•rf - FoMRHI

B a ^^^^^^^^^^^" the existence of many 16th century Spanish
broadsheets showing illustrations of vihuelas and guitars. One, reproduced on the
dust jacket of the Jacobs edition of Milan's works. having 4 strings and a string length
of 40 cm, seems to be a small guitar. Another used by Mason on publicity handoufs
for his Dee. lst Wigmore Hall recital shows 6 strings over the body (ambiguous over
the fingerboard) and a string length of 54 cm. It could be either a particularly small
vihuela (equivalent to the English treble lute) or a normal guitar. If such small vihuelas
of equal size to larger guitars existed (perhaps being distinguished by number of courses
and back curvature) then they, together with the 80 cm size would be able to play the
duets for two vihuelas tuned a fifth apart by Valdarrabano'^ These broadsheets certainly
need to be looked at. ^
APPENDIX I. THE SCALING OF INSTRUMENTS IN SCULPTURES AND PICTORIAL
REPRESENTATIONS
Ideally we should have tabulated a set of average dimensions of people and their
clothing, taking into account age, sex, social standing, period and locality. We uoufj
relate instrument sizes with those features most reliably known and easy to measure.
The data are unfortunately not available to us now. There are data on variation in
stature with time in the literature, but ali we have found so far is a comparison of
the average modem man's height 5ft 9in with his height in 1700 of 5ft 4Qin, a
difference of 65%. Armour in museums testifies to medieval and Renaissance
shortness. It is said that nutritional factors are probably responsible, and that
their greatest innuence on ultimate bone size occurs during babyhood. Cranial
development is more advanced than other bone growth at birth and this could mean
that head dimensions are less affected by nutrition than other measurements. Head
size is usually very difficult to estimate in art works because of hair styles and
other head coverings.
There are two measures relating to head size, either one or the other of which is
usually available on represenlations. One is the interocular (pupil-to-pupil eye)
distance and the other is the distance between the mouth opening and the centre
point between the eyes. On pictorial representations the former is more useful if
the subject's face is pointed close to or above or below the observer. The latter is
more useful if it is pointed to the side of the Viewer.
Until better data becomes available we decided to use measurements of modem
people for our scaling. On 8 adulta, which included members of the household and
guests, we measured the interocular distance and the moulh-centre of eyes distances
and the average values were 63.2 mm and 64.6 mm respectively. The root mean
square deviations of the measurements from these averages were 3.6 mm (5.7£) and
5.3 mm (8.27) respectively. We noticed that there was a tendency for people who
were particularly high in one of these parameters to be low in the other, and vice versa.
Consequently, we averaged the parameters for each individuai first and then found
the root mean square deviations of the individuals was 1.8 mm (2.8^) about the mean
of 63.9 mm.
Considering the errors involved and the probability that Renaissance people were a
bit smaller, we have decided to use 63 mm as a standard estimate for either of
these measures, and to add or subtract a few mm. if the facial proportions on the
re presentation seem to resemble those of the more aberrant of the people measured.
We hope that these estimates will be precise to within a semitone or 6%. We cannot
guarantee that the artists maintained this level of accuracy, but they offer most of
the data on instrument sizes that we have, and such data must be taken very seriously.