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Wood is one of the most readily available of materials, deployed in objects of everyday use and sacred veneration, for public purposes and private aesthetic pleasure. The present session takes wood—as a ground for panel paintings, sculptures and woodblocks; a matrix for household objects and architectural structures; a subject of collecting, conservation and eco-criticism; and a symbolic referent and global commodity—as its central focus.

More than half a century ago, Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany became a landmark publication on medium specificity. We welcome papers that expand the consideration of wood beyond Baxandall’s temporal, geographic and genre boundaries. We invite contributions that explore a much wider range of objects, functions, makers and beholders and works produced not only in European contexts, but globally, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in order to reconsider wood’s significance as a medium.

We encourage submissions that investigate wooden objects in artistic theory and practice, their original reception and uses, as well as their later collection, conservation and long-term sustainability. Whether a life-sized statue or diminutive figurine, a mask for public performances or furniture for private spaces, a base from which a broadsheet was printed or on which an image was painted, a carved utensil or supporting beam, an object that highlights the grain or renders the underlying material invisible—we are interested in the role played by wood’s physical and metaphysical qualities in the making and meanings of objects in the global Early Modern period.