This volume collects thirty-one papers by an international group of experts. Grouped into four topic areas: "Wood Science and Technology," "History of Panel-Manufacturing Techniques," "History of the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings," and "Current Approaches to the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings," the papers highlight a wide variety of philosophies and work methods.

Introduction: Keynote Address
David Bomford

THIS SYMPOSIUM on the conservation of panel paintings, organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute, has created the conditions for one of those rare, defining moments in paintings conservation that are not always apparent at the time they occur.

With a meeting and publication such as this, our disparate and farflung profession has stopped for a moment, reflected on its contexts, its motives, and its actions, and then stepped forward with more unity and a better collective understanding.

At the last major conference to consider the treatment of panel paintings—the 1978 International Institute for Conservation congress “The Conservation of Wood in Painting and the Decorative Arts,” held in Oxford—about one-third of the papers presented were on the theme of panel paintings. For the record, four of the speakers at that conference also have articles in the present volume.

Although the Oxford conference is often cited as the natural predecessor of this symposium, I have been reflecting more on a different week, in 1974, when the Conference on Comparative Lining Techniques took place in Greenwich, England. ...

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Proceedings of a symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Edited by Kathleen Dardes and Andrea Rothe
THE GETTY CONSERVATION INSTITUTE
LOS ANGELES

FORWARD
IN APRIL 1995 the Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum sponsored an international symposium, “The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. Initially the idea of Andrea Rothe, head of Paintings Conservation at the Museum, and enthusiastically supported by Kathleen Dardes, senior coordinator in the Institute’s Training Program, the conference was attended by more than two hundred participants from some twenty countries, who gathered for five days of papers and discussions.

During pauses, participants were able to meet informally with old and new colleagues in the galleries and gardens of the Museum. This combination of formal and informal exchanges greatly encouraged the flow of ideas and contributed significantly to the success of the symposium.

The purpose of the symposium was to document the techniques, both traditional and contemporary, of panel stabilization. This book encompasses the wide range of topics covered by the speakers. After an introductory examination of wood characteristics, the papers go on to consider the technological aspects of wood, the history of panel-making techniques, and the various methods of panel stabilization that have been developed and refined over the course of many centuries. ...

PREFACE
IN ADDITION TO representing the aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities of their creators, the world’s great paintings serve as rich historical documents. The close contact with these works of art that conservators and curators have long enjoyed allows access to their most hidden parts and, consequently, to a better understanding of the materials and working practices that are the underpinnings of artistic expression.

For paintings are more than the manifestation of an idea or a creative impulse; they are also a composite of ordinary materials, such as wood, glue, canvas, metal, and pigments of various sorts, that have been put to a wonderful purpose.

Wood has served for centuries as a support for painting, largely because of its strength and availability. Paralleling the long history of wood as a painting substrate is an almost equally long history of attempts to control its behavior. An early recognition of the tendency of all wood species to deform under certain conditions has led generations of woodworkers to devise techniques, both varied and ingenious, to control the movement of wooden supports and its consequent damage to the paint layer. ...

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