Great job, Alden!
It´s a real pleasure to see this gallery! To add my 2 cents: I once had a
discussion with a man about a painting by Memling. He - a retired teacher -
had compared the dimensions of the instrument in the painting with the
length of the thumb holding it and set that in relation to his own thumb.
The result was that the fiddle had a length of 18cm (5.1 in) - a little bit
short for a 5-stringed instrument - not playable simply due to the distance
between the single strings and rather a kids toy than anything else. Having
a closer look on the instrument itself all the inner proportions and the
details were perfect so there must have been such an instrument around.
There are more than 10 fiddles in Memlings paintings and not two are really
the same. But all of them have the same shape. So there must have been a
sketch in his workshop showing the design of such an instrument and the rest
is simply art.
But photos are not always better. I once did a series of photos of very
similar items in different sizes. As I used a plain white background there
was no chance anymore in the end to sort out which photo showed which size.
So even if we tend to interpret a piece of art as a technical drawing we
shouldn´t forget that it was made by an artist who had to fight technical
problems and was concentrated in the composition of his work. Not more and
not less.
Christopher Leins
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 9:05 AM
Subject: [HG] Alden's rant, part 2
OK, ladies and gentlemen:
For your viewing pleasure, here are the Stratocasters:
http://www.hurdygurdy.com/mailinglist/guitars.htm
At the bottom, there's a link to a photo of a Strat. But before you go
there,
consider the following:
Based on the "iconography":
How many strings does the Strat have?
How many pickups does the Strat have?
How many knobs does it have?
How many frets does it have?
Some of these are easily answered from the drawings, some not so much.
Michael Muskett already made my point for me pretty well, saying that the
sculptors and artists were unlikely to be truly familiar with the
instrument.
Imagine researching an obscure instrument with no books, no Internet
(horrors!) and only your own experiences and those of your collegues. \
Jocelyn makes a reasonable argument that the artists were professionals,
while
we who made the drawings are not. I could bolster this by noting that
while
fewer people were literate, people were better trained in observation and
memorization than they are nowadays.
But my point is that even though some of the contributors are very
familiar
with the instrument, nobody's drawing really accurately answers the
questions.
We could go on about this for a long time, and there's no real way to
prove
anything one way or another except with a time machine. I'm certainly not
discounting the iconography - in fact I love it - but I'm also going to
disagree pretty strongly with someone who takes its accuracy too
seriously.
Falling asleep at the keyboard,
Alden
