Abstract

The Ghent altar has attracted the attention of art amateurs and connoisseurs since its creation in 1432, but its first studies appeared only in the early nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century scholars, from Johanna Schopenhauer to William Wiel, devoted their monographs to the patrons of the altar, attributed panels of the polyptych and dealt with its socio-cultural context. Panels of the altarpiece more than ten times changed their location after its creation, either during the Napoleonic wars or due to the sale of part of the panels and formation of the first significant museum collections. After the First World War and after the Ghent altar panels were recombined, much more research was devoted to this masterpiece and among its researchers were the chief curator of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Paul Firens, German and Dutch scholars Hermann Beenken, Max J. Friedländer and Karl Voll. However, after a short peace period of 1918-1939 altar panels were again relocated as a result of the seizure of Belgium by German troops. The “journeys” of the Ghent altar wings were completed only after 1945. The history of the altarpiece after 1432-1435, i.e. after it was painted by Jan van Eyck, deserves further analysis that will allow us to reconsider the methodology of research on this work. Art historians of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century could not attain fully justified judgments regarding the Ghent altar because of the separation of its panels, which occurred due to various political and economic circumstances. The research on the dependence of an art historian’s approach from a particular configuration of the Ghent altarpiece without panels disconnected from it between 1781 and 1945 places the historiography in a new perspective. The objective of the article is to identify additional conditions that have impacted the study of the polyptych.