> albrecht durer used a lute to demonstrate a drawing > devise he made from a frame bisected with equally > spaced, horizontal and lateral wires. by looking > through the wire grid the artist could accurately > gauge the lute's difficult perspective. Which is no indication that Duerer used it himself, and the drawing in question says nothin about the purpose of the action contained therein. Duerer was the greatest draftsman that ever lived, and he was capable of producing any object's perspective not only without an aid of optical devices, but he also could do it directly in pen&ink with amazing precision without any preliminary sketching in chalk.
> > lutes also feature heavily in david hockney's theory > that mirrors and prisms were used extensively by the > masters to make accurate drawings of traditionally > difficult subjects. the twisted peg box and misplaced > frets are due to the distortion holbein saw in the > lens. Hockney's "theory" has already been blown to smithereens several times. > > i have great sympathy with the poor man who painted > this french painting under discussion. imagine > spending that much time and talent on something, > getting all the essential details of the figure > correctly and then falling down disastrously with the > lute - (shudder) Absolute correctness is not was makes a painting beautiful, even though the one in question is distorted a lot more than a few by Frans Hals who was known to have painted while intoxicated. > > it's a peculiar thing but i don't think there's any > other musical instrument that's captured the > imagination of artists quite like the lute and guitar. A lute a lot more than guitar. Peculiarly hardly any charango. RT To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
