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Look closely, and one panel of the brilliantly restored lower half of the Ghent Altarpiece still has old varnish, right next to the vivid coloring that has come to life again in one of the most iconic works of Western art.
It seems older than the rest of the early 15th Century work, but in fact the browner panel is a copy dating to the 1940s – slotxo and a reminder of one of the greatest unsolved art crimes of all time: The 1934 theft of the Just Judges panel. , painted by the Flemish Primitive Jan Van Eyck, whose works grace the world’s greatest museums.
Restorers didn’t want to give the copy the same makeover as other panels that have been cleaned up so far.
“We chose to leave that patina on, precisely to show clearly to the people that this is a copy, not the real Van Eyck,” Canon Ludo Collin of Ghent’s Saint Bavo’s Cathedral said ahead of the opening of a new visitor center this weekend.
The real Just Judges could be anywhere, and Ghent still has a prosecutor and two police investigators tasked with solving the crime almost a century later. And over the years they have had the assistance – usually unsolicited – of amateur sleuths ranging from a former police commissioner to a cab driver, a computer expert and a children’s book author.
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