Books › The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864 › scan 35
Scan 35
The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864
9 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 15. See the scan on archive.org.
1One of them is in a relievo on the death of Orpheus, in the University at Turin; and the other is a statue either of Orpheus or Apollo, in the Montalta Gardens at Rome. It is unlucky that all three have something to be said against them. That at Florence is an unfinished piece, and perhaps not quite indisputable; that at Turin of a very bad taste, or of a low age; and in that at Rome, the fiddle at least is evidently modern." Mr. Singer, the editor of "Spence's Anecdotes," from which these extracts are taken, being part of the valuable "Library of Old Authors" published by Mr. J. Russell Smith, thought that Mr. T. was probably Mr. Townley, (who, in his account of some ancient gems, mentions a curious figure of a centaur, with a whip in his hand to lash himself!)
3Rousseau refers to an account given by Achilles Tatius of a banquet, where a youth came forward with a cythara on which he first played with his fingers, and then used a bow, and sang to it: also to a description of Orpheus by Philostratus in the time of Nero, who supports the lyre on his thigh, striking the strings with his left hand, whilst his right holds a bow. Rousseau uses the words viole and archet, but the Latin words are cythara and plectrum, which do not warrant his translation; nor can we agree with him in his application of a quotation from Ovid's third book "De Arte Amandi"—
5"Nec plectrum dextrâ cytharam tenuisse sinistrâ
6Nesciat arbitrio fœmina docta meo."
8The plectrum and cythara here neither mean a viol or a bow, but the former was occasionally long, such as that represented by Montfaucon in the figure of Apollo before mentioned. In the early ages of Christianity, the word cythara was frequently used to designate any stringed
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