WHO PAID FOR IT? Around 1426 — the exact date is unknown — two Ghent residents named Elisabeth Borluut and Joos Vijd commissioned a painter to make the altarpiece for the local Church of Saint John. They were members of the local elite: Borluut came from money, and Vijd was the son of a decorated knight who rose through the ranks of Flemish society only to be found guilty, under questionable circumstances, of embezzlement. For Vijd, the grand gift may have been an attempt to win some favorable press, a tactic not unfamiliar to anyone who watched controversial Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg give $100 million to the Newark schools in September.

ICONOCLASM

In the 16th century, fervent Calvinists swept up in a zealous wave of iconoclasm tried on more than one occasion to break into the cathedral during the night and destroy the work, which to them represented the height of worldly, decadent Catholicism. The clever Catholics decided to dissemble the work, hiding it in a tower of the building. When the Calvinists eventually succeeded in gaining entry to the nave, aided by a battering ram, they found that the work had disappeared. Though they ransacked much of the cathedral, the "Lamb" remained unharmed.

CENSORSHIP

By the 18th century, the altarpiece had become an important pilgrimage destination for any art lover's grand tour, and even the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came through in the latter half of the century to admire the work. While he was impressed by the skill of the painting, the emperor reportedly was maddened by the naked, and uncomfortably realistic, depictions of Adam and Eve on the work's outermost wing panels. They were "gratuitous, pornographic, and — worse — likely to incite irrational behavior," he believed, according to Charney. The mayor of Ghent, hearing that Joseph was considering confiscating the works, had them moved to the cathedral archives. Some eight decades later, the city would pay to create replicas of the panels with the two humans covered with sumptuous bearskins.
 
THE FRENCH STOLE PART OF IT

At the end of the 18th century, the French Republican army charged through Europe, pillaging the art and artifacts of foreign powers. "If we demand the assembly of masterpieces in Paris, it is for the honor and glory of France and for the love we feel for those very artworks," the French Directory wrote in 1796, by way of explanation. The French general Charles Pichegru snatched the central panels of the work from Ghent in August of 1794, carting them back to Paris, where they went on display at the Louvre as one of the conquering army's greatest treasures. Antoine-Alexandre Barbier, the official in charge of confiscating artwork in Holland and the Austrian Netherlands, told the National Convention: "Too long have these masterpieces been sullied by the gaze of serfs.... They rest today in the home of liberty and sacred equality, in the French Republic."
 
They would not remain there forever. When Louis XVIII was returned to the throne after the fall of Napoleon, in 1814, he returned the panels to Ghent, where he had found safety during part of his exile. It was just one of the more than 5,000 pieces he restituted during his reign — not bad for a man that Charney characterizes as "selfish, pompous, luxurious, and indulgent," albeit imbued with some "Enlightenment characteristics."

THE GERMANS PURCHASED PART OF IT

While international treaties now restrict the trade in stolen artworks, there were no such worries for enterprising thieves in the 19th century, which allowed the vicar-general of the Saint Bavo Cathedral (the name of the Church of Saint John after 1540), Jacques-Joseph Le Surre, to sell off the altarpiece's six wing panels in 1816 when the presiding bishop was out of town. The buyer, who paid an unimpressive sum of 3,000 guilders (or about $3,600 today), was Brussels dealer Lambert–John Nieuwenhuys, who then flipped the works to a Berlin–based collector named Edward Solly for 100,000 guilders ($120,000). Oddly, there is no record that Le Surre, who claimed that he sold the pieces to raise money for the bishopric, ever suffered any consequence for his rapacity.
 

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