If You Have Time For A Coffee,

and want to read about a mystery that still has to be solved,

this could be the post for you, just about everything bad that could happen to a painting has happened to Hubert and Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (also known as the Ghent Altarpiece). It's almost been destroyed in a fire, was nearly burned by rioting Calvinists, it's been forged, pillaged, dismembered, censored, stolen by Napoleon, hunted in the first world war, sold by a renegade cleric, then stolen repeatedly during the second world war, before being rescued by The Monuments Men, miners and a team of commando double-agents. The fact that it was the artwork the Nazis were most desperate to steal – Göring wanted it for his private collection, Hitler as the centrepiece of his citywide super-museum – has only increased its renown, it is easy to argue that the artwork is the most influential painting ever made: it was the world's first major oil painting, and is laced with Catholic mysticism. It's almost an A to Z of Christianity – from the annunciation to the symbolic sacrifice of Christ, with the "mystic lamb" on an altar in a heavenly field, bleeding into the holy grail, our story starts in 1934, sometime during the night of April 10, 1934, the Just Judges (also known as the Righteous Judges) was taken from the Saint Bavo Cathedral, one of its 12 panels was stolen in a heist that has never been solved, though the case is still open and new leads are followed all the time, the story is a bit too long to post here, but if you want to see the history behind the theft, have a look here, and remember the coffee!