The Ghent Altarpiece: a passport to paradise missing one magical stamp

The idea that we might soon see the Van Eyck brothers’ lost panel is one to savour

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I’ve made my share of artistic pilgrimages. But last year I set out on the ultimate quest: I took the Eurostar to Belgium. The crowds who squeeze into a tiny chapel in St Bavo’s Cathedral to see Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece are not there merely because there’s not much else to do in Ghent. As we wait for the doors of this giant painting made of multiple hinged wooden panels to open, I run through the reasons it’s supposed to be so special.

There are so many firsts in this painting you can lose count. It contains the first realistic interior, the first convincing townscape, the first great north European landscape, the first completely lifelike portraits. Begun by Hubert in the 1420s, it was finished in 1432 by his brother Jan. That’s at the very beginning of the Renaissance, long before such heights of realism reached Italy.

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