He turned up information that Goedertier already had more than the million francs demanded in the ransom in his bank account. He was the first to note that Goedertier had an eye problem that meant he could barely see in the dark, much less rob a cathedral at night. Now in his 80s, he has done more than anyone to shed light on the case. Mortier has dedicated his quiet hours to the hobby that drives him to this day: the hunt for the lost panel. It was a huge unsolved mystery, not just for Ghent, for Flanders, for Belgium, but for the art world. Karel Mortier was chief of the Ghent police from 1974 to 1991, and fascinated with the Just Judges theft. The greatest strides in solving the crime have not been made by an active officer, though. Photograph: © Archivo Iconografico, SA/Corbis The Adoration of the Lamb from The Ghent Altarpiece. But to this day, a detective with the Ghent police remains assigned to it, inheriting the case from his predecessors. Eventually, after many false leads, police concluded Goedertier had been the thief.
De Vos failed to alert police about Goedertier's confession for a month.
The investigation that followed was no more thorough than Commissioner Luysterborghs's had been. But Goedertier was wealthy and devout it seems odd he would resort to extorting his beloved diocese. Rather than admit their failure, they stole the panel and ransomed it to cover the losses. One theory goes that a group of church members, Goedertier among them, were involved in a failed investment scheme that lost church money.
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The information is in the drawer on the right of my writing table, in an envelope marked 'mutualité.'" The lawyer followed the instructions and found carbon copies of the ransom notes, plus a final, unsent note with a tantalising clue about the stolen panel's whereabouts: " rests in a place where neither I, nor anybody else, can take it away without arousing the attention of the public."īut if Goedertier did steal the panel, why? The church has been defensive, and there is an air of cover-up – as well as evidence that other members of the bishopric were involved. Just before he died, De Vos claimed, Goedertier whispered: "I alone know where the Mystic Lamb is. He summoned his lawyer, Georges de Vos, to his deathbed. Then a stockbroker called Arsène Goedertier had a heart attack at a Catholic political rally. As a show of good faith, the ransomer returned one of the panel's two parts (a grisaille painting of St John the Baptist). The theft was followed quickly by a ransom demand for one million Belgian francs. This is just one of many bizarre twists in the story of one of the most famous art heists in history. Across the street was another theft on the same night he had already been investigating: at a cheese shop. The missing panel – from what was already the most stolen artwork in the world – could wait. The commissioner took a quick look, and left. One of the panels, depicting The Just (or Righteous) Judges, was gone. On 11 April of that year, Ghent police commissioner Antoine Luysterborghs pushed through a crowd at the St Bavo Cathedral that had gathered to gawk at something that was no longer there.
In 1934, one of its 12 panels was stolen in a heist that has never been solved, though the case is still open and new leads are followed all the time. It's almost an A to Z of Christianity – from the annunciation to the symbolic sacrifice of Christ, with the "mystic lamb" on an altar in a heavenly field, bleeding into the holy grail. It's easy to argue that the artwork is the most influential painting ever made: it was the world's first major oil painting, and is laced with Catholic mysticism. The fact that it was the artwork the Nazis were most desperate to steal – Göring wanted it for his private collection, Hitler as the centrepiece of his citywide super-museum – has only increased its renown. It's almost been destroyed in a fire, was nearly burned by rioting Calvinists, it's been forged, pillaged, dismembered, censored, stolen by Napoleon, hunted in the first world war, sold by a renegade cleric, then stolen repeatedly during the second world war, before being rescued by The Monuments Men, miners and a team of commando double-agents. J ust about everything bad that could happen to a painting has happened to Hubert and Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (also known as the Ghent Altarpiece).
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