• I f - FoMRHI

10
Comm. I S 9 9
About technological information in musical instruments iconography: reply to Comm.
1571.
A) For a long time I was involved with questions concerning the benefits of musical
instrument iconographies as sources of knowledge. As others did, I also tried to
"reconstruct" musical instruments shown in paintings from different ages. The aim
was to experiment how e.g. flat bridges and wide tops could have been consistent
with playing techniques of music kept in scores or manuscripts contemporary with
the pictures. This was an extremely naive attempt to gain technological information
from pictures. There was, and still is, the problem of how to solve the contrast
between instrument acoustical and iconographical aspects. Obviously, my
instruments were "pure imaginaries". Later I was asked to collaborate with RIDIM
(University of Pavia) and I was given a large directory of names and types of
instruments already identified in paintings and catalogued by "categories". It was
clear that every new image discovered from iconographical sources (being examined)
didn't correspond to others that had previously entered the catalogue. I was asked to
study the instrument iconographical sources in Trentino (Northern Italy) and it
appeared obvious that the directory should be enlarged by some dozens of types of
instruments never catalogued.
Then I tried to discover \i there were reasons for compiling such a list of types,
because every new entry corresponded to an "unicum" and didn't pertain to a type of
instrument already defined. Owing to the impossibility of explaining whether a
picture can be a document of a real, already existed, type of instrument, I was to
abandon the conviction that the study of instrument images should be done in order
to obtain "technologically true" information. Should one accept Ch.Written II's
conclusions ("Apollo, Orpheus and David" in A.M.I.S., 1,1975, p.5-55, if they were not
a paradox), that some instruments were so realistically depicted, that not a few of the
models can be still identified among instruments preserved in museums or private
collections? It is evident to me, that the content of cognition one has to have when
trying to interpret the shape and details of instruments in paintings, is so high, that
the image in itself serves more to stimulate individual cognition than to be an actual
means for improving the level of knoweledge.
We have no serious reason for being convinced that we do concentrate on "getting the
most [technological] indication of truth" out of the evidence available from the
musical instrument iconography. On my opinion one has to distinguish among
(1) picture and objects depicted on them - pictures are objects, as they consist of a
support, materials and colours; therefore, one may study them for getting the most
indication of what the picture consist of, whereas objects depicted are images,
(2) the process of approaching the truth studying pictures of objects that don't exist
(never can we be sure that they existed) - there is no reasons for comparing them
each other, because all they are images: therefore each of them is an "unicum".
It is for me unthinkable, that we can get most indication of the "truth of the evidence",
ascertaing in the pictures characters that we imagine some objects should have had.