, within the drawer, a series of carbon copies of the ransom letters that had been sent to the Bishop of Ghent — written in the same characteristic typewriter font — and, attached to one of the letters, a single sentence. The sentence, in French, read approximately: the Just Judges rest in a place where neither I nor anyone can fetch it without attracting public attention.

The line in the drawer

That sentence is not a location. It is a description of a quality — that the panel was hidden somewhere whose retrieval would, in itself, be conspicuous. A church. A public monument. A bank vault. A government building. Somewhere where the cost of retrieval would be, on inspection, too high.

That line has been studied, in Belgian literature, for ninety years. The most-cited interpretation is that the panel is hidden somewhere within Saint Bavo's Cathedral itself — within the building from which it was stolen — in a place where retrieval would require destruction of historic stonework, the opening of a sealed crypt, or the excavation of a public floor. The cathedral has been searched repeatedly with ground-penetrating radar in floors, walls, and crypts. A monument in Wetteren — Goedertier's hometown — has been excavated. The Belgian National Bank, where Goedertier had a deposit box, has cooperated with searches. None has produced the panel.

The position the Just Judges occupied on the open altarpiece is now filled by a high-quality reproduction, painted in 1945 by the Belgian artist Jef Van der Veken, working from photographs of the original. The reproduction is technically excellent. It is the panel that visitors to Saint Bavo's Cathedral see today, in the lower-left quadrant of the open altarpiece, when they stand in front of the work. It is not the original.

The visitors stand, every day, in front of an altarpiece that is missing one of its twelve oak panels, in a cathedral whose own walls may, somewhere within them, hold it. Whether that interpretation of Goedertier's line is correct, no one has ever known. The panel waits. The reproduction looks back.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 18. Stream the episode here.