Despite earlier experimentation with X-Ray technology applied to paintings in German science laboratories, it was only in the 1920s and 1930s that the technology became more widely and systematically applied to art. Alan Burrough’s acquisition of the first and extensive archive of X-ray images of paintings, first of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the most important driving force behind this. Burrough’s efforts were inspirational for Kurt Wehlte, the German Maltechniker, who in the 1930s established a laboratory for the X-Ray investigation of paintings in Berlin. In this paper I discuss how and in which ways X-ray investigations of paintings were consequential for art history. To this end, I look at the work of two other researchers: Christian Wolters in Munich and Berlin; and Martin de Wild in Delft and Utrecht. The history of X-ray technology in the history of art in the 1920s and 1930s shows that it was not simply a matter of art versus science, that is, of the eager adoption by scientists embarking on the art historical terrain from their recently established museum laboratories versus the outright rejection of the technology in circles of artists and humanists. X-ray technology was accepted when it supported a particular style of art history which was structured around formal analysis and which radiating from Vienna made school across Germany and the Netherlands. These art historians maintained that new ways of scientifically examining art in the laboratory required students of art history to learn new ways of seeing.
