Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is a 12-panel masterpiece that has been stolen, dismembered, ransomed, and chased by Nazis and treasure hunters more than any other artwork on Earth. One panel — the Just Judges — vanished in 1934 and has never come back. The chief suspect confessed on his deathbed but revealed nothing, and the hunt continues to this day.
The full dossier on Jan and Hubert van Eyck's 1432 polyptych — a 12-panel altarpiece so revolutionary it helped launch oil painting in Europe, and so coveted it has been looted, split apart, and stolen across six centuries.
TED-Ed's whirlwind tour, narrated from art-crime historian Noah Charney's research, of every theft, ransom, and narrow escape in the altarpiece's violent history — the ideal map before you go down the rabbit hole.
The lower-left panel showing a procession of mounted judges — stolen in April 1934 and missing ever since. What hangs in St Bavo's Cathedral today is a 1945 copy painted by Jef Van der Veken from old photographs.
A closer look at the theft itself — the gaping hole the sacristan found one morning, the ransom demand for a million francs, and the half-returned panel left at a railway station as a sign of good faith.
Arsène Goedertier collapsed at a political rally in 1934 and, dying, told his lawyer he alone knew where the Just Judges was hidden — and that 'it cannot be taken without arousing public attention.' Carbon copies of the ransom notes turned up in his study. The panel did not.
A deep dive into Goedertier — the respectable, churchgoing financier with a double life — and the maddening fact that the one clue to the panel's location may be buried in his cryptic, unfinished final words.
The 'Closer to Van Eyck' project scanned the entire altarpiece at microscopic resolution — a gigapixel X-ray of a crime scene. Zoom in yourself on the forged replacement panel and the centuries of damage, and understand why a prosecutor is still assigned to find the real one.