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

MATERIALS AND MEN 17 75. Glatigny 1993, 142-143. 76. Wadum 1998, 149-177. 77. The cogge was a large merchant ship (30 m long on the waterline, 20 m wide and 7.3 m deep, with a capacity of up to 200 tons). The Hansa cogge strongly influenced the development of sailing vessels in northern Europe. This cogge and the quartered logs are now on display at the Gdansk Navigation Museum (communication by Jean-Albert Glatigny). 78. Fraiture and Dubois 2011, 313. Today these marks are viewed as belonging to numbering or identification systems. Certain historians remark that these marks are found essentially on oak from the Baltic. Dendrochronologist Ian Tyers observed them on the top boards of stacks of Baltic timber salvaged from a wreck. Jean-Albert Glatigny suggests these markings were placed by lumberjacks in the Baltic area in order to identify their production. 75 The identification was vital for assessing the quantity and price of the work, facilitating transshipments and further commercial stages and deterring theft. According to Jørgen Wadum, the planks carrying such marks never have saw marks, i.e. they were all split from tree trunks. 76 The size of the trade between the Baltic and the southern Netherlands is shown by the fact that in 1481 the archives record 1.100 vessels leaving Gdansk, mainly Dutch merchant ships travelling from the Baltic to the ports of the southern Netherlands. A 25 metre cogge 77 was found in 1969 in the Bay of Danzig. It sank around 1409, leaving the port with its cargo of wheat, copper, wax, ash, wood tar and more than a hundred quarters of oak, all of more or less the same size. If this batch was intended for the southern Netherlands, it would have been unloaded in Bruges or Antwerp, checked on the quayside, and then (possibly) split further using an axe and wedges or sawn by sawyers. To make the boards for the painting supports, each block (in all ± 16 wedge-shaped blocks by tree trunk) was sawn radially into two or three thin sheets . The radial cut is evidenced by the many panels containing boards where one narrow side is thicker (the softer sapwood side) than the other (harder wood near the heart). In principle one does not find tangentially cut (plainsawn or “crown cut”) boards in the Flemish painting of the 15th and 16th centuries. We have observed exceptionally one in an assembly of provincial character (Tongeren, BOL , no. 2 ). This changes in the 17th century. Tangential cut boards are described in Rubens’ panels. This use remains exceptional but fits in a general trend of decreasing quality motivated by the scarcity of high quality panel production. 78 In addition to splitting, wood was also sawn (fig. 3). The sawyers would saw the 1/16th wedges to produce the boards. It is possible that certain very long boards (for example the “12 feet” boards used for the Judgement of Emperor Otto III paintings for the City Hall in Leuven were sawn directly from quarter-split logs, as sawing gave greater control than splitting.