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

MATERIALS AND MEN 31 111. Greber 1956. 112. De Vos et al. 1983-1984. 113. The Merode Altarpiece by the Master of Flémalle (Robert Campin) in the Cloisters Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art also exhibits shallow chamfering under the preparation around the perimeter extending as far as 2.5 cm into the picture plane. We thank Georges Bisacca for this communication. 114. Verougstraete-Marcq and Van Schoute 1979, 29-34. 2. Tools for flattening and smoothing Once the wood had been cut to the right length and width, it was necessary to smooth it to give it a flat surface. This was done on the workbench (fig. 6: 77). The plane (fig. 6: 24-27) is the smoothing tool par excellence. 111 It consists of an elongated wooden block, pierced with a mouth, into which is placed the cutting blade, which is held with a wedge. There are various sizes of planes. The larger models, the jointer plane or try plane (fig. 6: 25) and the smaller fore plane or jack plane (fig. 6: 26), are frequently depicted in illustrations of the period. Otherwise, the details of the planes are difficult to recognize on old depictions. In the 16th century, profiling and groove-cutting planes were probably introduced (fig. 6: 27). Wood was also smoothed with chisels of various kinds (fig. 6: 28-29) and drawknives, consisting of an iron blade held between two handles (fig. 6: 33). A rasp, either straight or curved (fig. 6: 34-35), served primarily to finish hard-to-access areas, clean stub mortises and finish off grooved mouldings. To guide the flattening process, squares were used (fig. 6: 44-45). It is likely that the flatness of large panels was checked by placing straight-edges (short straight lengths of wood placed across the grain and sighted from the end of the board to check flatness) (fig. 6: 46-47) at intervals along the piece as with stonework. For smaller pieces verification was possibly already done as in the 18th century and still today by holding the piece at eye level, sloping slightly downwards, and checking the parallel nature of the corresponding sides by the laws of perspective. The marking gauge (fig. 6: 51), which will be discussed below, is used to draw lines parallel to the edges of a piece of wood, in order to get the panel to the correct thickness and width. The smoothing of the face of the panel to be painted was undertaken with very great care. The surface was reworked until it was totally flat and smooth. There were, however, exceptions to this almost general rule: Bernard van Orley’s Passion Triptych (Bruges, Church of Our Lady) has a quite irregular surface. 112 In places a chamfer is perceptible on the face. 113 In other cases, the face of a panel is scratched cross-wise, by means of a toothed scraper (plane blade?). This is the case of Votive Painting with the Intercession of the Virgin and with the Donor, Canon Art van Pyringhen (Tongeren, BOL , no. 2 ). 114 These scratches are probably intended to ensure the better adhesion of the