Ghent Altarpiece

The Ghent Altarpiece — also known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — is a large polyptych of oil paint on oak, completed in 1432 and now again in St Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent. It belongs to Early Netherlandish painting and to the genre of religious art, yet its form is more complicated than a single panel can be. It is a winged altarpiece: two vertical registers, each fitted with double sets of foldable wings that carry paintings on both their inner and outer faces. Closed, it is one programme. Open, it is another.

When the wings are shut, the outer faces show an Annunciation in the upper row, with prophets and sibyls above, and below them donor portraits of the merchant and Ghent mayor Jodocus Vijd (also called Joost Vijdt) and his wife Lysbette Borluut, together with sculptural grisaille figures of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist. The greys are deliberate. They mimic stone carving so that the closed altarpiece reads partly as architecture and partly as painting — a quiet threshold rather than a full vision.

When the wings open, the inner faces present the full scheme. The upper register is devoted to heavenly redemption. At its centre is a Deësis arrangement: a monumental enthroned figure, read by some as Christ the King and by others as God the Father, with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist to either side. Further out are choirs of angels, some playing music. At the far edges stand Adam and Eve. The lower register is dominated by its central panel, the Adoration of the Lamb: a meadow crowded with saints, sinners, clergy and soldiers who have come to attend the Lamb of God upon an altar, under the dove of the Holy Spirit. The side panels of this lower tier continue the gathering with further groups moving through landscape.

The commission came from Vijd and Borluut as part of a larger project for their chapel in what is now St Bavo's Cathedral. Installation was officially celebrated on 6 May 1432. A now-lost inscription on the frame stated that Hubert van Eyck, described as greater than anyone, began the work, and that Jan van Eyck, calling himself second in the art, completed it in 1432. Art historians generally agree that Hubert designed the overall structure in or before the mid-1420s, and that Jan painted the panels; yet generations of scholars have failed to establish a convincing separation of hands. It may be that Jan finished surfaces Hubert had already begun. The uncertainty is not a minor footnote. It is built into how the object is signed and how it has been studied.

The original ornate carved outer frame and surround — which may have harmonised with the painted tracery and which may even have included mechanisms for moving the shutters — was destroyed during the Reformation. The painted panels themselves have since passed through other collections and holding points, including the Solly Collection, the Bode Museum and the Munich Central Collecting Point, before returning to the cathedral. What remains in Ghent is therefore the painted polyptych without the full architectural body it once had. Even so, the logic of opening and closing still structures every encounter with it: the work is designed to withhold and then release its principal vision.