Les Juges intègres

This panel is the one that isn't there. It's the lower left corner of the huge Ghent Altarpiece that van Eyck completed in 1432, a procession of judges riding toward the Lamb of God. On the night of the 10th of April 1934 it was cut from the altarpiece in the cathedral in Ghent and taken. A note left behind read, in French, that it had been taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Ransom demands followed. That November a Belgian man named Arsène Goedertier collapsed and, dying, told his lawyer he alone knew where the panel was hidden, then died without saying. It has never been found. What hangs in its place today is a copy painted in the 1940s, so the version of the Just Judges you can see is a stand-in for a picture still missing after 90 years.