Books › The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904 › scan 22
Scan 22
The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1old Italian instruments had been in my possession, it must be confessed that the varnish question did not attract my attention. For more than forty years I accepted, like the rest of the world, without question or demur, the dogma which emanated from experts in whose knowledge and judgment I placed unlimited confidence. This apathy may be excused by the consideration that a coloured varnish, a mere concoction, is totally devoid of scientific interest.
3Suspicion of the general soundness of the established dogma was, quite unexpectedly, aroused by the examination (in May, 1900) of a red varnish of the Neapolitan variety, which was discerned to be distinctly dichroic.
5The significance of this observation was not immediately apparent, but, after some consideration of the matter, means were taken to obtain access to a number of Stradivari's instruments, of undoubted authenticity. The varnish of these was found to exhibit the same dichroic properties—red tints were evidently optical effects, the apparent colour was in no case due to substantive colouring matter or pigment.
7The scientific term "dichroism" appears to have been primarily used "to denote the property exhibited " by many double-refracting crystals; of exhibiting "different colours when viewed in different directions" (Watts' Dic. of Chemistry, 1869, Vol. II. 320); Berthelot used it in 1853, 1854, to denote some such (unexplained) property in some terpene derivatives (Ann. de Chim. Vols. 38, 39, 40). It is here used to denote that the colour of transmission (yellow) differs from that of refraction (red, rarely purple).
9The problem now presented was totally different
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