The Wooden Panel of The Wedding Dance

Abstract

Bruegel painted e Wedding Dance on an oak panel. is panel is an important component of the painting because it provided the smooth support for his remarkably thin ground and paint layers. e specific oak timber used to build the panel traveled from the Baltic ports to Antwerp via the trading routes of the Hanseatic League—a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in northern Europe—before it was delivered to Bruegel’s studio as a panel.28 is wood panel tells us not only about an artist who was able to access materials of the highest quality, but also about the history of the powerful merchant city of Antwerp and about trade and organized labor during the mid-sixteenth century. Although the wooden panel has been altered over the centuries, it remains a repository of important information. Many of the manufacturing marks and assembly techniques are clearly consistent with those found on Bruegel’s other panels, and they show the practices of the workshop that made these panels. Recent wood analysis and dating of the various wooden planks has placed the panel even more thoroughly within Bruegel’s oeuvre, drawing more specific connections to his other panels.29 A thorough examination of the wooden panel, however, reveals that the top section of e Wedding Dance is a later addition by someone other than Bruegel—an assessment that significantly alters our understanding of the artist’s compositional intentions. Because its condition and colors are di‡erent from those of the rest of the painting, the top section has been under scrutiny since at least the restorer William Suhr’s 1942 report. Yet ultimately it was the logic of the panel itself that led us to speculate that this section was not just a later repair, but in fact a complete invention. is hypothesis has now been confirmed both by wood analysis and by a comparison of the painting with a copy in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin: Wedding Dance in the Open (plate 7). O A K : A J O U R N E Y F R O M T H E B A LT I C T O A N T W E R P