At 9:50 AM +0100 23/10/03, Martin Shepherd wrote: > ><snip> > >I have heard it suggested that the painting was originally hung on a >staircase, so that someone standing at the bottom of the stairs (if >it was hung on the left) would see the skull "normally" and little >else - another aspect of the symbolism? >
Dear Martin, Several points as I try to catch up with correspondence: Thank you for the Mace text on the single frets, they seem to fall slightly between our positions. They certainly suggest that single frets were new to him but don't, I think, suggest he invented them. You are right to remark on the extreme thinness of the strings of the Berlin painting, it looks almost impossible for our current notions of tuning and gut strings. There are one or two other pictures of lutes with the octave on the bass side, in particular one of the intarsia where the difference is especially obvious. It would certainly give even more brightness to the lowest course if one assumes a thumb striking downwards. More troubling though is the apparent octave on the bass side of the third course! I wonder if we are at the limit of what can be "drawn" with a paintbrush? Finally one consequence of the distorted skull which has not, so far as I know, been remarked on is that if you look diagonally at the painting so as to "face death head on", the things of this world, including all the latest achievements of science and art as displayed on the table come to appear less important and significant. So, on this reading of the painting, it is showing an equivalence of the moral and physical point of view which determines what value we place on this world and the next. This ties in with the apparent insignificance of the crucifix in the top left of the painting which Stewart remarked on. It is also worth remarking that these important points are vanishingly unlikely to have come from Holbein himself. They will have been an explicit part of the commission from the two sitters [standers!] and will have been designed to show their cleverness and piety in equal measure. In fact a round dance in which their cleverness shows their piety which shows how they devalue cleverness! Best wishes, David -- The Smokehouse, 6 Whitwell Road, Norwich, NR1 4HB England. Telephone: + 44 (0)1603 629899 Website: http://www.vanedwards.co.uk
