Johannes Wilde

Johannes Wilde CBE (2 July 1891 – 13 September 1970) was a Hungarian art historian and teacher of art history. He later became an Austrian, and then a British, citizen. He was a noted expert on the drawings of Michelangelo. Wilde was a pioneer of the use of X-rays as a tool for the study of both the creation and the state of conservation of paintings. From 1948 to 1958 he was deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

X-rays By about 1928 Wilde and the restorer Sebastian Isepp were using X-radiation as a systematic aid to understanding both the physical condition of paintings and the artistic processes by which those paintings had been created. At first they made use of the facilities of the Röntgenologisches Institut of Vienna University, but in 1930 an X-ray laboratory was installed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. While Wilde was not the first to use X-rays to examine pictures, this was the first such laboratory in Europe. He first published his findings on The Gypsy Madonna and The Three Philosophers'