The Ghent Altarpiece, completed by Jan van Eyck in 1432 (incorporating work begun by his brother Hubert), is the most important painting in the history of Western art to have survived from the early fifteenth century and one of the most theologically complex visual programs ever executed. Its central lower panel - the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb - is the culminating image of a polyptych of twenty panels that unfolds across both its closed and open states to present a comprehensive visual theology of salvation.
The Lamb of God stands on an altar at the center of the panel, its chest bearing the wound of its sacrifice, its blood flowing into a chalice below. This is Revelation 5:6 made visible: 'I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain,' the slaughtered Lamb who is simultaneously alive and reigning, whose death is both historical fact and eternal present. Around the altar, a heavenly world of extraordinary botanical precision unfolds, with cypress trees, orange trees, and other plants rendered with a naturalistic detail that served a symbolic function - the paradise world of the world renewed by the Lamb's sacrifice.
From every direction across this landscape, processions converge on the altar. To the left, the prophets of the Old Testament and the gentile philosophers approach - those who anticipated the Lamb without knowing him fully. Behind them, the patriarchs; beside the altar, angels with liturgical instruments of incense and devotion. To the right, the martyrs and virgins, the holy women, converge in orderly procession from a distant world of towers and trees. In the sky above, the dove of the Holy Spirit descends in a burst of golden light, and the panels above (not part of this description but contextually essential) show God the Father enthroned, flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist in deësis formation.
The 340 individually differentiated figures in the Adoration panel represent the most ambitious achievement of early Netherlandish painting's revolution in figure rendering. Van Eyck's development and mastery of oil glazing technique - using thin transparent layers of oil paint to build up surfaces with a luminosity and depth impossible in tempera - made possible the portrayal of materials, fabrics, jewels, and flesh with a fidelity to visual reality that was genuinely unprecedented. The painted Book of Hours held by the Virgin in the upper panels' deësis section, for example, is rendered with individual letters legible.
The altarpiece's theological program synthesizes Revelation's vision of the Lamb with the entire typological tradition of the Old Testament and with the mystical theology of redemption as universal gathering. The image of all the saved converging on the Lamb from every direction - the processions coming from left and right, from near and far, through a landscape that is simultaneously earthly paradise and heavenly reality - is the most comprehensive visual statement of the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints produced in the medieval period.
The altarpiece's survival is itself a theological and historical drama. It was dismantled, panels separated, stolen by Napoleon, partially reassembled, stolen again by the Nazis (who took it to the Altaussee salt mine in Austria), and recovered by the Monuments Men in 1945. The missing panel showing the Just Judges was never recovered and a copy currently occupies its place. This history of attempted dispossession and miraculous survival has become part of the altarpiece's cultural meaning, a work that the world has repeatedly tried and failed to destroy.