frames of the wings was further weakened by the fitting of brass bolts and
keeps in the nineteenth century (Fig. 2).
By the mid–eighteenth century, the movement of paintings from
their ecclesiastical settings into private collections and museums had
begun. Complex altarpieces were broken up and installed in new, fashion-
able frames, losing in the process not only cultural context but also, in
many cases, structural soundness. For example, the context was obscured
in a small Virgin and Child,painted in Florence in the 1420s and now in the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, when the arched top was squared off
with a wooden addition decorated with gilded pastigliawork, so as to fit
a rectangular frame, presumably for display in a secular setting (Fig. 3).
A portrait of a man by Memling, originally part of a diptych, depicting
a donor and presumably the Virgin and child (part of the Bearsted
Collection, Upton House, National Trust), now has a nineteenth-century
ornate Gothic frame fitted inside a shadowbox. Traces of the original mal-
rand survive, as do traces of gilding from the original, integral frame.
There seems to be no evidence that panel paintings were ever
fitted with a regard for expansion, contraction, and warping of the panel
support before the twentieth century, with the exception of double-sided
elements of altarpieces in northern Europe. Even such a grand altarpiece
as Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna of the Sparrow,probably commissioned in the
1490s (National Gallery, London), has developed cracks as a result of its
original construction. The altarpiece is largely intact, although the central
panel has been thinned and cradled. The predella panel, a single horizontal
plank painted with three separate scenes, was securely nailed in with nailsT F W P 435Figure 3
Florentine school,Virgin and Child,early
fifteenth century. Tempera and oil on poplar
panel, 84.5 3 45.2 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum,
University of Cambridge (1987).
Figure 2
Antwerp school, Oxburgh Altarpiece (right
wing, outer side), ca. 1530. Oil on oak panel,
226 3 114 cm. National Trust, Oxburgh Hall,
Norfolk, England. In the lower right corner is
a bolt that was inserted later.