Books › The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904 › scan 42
Scan 42
The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1"themselves (se trouvant abandonnées à elles-mêmes), "will dry promptly, losing the suppleness which it "ought to communicate to them. It would evidently "result from this way of doing, that more coats would "be necessary to obtain the necessary brilliancy, that "the varnish which we employ, into which no hard "resins enter, would become very friable, since they "would have lost, in part, the excipient" (curious word! compare Fleming 270) "which ought to pro- "tect them, and that to arrive at a suitable solidity, "it would be necessary to give two or three coats "more; that at length, when these last shall have "become oxidised by time or worn by rubbing, those "beneath will fall promptly into powder; but the "most grave inconvenience would be, on the one "hand, of having caused the wood to absorb a certain "quantity of varnish, and on the other of having put "on to it a thickness more considerable than useful; "in consequence the sounds of the instrument would "be dull, veiled, without brilliancy, and without carry- "ing power; if not for ever at least for a very long "space of time. The woods employed in violin- "making (lutherie) are not used until they are very "dry, desiccation which can only be obtained after "several years, from which it follows that in causing "the essence and the resins to penetrate the wood, "one would do a thing quite contrary to the end "which one proposed to oneself to attain."
3This singular and totally erroneous notion of what happens to wood in the process of drying or seasoning, M. Mailand puts quite clearly, at page 61:—"For in "violin-making the wood which is the most dry is "esteemed; that, in a word, which has lost its resin"
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