Free Stealing the Mystic Lamb by Noah Charney

1435. There was a widespread Catholic belief at the time that once someone died, the deceased would ascend out of Limbo into Heaven more quickly if the living prayed for their souls. The more people who prayed, particularly monks (and the more frequently the better), the faster their souls would rise to Heaven. As a result, aside from the charitable support of a beloved religious institution, and the creation of a memorial, donors were essentially paying their way into the fast lane to Heaven.
    To this end, part of the contract that Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut drew up, when they paid for the chapel and the altarpiece, included provisions for the celebration of Mass on specific feast days and the prayer for their souls by a specific number of monks, a certain number of times per year. Joos and Elisabeth had no children, another potential reason to endow a chapel and the celebration of Masses. Without children to pray for their souls, they needed the monks to pray for them.
    How do we explain the grandiosity of Vijd’s commission? Why did he choose to work with the most prominent artist of the age on such a colossal scale? To underscore one’s piety, to speed one’s soul out of Purgatory,
to demonstrate one’s wealth—these are all legitimate rationales for commissioning an altarpiece. But there is no precedent for any painting of this scale, with this number of figures, this degree of realism, this combination of microscopic detail with a macroscopic vantage, in any previous work of northern European panel painting. In order to secure Jan van Eyck as an artist, services that were first and foremost promised to the duke, Vijd would have had to have serious connections—or the duke a rationale for permitting a local aristocrat, rather than himself, to bask in the glory of having commissioned the greatest painting of the age. Such questions have not been definitively answered, and the lack of closure has prompted a variety of theories, several rather more conspiratorial than sober, about why this masterpiece should rise like a leviathan out of the sea: miraculous, without precedent, and provoking more questions than answers.
    A possible answer to the question of why such a work was created may present itself if we recall that 6 May 1432 was the date of both the first presentation of the altarpiece to the public and the baptism of Duke Philip’s son, also named Joos, who had been born April 24. The two events took place in the same church, in the same chapel. Therefore the altarpiece may represent not only the commission of the Vijd family but also a literal backdrop for the baptism of the son of Duke Philip the Good, a son on whom rested the hopes of the Burgundian dynasty. Of course Philip could not know that the timing of the completion of the altarpiece would coincide with the birth of his son, so this rationale would only explain the date of the presentation of the altarpiece, not why its commission was approved in the first place, years before. Alas, young Joos of Burgundy was not to be the future duke, as he died just weeks after the ceremony in which he was formally named.
    It is noteworthy too that the duke’s infant son and the patriarch of the Vijd family shared the same first name. While there is no reason to think that the infant was named after him, the coincidence would likely have been seen as fortuitous to the local aristocrat Joos Vijd, who would have been both honored and proud. The fact of the baptism coinciding with
the completion of the altarpiece would explain why Duke Philip permitted his personal courtier to paint such a monumental work on behalf of a local aristocrat. Philip might have imagined that the altarpiece would serve as a backdrop for some major event, the birth of a son, or perhaps even his third marriage (to Isabella of Portugal), as he could not have predicted, in the late 1420s, which events in his personal life would coincide with the completion of the altarpiece. Van Eyck, like