bean_fidhleir

Too true. "Who can protest but does not, is an accomplice in the act" (Talmud, 54b)

C'mon guys, that's not nice. There are many people, especially nerds, who have a deep-seated need --it goes well beyond desire-- to feel self-sufficient and to go their own way. Often it comes from a childhood spent as an involuntary outsider. For someone whose early social experience consists largely of rejection, learning how to "go it alone" is the key to psychological survival. And the reason for the rejection doesn't matter: the late psychologist Abe Maslow --of Hierarchy of Needs fame-- once remarked that it was a constant source of amazement to him that he hadn't grown up psychotic, having been the only Jewish boy in the neighborhood and relentlessly rejected by his non-Jewish peer group. Yuen might not have experienced that kind of alienating childhood, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he did.

I won't try to dispute your judgment, but this particular fake, at least, sure looks good to me! http://www.meegeren.net/images/uploads/z%2...%20%5B2x%5D.jpg Given that he pulled the noses of a lot of the Big Wheels of his day, the equivalent of the Beares, Hills, etc, it makes me wonder how many of today's big fiddle certs are rubbish. How many of his forgeries would ever have been disclosed had it not been for the Göring connection and collab charge?

I'd love to own that first one - the stigmata make it beautiful. There's a dictum in art (and engineering) that it's supremely difficult to counterfeit something out of its time because we are such complete children of our own time that everything we do betrays us in some way. There's a sort of minor illustration of that in David van Zandt's copies of Stainer fiddles compared to these instruments: DvZ makes the f-holes a tiny bit too narrow and discontinuous, making them look slightly Strad-ish/GDG-ish (to my eyes). It makes one wonder how someone like van Meegeren, poor bugger, could keep such a perfect eye and hand.

Do a search on "ISOC" and/or "in search of Cremona" in the MN archives. It'll tell you what you need to know.

My guess would be that he's experimenting to see whether that will bring him more money.

My guess would be that he's experimenting to see whether that will bring him more money.

Those scrolls look VERY different, to me.

"No major cracks"? He must be defining "major" in a special way. like BushCo's & ObamaCo's definition of "torture".

That must have taken ages to make. How sad, in a way, to have wasted all that obvious woodworking skill.

Apologies for the delay...DSL troubles. I reckon this'll be my last rx in this thread because I suspect I'm on the verge of getting people irritated (I know: too late) to Jeffrey: I'm not trying to be contrary, honest! I'm only trying to express my perception (and total inability to share what seems to be a communal perception). to Strado and David: perhaps the Pantheon didn't like the crinkled effects either, but shrugged them off with a grimace and headshake because they reckoned that the only way to get rid of them was by Descent To Bowling Alley. I.e., the choice was between varnish that was very good for the fiddle but that would inevitably fail under human contact, or varnish that wouldn't react to anything less than a company of sappers, but would give their fiddles all the warmth and charm of a bowling alley floor. Eh?

To answer Strado's question about having engineer in me: yes. But I'm not solely a technophilistine - I practiced for years as a commercial artist before turning engineer. And while my engineering work never received any peer-group juried awards that I know of, my art work did. My objection certainly isn't to texture, and not even to shrunken, broken-up surfaces as such. I strongly appreciate the textures a fiddle acquires over a century or three of love and use. The significant difference is that those stigmata represent the maker's success, while (I think you'll have to agree) craquelleure is purely a sign of miscalculation: the varnish film should have retained its integrity, resisting the assault of hormonal 'Sturm und Drang' and atmospherics, but didn't. How can a group of people dedicated to perfecting their artistic craft genuinely appreciate the results of such miscalculation? Only by disconnecting the components of your skill: you stop thinking as a maker whose goal is a varnish film that retains its integrity through the last molecule of coverage and shove those perceptions out of the way so that you can look at someone's oopsie as though it were a painting or benign natural phenomenon such as a temporarily dry mud flat. If you looked at it with all your skill in operation, you'd have to feel a mix of emotions not completely unlike what we feel when looking at a puddle in the road with an oil-slick spectrum: the spectrum is pretty, but it's produced by pollution and is therefore very undesirable. What interests and baffles me is why you would want to compartmentalise your perceptions in that way. You obviously do want to --but why?

