Frames and supports in 15th and 16th-century Southern Netherlandish painting

LARGE WORKS 127 24. Michael Lomax points out that the jigsaws that would have been used did not have a sufficient sawing radius for cutting finally assembled boards. of cutting we are talking about, it does enable us to visualize how joiners, sawing along a curved line drawn on the wood, could produce simultaneously both the curve of the central panel and that of the wings. The shapes could not but be accurate, given that they came from the same cutting operation with no wastage of wood. When the curve was simple, for example an accolade, it was possible to form two sets of panels for two triptychs of the same shape. For triptychs with a more complex shape, it was possible to produce an initial triptych with the desired curves and counter-curves, and with the second triptych in a reverse pattern (fig. 69c). The tracing out by the joiner, and then the sawing of the rounded shape, would have had to have been done prior to the gluing of the boards. 24 If the boards were longer than the height of two sets of panels, there remained a spare length of sawn wood that could be used elsewhere. The fact that the boards of the same tree can be found in different panels of the same triptych, as dendrochronologists note from time to time, could be linked to such practices.