On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 15:58:28 -0600 (CST) Herbert Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Support also comes ... from paintings > > It seems that much of the evidence about early lutes comes from > paintings, > which are about as flammable and fragile as lutes. Have we, in > general, > lost the lutes, but kept the paintings? If so, why? >
Herb: I am going to disagree, at least partially, with your presupposition. There are, in fact, around 800 old lutes still in existence. See the "Lautenweltadressbuch" ( http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~lsa/associated/index.html ) for a good, but still incomplete database. Yes, most of the ones from the 16th century were altered in the 17th and/or 18th centuries, but there are still quite a lot of them known. In addition, there is the question of the uniqueness of paintings -- each easily identifiable as different from all others by the casual observer, versus the relative sameness of lutes to the untrained person. And finally the fact that most people can enjoy a painting without having someone interpret it to them, while a workaday lute tends not to go very far as an art object -- it requires a trained player to bring it to life as far as the average person is concerned. When trained players disappeared from the musical landscape, the instruments went into the closet or attic, if space was available, and into the trash when the glue failed and they became a pile of loose pieces of wood. Regards, Daniel Heiman
