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

CHAPTER III 80 24. Marijnissen 1985, 77. The joinery of the auxiliary supports to the canvas is in oak or sometimes another wood such as poplar. It is generally more basic than that of paintings on wood. The technique of the backing panel remained for a long time, with examples found in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this way we understand what the original presentation of the Adoration of the Magi by Pieter Bruegel must have looked like (fig. 36c). The canvas was placed on a backing panel that was preserved until recently. The canvas and the backing panel would originally have been of more or less the same size. The black border was covered with an applied frame, and the entire assembly held in place with pegs and possibly by nails driven in from the back. A conservation problem specific to these works lay in the antagonistic effects of moisture on canvas and on wood. While wood swells, canvas shrinks. The ensuing tensions around the pegs and nails caused tears, whereupon the assembly was strengthened by new nails. The tears in the borders of the Adoration of the Magi are more numerous in the upper edge because the weight of the fabric exercised additional traction. On the other hand, the damage on the lateral edges is more limited. The backing panel consisted of boards laid horizontally, and given that the play of the wood in the direction of the fibre was nil, there were no antagonistic sideways movements of the canvas and wood supports. At some point, the edges, weakened and full of holes, could no longer be reinforced. The only remaining solution was to take the canvas out of the frame and fold back its edges onto the backing panel. Doing this required sawing the edges of the panel to reduce it to a smaller size than the canvas. If, at some point, the backing panel of the Adoration of the Magi was deemed to be non-original, this was because the damage to the edges of the canvas did not match the damage to the edge of the panel. No one thought that these edges might have been sawn back. Although lost to dendrochronology, the panel has not entirely disappeared: judged of good quality, it was cut up and used to restore in a remarkable way the weak part of the support of the St John in the upper altarpiece of the Van Eyck brothers in Ghent. The technology that came to dominate in the 17th century was that of mounting canvases on stretchers. Stretchers already existed in very ancient times. If the use of stretchers did not become general practice earlier despite its advantages of lightness and economy of materials, it may be because people believed that backing panels better protected the canvas, despite the disadvantages of the adverse effects of the play of the panel on the conservation of the canvas, as explained above. As far back as the 14th century, the construction of a stretcher had no secrets for a joiner. In the pre- Eyckian panels of The Walcourt Annunciation and Visitation (Namur, PMAA , no. 1 ), we see a stretcher of very neat construction. This stretcher was not designed to support a canvas, but to be pegged onto the panels. Its construction, however, reveals that it was constructed separately out of lap-jointed stiles and rails, which were pegged together before being applied to the panels. Archival sources also attest to the very early existence of stretchers, an inventory from 1434 mentions “eene rame van lijnwade ghedect” (a frame covered with a linen cloth). 24