The Painting Hitler Stole Because He Thought It Had Supernatural Powers

Jan van Eyck spent his entire life painting the most sacred stories ever written. Angels, martyrs, the sacrifice of Christ, the full sweep of Christian salvation rendered in oil on wood with a realism nobody had ever achieved before.
But when he reached the center of the altarpiece — the moment the entire work had been building toward — he faced a problem no painter had ever solved before.
How do you paint a lamb that is also God? How do you make a sacrificial animal carry the weight of all human salvation and still make people believe it?
Van Eyck painted it anyway. And what he put on that panel was so strange, so theologically confrontational, that someone covered it up within a century of his death and left it hidden for four hundred years.
In this video we explore the most stolen painting in history, the secret that was buried inside it, and the missing panel that a dying man refused to reveal the location of even with his last breath.
#arthistory #art

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