(The 'try so hard' folk to whom I was referring are the folk today, struggling to eliminate random effects) As for the 'desirability of textures in violin surfaces', that obviously doesn't explain what's going on here, though. People could easly get all sorts of textures in violin surfaces...but in general they don't want them and try to avoid them. But they go into raptures when they happen anyway. That doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. Either they're desirable and people should try to produce them with the same intensity they now expend trying NOT to produce them, or they're undesirable and unworthy of admiration when some process fails and produces them anyway. Or at least I don't see any third course that's not at least a little 'sweet lemon'-ish. I believe it's the case that intentionally constructed textures (e.g., the textures gooped on during the late 19th c., or even intentional craquelleure) are not, in general, valued. True?

That six-panel abstract collage was put together by a blind child? That's beyond astonishing. There are plenty successful, sighted artists who couldn't do as well. Amazing teacher, that. Amazing students, too. Dank U wel, Mijneer Jacobus.

I think texture is wonderful - when it's intended. The (e.g.) Japanese masters of raku embrace the random effects of their post-kiln reduction treatments...but the effects are random only in detail, not in conception. The potters have a very complete idea what they're going to have in the end, just not in detail. I value texture so much that I bought two prints for my office years ago almost entirely on the basis of the artist's command of texture. My non-artist colleagues, less sensitive, thought I'd gone mad (the originals were paintings of African women in tribal dress, and I discovered to my bewilderment that my choice, since I'm European, apparently violated some sort of subcultural 'race-mixing' tabu!!) Intended texture is good, but there are many textures that are the result of entropic processes, and to me that's what craquelleure looks like: someone did their sums wrong, and the object (or its surface) is slowly falling apart. I'm still not getting why that's good. If that's good, and interesting/admirable, why don't people go into raptures over, e.g., a dead body in a similarly early stage of entropic decomposition? Or, if the idea is not to have the same outcome each time, why do so many work so hard to have exactly the same outcome (or at least fully-predicted differences) each time?

I have to ask: why is this considered attractive/desirable? I myself can't see it as anything other than an error, and undesirable, just as the use of chrome yellow by van Gogh turned out in retrospect to have been an error. Not his error, but an error, and undesirable in its results. What am I missing?

(unintended dupe)

Burnt Umber is a yellow-brown pigment; Burnt Sienna a red-brown. Perhaps a light coat of clear tinted up with B. Sienna would get you what you want?

the fiddle I wonder how it would sound were it intact.

I suspect "engraved" is a translation error.

If I recall correctly (my copies are packed away for moving) those fiddles, from Germany, were offered by Sears etc a hundred years ago and thereabouts. To me, the tipoff that you're not looking at a high-class instrument is the fact that the interlacing on the back doesn't interlace correctly - the person who did the work was so rushed or uncaring that they didn't bother to do a proper job.

In part to stir the pot slightly, but also because there's a real and important truth here: I was one of the auditorium-full of engineers to whom the late Maurice Wilkes gave a talk one day. As a lead-in to one of his topics, he made a remark that "brought down the house" - gales of laughter, whistles, cheering, and sustained applause. What he said was: "The nice thing about standards is that they guarantee that everyone will make the same mistakes we did".

Okay, I'm going to qualify for my heretic cap badge here and now (presuming that I haven't already done it ages ago, without noticing): I find the worn, shorter, beaky corners -regardless of how they came into being- much more aesthetically pleasing than I do the "pristine" squared-off ones. If that puts me at odds with Stradivari's sense of visual design, tough bananas. Allowing his mastery of the functional craft to create in our minds a general halo effect is plain idolatry. (If you reckon I now merit stoning, please use small stones. The big ones get my arthritis too excited)

Speaking from the standpoint of an ex-commercial artist, I don't care for the fleurs. As Andres noted, they don't integrate well with the overall line. They completely overload two of the corners, already crowded by the proximity of the f-hole eyes, and are visually unmotivated. The Brescian ornamentation on the other hand is airy, very traditional (interlacings are one of the oldest decoration forms), and "fits" to the shape of the fiddle rather than interrupting it or looking stuck-on.

The scrolls & f-holes look quite different to me, VH. What am I missing? Also, would you really call the varnish on that ebay one "reddish brown"?