The Relationship between Carving Work and Timber Features: A Database for the Italian Wooden Statuary

Wood has a wide range of applications in the artistic field, most of the time used as asupport for works of art, for example, in panel paintings. Compared with stones and metals, wood isby far the material most utilised for sculptures. Through the identification of wood species, a studyof timbers used in statuary in Europe, with a deeper exploration of the works of art preserved in Italy,can provide further insights for historical-artistic studies. Indeed, in reality, generic wood does notexist, but there are different timbers. This is a notion that the wood fine carving artists/craftsmenknew well. The initial idea of this study was to verify whether timber features could influencethe formal results in figurative carving; therefore, a specific database that had been developed tocatalogue the carving works was used for which the identification of wood species was carried outthrough reliable methodologies. The aim of this research was to analyse the relationship between thetimber species used in statuary, the formal results of carving, and the thickness of the preparatorylayer, through the data stored in a specific database, called ArISStArt. It contains a sort of registryof artistic carving and inlay works: For each artefact, a record was compiled consisting of differentfields, which contains the historical-artistic information available, including the images of the artefactand also types of timber/s used for its creation, with a link to the relative field. The number of therecorded artefacts is, at present, 480. On most of the artefacts, more than one sample was taken;therefore, the total number of identifications carried out corresponds to 691. Based on the results,the vast majority of wooden statuary is carved from hardwoods, more specifically hardwoods, withdiffuse porosity and small variations in density within the growth ring. The timber most presentis poplar, followed by lime and walnut. With the listed three timbers, almost 80% of the artefactsrecorded in ArISStArt were created.