Exactly the point. Had a discussion with Mimmo concerning this, the color you see on the painting is the red lead oxide. The darker slightly brownish red - mercury oxide. Both are much easier to combine with gut or silk (and heavier by much, making for smaller diameters). As a matter of fact many historical silk or gut weighed articles (like G. Washington's american flag, or leather articles from before 19th century) were chemically weighed with lead and mercury oxides and salts. Some of the the mercury salts produce quite transparent weighed gut, by the way. This was Mimmo's dilemma, of course. Copper has to be loaded with a spoon, literally, it does not bind chemically, whereas both lead and mercury are very willing with organics... With what we know now of both mercury and lead, anyone here would be willing to use "historically accurate" strings?.. alexander
On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:52:45 +0000 <dem...@suffolk.lib.ny.us> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 22, 2009, Jarosław Lipski <jaroslawlip...@wp.pl> said: > > > Dear Anthony, > > I thought that lead is poisness, isn't it? Didn't they know about it? > > No, well, some had clues, but noone knew as we do today. > > This is an era when mercury amalgams were used to plate with silver and > gold; driing off the mercury using heat; shortening the life of everyone > downwind. Lead compounds were used to sweeten certain wines, leading > perhaps to the deafness of Bhetoven an perhaps to the death of Mozart. > > Things that killed slowly were hard to prove as cause of death. > > Consider that many of the cosmetics in use were also deadly, probably many > of the tinctures ground by painters. Water used by the brewers on the > London Bridge was drawn from the river thames itself... > -- > Dana Emery > > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
