Musical Instruments as Works of Art - Softcover

Victoria And Albert Museum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0112903258 ISBN 13: 9780112903253

Publisher: Stationery Office Books, 1982

Synopsis

The illustrations in this picture book are all of instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum. As this is principally a museum of decorative arts, many of the instruments in its extremely important collection have been acquired especially on account of their decorative qualities. It is therefore appropriate that the Museum should draw special attention to this aspect of its collection. When I compiled the first edition of this picture book in 1967, I hoped to stimulate interest in this subject, but I had not anticipated the enormous explosion of interest that has since taken place in musicology and the study of ancient musical instruments. With it there has arisen a demand for information about the decoration of instruments, mainly from those people, mostly quite young, who are today making reproductions of old instruments. This will surely provide an incentive for scholars to take up the study more seriously. As yet the field has hardly been explored, and it is hoped that the present entirely revised edition of this largely pictorial offering will help to stimulate such exploration. It would also be rewarding if students of antique furniture and woodwork were to pay greater attention to decorated musical instruments, for the simple reason that most instruments are inscribed with both date and provenance. Such firmly documented specimens are hard to come by in related fields. Musical instruments can, for instance, throw light on the provenance of jewel caskets and small boxes decorated in a manner similar to that of various sixteenth-century spinets and harpsichords. Anyone interested in the early history of marquetry ought at least to look at the decorated fingerboards of seventeenth-century Paduan and Venetian lutes. And no student of decorative painting can afford to ignore keyboard instruments which have throughout the centuries provided a vehicle for the display of the painter's talents. (from the Preface)

Edition details

• Publisher: Stationery Office Books
• Publication date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0112903258
• ISBN 13: 9780112903253
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 56