BUCHAREST, Romania — Olga Dogaru, the Romanian woman who told investigators that she had incinerated seven works of art by Matisse, Picasso and other modern masters in an effort to protect her son, denied in court on Monday that she had burned the works.

Standing alongside her son, Radu, 29, who has admitted stealing the paintings in October from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, Mrs. Dogaru, 50, told a panel of three judges that her earlier account of destroying the works in a stove at her house in the tiny village of Carcaliu was untrue. “I did not burn them,” she said in a soft voice.

Alarm swept the art world last week when it appeared that the theft in the Netherlands had ended with a spasm of wanton destruction in a remote corner of Romania. The head of Romania’s National History Museum, Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, described the supposed burning as a “barbarian crime against humanity.”

The artworks — paintings and drawings signed by Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Lucian Freud and Meyer de Haan — were stolen from the Kunsthal in a brazen nighttime robbery led, according to prosecutors, by Mrs. Dogaru’s son, who was arrested in Romania in January. Mrs. Dogaru told investigators in May that months earlier, in February, she had shoved the stolen artworks into a stove used to heat a sauna at her family home and then set them alight, in a desperate attempt to destroy evidence and save her son from going to jail. News of her account circulated widely last week, along with reports that forensic scientists had found trace evidence to support it.