sive enough, or the remaining wood from the original support was too
“lively.” The next treatment to be adopted was total transfer.
The same disrespectful attitudes toward the original and integral
character of the painting support appear also in the early techniques of
removing wood from the support for purposes of pest control and wood
consolidation.
In the nineteenth century, the difficulty of totally transferring
paintings from wood without respect for the original support may have
been the determining factor when it became more common to retain a
thin portion of the wooden panel in partial transfer. New, rigid, wooden
auxiliary supports have been advocated since the beginning of the twenti-
eth century; partial transfer was easy to accomplish with these new
types of supports.
The “prehistory” period of panel paintings conservation ended
during the 1920s and 1930s. The history of the conservation of wooden
panels began with a new understanding of wood’s natural material charac-
teristics and their influence on supports of works of art.
At the time ofthe 1930 conference in Rome, organized by the
International Office of Museums, restorers started to explain the relation-
ships between humidity and wood (Bauer-Bolton 1933). The Second World
War barred further development until a new period of activity and
ex change was possible, a period documented in the 1952 Wolters Report.
The substantial impact of this report as a symbol of new international
activity and cooperation in conservation cannot be emphasized enough
(Wolters 1952). An important subsequent development in the field was the
1961 conference in Rome of the IIC. The late 1950s and the early 1960s
were, in fact, the years when—under the great influence of the research of
Richard Buck—the care ofwooden panels definitively changed, and the
knowledge that formed the basis for the choice of treatment evolved from
empirical to scientific. F or German-speaking conservators, Straub’s pub-
lished work was much more than a dissemination of that new thinking:
Straub also heavily influenced ethical and technical thinking about the
conservation of panel paintings.
In Germany, as elsewhere in the conservation world, research
about the conservation of panel paintings diminished significantly after the
1960s. At that time, research on wooden panels was no longer a trend; it
became more of a special interest. The conservation of wood in general
became a more common concern—particularly the areas of wood consoli-
dation, pest control, and climate control (including climatic boxes for
panel paintings). The main subjects in international conservation research
in the 1970s and 1980s were the conservation of canvas paintings and of
stone. It is nowtime to return to the questions concerning the conserva-
tion of wooden panel paintings.The author wishes to express his many thanks for help and discussion to
Christian Marty of the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft,
Zurich; Hubert Dietrich, Vienna; Joachim Haag and Dorothea Preyss,
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München; Bruno Heimberg, Doerner
Institute Munich; Werner Koch, Berlin; Petra Mandt, Cologne; Andreas
Schulze, Landesamt fürDenkmalpflege Sachsen, Dresden; Horst Vey,
Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; and Adelheid Wiesmann-Emmerling, Hessisches
Landesmuseum Darmstadt.Acknowledgments
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