The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece)

The story of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece)

This is the center of the most stolen, most fought-over, most restored painting in Europe, and the reason for the fuss is visible in any square inch of it. A lamb stands on an altar in a green meadow, bleeding into a chalice, while angels, prophets, popes, martyrs, and hermits arrive from every corner of the field. Jan van Eyck finished the altarpiece for Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent in 1432, and he painted it as if he expected you to bring a magnifying glass: individual leaves, individual jewels, individual faces in a crowd of hundreds. It is the founding work of Northern Renaissance painting and it still lives in the cathedral it was made for.

In a room, the panel is surprisingly gentle. The dominant note is meadow green under a soft blue sky, with red and gold clustered around the altar and the fountain in the foreground. It suits a dining room, a library, an entryway, or a home office where you want something rich but not loud, and it works with traditional, craftsman, or old-world interiors. The detail is the whole point, so give it a size where you can read the crowd: the Medium at 21.9 × 16 in is the one to get, and the Small at 16.4 × 12 in still holds up over a sideboard.

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait is the natural partner, painted two years later with the same obsessive light. The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin gives you his landscapes up close, and Memling's Last Judgment continues the Flemish line a generation on. More from Jan van Eyck.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the panel taken after its recent cleaning, so the greens are the ones Van Eyck actually mixed.