At 01:07 AM 4/2/2010, you wrote: >Thanks - and any details about that beautiful cello painting you >pointed us to?
The painting is in the National Museum in Stockholm. During a performance at Drottningholm, I visited the museum and saw that the painting was not in the museum book that was available for sale, or as a postcard, so I asked the security guard if I could take a photo with my point and shoot. As it was dark, I held the shutter open for a half second to take the photo. I have a real camera, of course, and I always forget to bring it. Books never show the strings anyway, so I got as close as I could to photograph the strings. I took a photo of the info card, but it is too blurry to read. The National museum has an online catologue but I can't find it there. Best I can do is perhaps ask some of my friends in Sweden, or perhaps you know some of the string players in the Baroque orchestra there. My impression of the painting is that there were four gut strings, all different in texture and different in color, no metal. The 4th string is not much thicker than the third string, as is often the case for lute strings that reach a kind of size limit in the bass. The other thing is the two conjunct spheres on the top string below the bridge. This could be a knot, such as when a broken string is reused, but I must say I really did consider that it was a fine tuning mechanism when I was in the museum. Looking at an enlargement of the photo, it does not appear to be a typical knot, because the texture and thickness is different than the string. So it could be that it is either a fine tuning mechanism, or a device to control a wolf tone, or a clasp to serve as a knot to retie a string. Becuase the object looks like two pearls, I can't rule out that it is an ornament. If it is a fine tuner, it would have to work, I think, that the ends of the strings were enclosed in two round holders joined by a simple screw mechanism. Then again, maybe it is a knot! Just a double knot.....How annoying. Should have brought the Zeiss lens. The other thing that is interesting about this painting is you can see the width of the bow is 1/3 the distance between the strings, as a rough guess, and the top of the bridge is about two thicknesses of the third string. Lastly, if you look at the very end of the low C string, you can see that it is slightly curved. This could only be possibly if the string had an inner core, possibly of wire, or of the string were twisted in such a way that it caused some bunching in the twists, such as you see in a telephone handset cord. I don't think the curve is artistic license, but of course there is no way to know. I went to the museum to see the Judith Leyster violin painting, but it was on loan to Kassel. So I then went to Kassel, and it was on loan somewhere else. Here is a detail that has a shadow enhancing filter applied http://voicesofmusic.org/cello_detail.jpg dt -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
