The Just Judges
Stolen in 1934; a copy keeps its seat, still waiting.
- EXISTED
- Completed 1432, stolen 1934
- WHERE
- Ghent, Belgium
- LOST
- 10 April 1934
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Theft; never recovered
The Ghent Altarpiece, finished by Jan van Eyck and his brother in 1432, is among the most important paintings in the history of Western art, a vast folding work of staggering detail, one of the first great masterpieces in oil. In the night of 10 April 1934 one of its lower panels, The Just Judges, was stolen from St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent.
What followed was a maze of ransom notes and false leads. A dying stockbroker named Arsène Goedertier claimed to know where the panel lay hidden, but his confession broke off before he could say, leaving only the tantalising line that it rested somewhere it could not be moved unnoticed. Despite ninety years of searching, walls torn open, theories without end, it has never been found. In the restored altarpiece, a careful copy sits where Van Eyck’s judges should be, a painted placeholder for an absence.
The thief’s deathbed confession trailed off: the panel, he wrote, “rests in a place where neither I nor anybody else can take it away without arousing the attention of the public.” Then silence. A painted copy hangs in its place to this day.