Around halfway through Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece, Noah Charney offers this summation of where all the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece -- also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and the titular most-coveted masterpiece by Jan van Eyck -- were located prior to World War I:
"On display in the original location, the Vijd Chapel of Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, were the new copies of the Adam and Eve panels by Victor Lagye, the wing panels copied by Michiel Coxcie in 1559, and the original van Eyck central panels, returned from Paris.
The Belgian government had the original van Eyck Adam and Eve panels. They remained in the Brussels Museum, save for a few months in 1902 when they were on loan as the centerpiece of an exhibit of Flemish masters in Bruges.
The Berlin Museum, inheritor of the Prussian royal collection, owned the six original van Eyck wing panels. In 1823, the museum had acquired the Coxcie copy of the central panels of The Lamb, which had been on disply in the Munich Pinakothek, after having been acquired from L. J. Nieuwenhuys. Therefore Berlin now displayed a semblance of the complete Ghent Altarpiece, with nearly as much original material as Ghent could boast."
Got all that? Good, because those panels are just getting started.
Stealing the Mystic Lamb is an excellent art history gateway drug, as evidenced by my cyclopean stack of library books about art looting, theft, and forgery. Exploring the history of the Ghent Altarpiece from every angle, Charney begins with a Dan-Brown-is-envious in-depth examination of the work, its intricacies, and historical significance; followed by a necessarily less-detailed but fun-to-speculate-about biography of its painter, Jan van Eyck; and a primer on Belgium in general and Ghent in particular.
Then the fun begins, as we follow the painting through various wars and schemes, of which some outcomes are as yet unresolved. The Ghent Altarpiece was (and still is) a big deal, and a big trophy, a symbol of national pride for the Belgians, and of victory and supremacy for the French and Germans (it's mentioned by name in two articles of the Treaty of Versailles).
If you've read anything about Nazi war looting, you probably already know that most of the altarpiece eventually ended up in a salt mine in Austria. It was destined for pride of place in Hitler's crazy Linz museum scheme (it was also suspected to have possibly been a secret map to the Arma Chrisi - eat your heart out, Brown), and especially prized as having been recovered from the French and returned to its rightful land.
Despite being very rich in detail, I found Stealing the Mystic Lamb a really quick and entertaining read, but it did bog down a bit in the heroic conclusion. This is mostly not the author's fault, as it seems there are as many (if not more) stories as there were people present for the big denouement (spoiler alert - the Nazis lose). Compared to other works about the post-World-War-II art recovery effort, however, it's an utter breeze (I'm looking at you, Monuments Men), and I highly recommend it.
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