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

CHAPTER I 16 74. Marijnissen 1967, I: 488 and II: 134; Marijnissen 1985, 67-70. On individual boards one sometimes observes a pattern of intersecting lines. This mark was made with a hook knife (the knife blade has its end turned back on itself to form a fine gouge), which digs a fine groove into the surface of the wood. Normally such markings consist of 2 to 5 or more straight lines less than 1 cm wide. We find them also on the back of the boxes of carved altarpieces and on the backs of carved items. They have been observed on the back of a base and the backs of various panels (fig. 1). 74 In the case of paintings, the marks are located on a single board and are often cut off by a join, a chamfer or the edge of the panel. This tells us that these marks predate the marking up and cutting of the wood and the final assembly, with which they seem unrelated. While sometimes we find several marks on the same work, in most cases we see only one on the back of just one board (fig. 2). Fig. 1. Examples of lumbermarks found on individual boards of the paintings studied in the Catalogue of this book. Fig. 2. Lumbermark on a board of the Wenemaer Altarpiece , c. 1480 (Ghent, MFA , no. 1 ). We should note that these marks, which are relatively rare, are sometimes found repeatedly in work of the same artist (Gerard David, Jan van Rillaer) or even a group of works (the Bosch group).