The story
On the night of 10 April 1934, someone slipped into St Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent and cut two panels out of its great altarpiece. One was recovered. The other, the panel of the Just Judges, has never been found. A local stockbroker named Arsène Goedertier confessed to the theft on his deathbed months later without saying where it was, and Ghent police still keep a file open. A painted copy stands in the missing panel's place today.
The altarpiece is why people come. It is the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, finished in 1432 by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, a folding polyptych of a dozen panels crowded with figures and painted in the new oil technique with astonishing detail. St Bavo's is a working Gothic cathedral, with a Rubens altar painting and a Baroque pulpit of its own, but the van Eyck panels, now shown behind protective glass, are what fill the chapel where visitors gather.
