L'Adoration de l'Agneau mystique (Retable de Gand)

By 1432, when Jan van Eyck signed off on this, Ghent was one of the richest cloth towns in Europe, and its money shows. The pigments are ground fine and layered in oil so that a single jewel or a strand of hair holds up to a hand's-width inspection. The scene gathers crowds from every direction onto a green meadow, all of them walking toward a small altar where a lamb stands and bleeds into a golden cup. In the distance van Eyck mixed real Flemish towers with imagined ones. The panel has been fought over ever since. During the Second World War it was carted off and hidden deep in an Austrian salt mine, from which Allied teams pulled it back out in 1945.