Books › The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904 › scan 40
Scan 40
The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1"As to the colours which they put into the varnish, "they are so very transparent or translucent (telle- "ment translucides) and allow the grain of the wood "so well to be seen (laissent si bien lire la veine du "bois), that we do not doubt that they employed "resins or resinous colouring matters (!!!!). It is "impossible for us to say by what means they "managed to dissolve these in the essences" (i.e., oil of turpentine or of aspic), "but the means is indifferent; "what matters, is to succeed, and we have managed to "mix them so intimately in the oils, that they do not "abandon them again after they have been incor- "porated."
3At page 91, M. Mailand writes:—"Essence of "turpentine, it is known, does not combine or mix "with any kind of colour, whether ground up in oil, "pulverized or distempered in the varnish; it is the "same with the essences of lavender, aspic, or rosemary, "—they are tinted a little more, but so feebly that they "do not leave any colouration when laid on." Consequently, he gets the colour into the varnish by the medium of alcohol; it does not matter how he gets it in so long as he succeeds.
5M. Mailand observed what I also observed, although we draw different conclusions from our observations. If a varnish were coloured red, it would be always red, however thin the pellicle; but he noticed that a thin pellicle was not red but yellow. He writes (85):—"Preoccupied by the yellow tone "which is met with on many of the instruments "of the Italian luthiers, when the varnish is worn "away, we have thought that they sized them with "resinous gums soluble in alcohol, such as gamboge
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