Still Life with Musical Instruments

Every object on this table is a real thing you could name. A bombarda, the deep-voiced ancestor of the oboe, then a mandola, then a violin with its bow across it, a sheet of tablature, bound books, fruit, a curtain hanging behind. Baschenis painted this in Bergamo around the 1650s, and the way it is built comes from two places: the perspective treatises that any workshop would own, and the inlaid woodwork of Lombard churches, where craftsmen had been fitting instruments into wooden panels in exact foreshortening for over a century. He knew music from the inside and his written notation reads correctly. The thing worth standing close for is on the mandola. He painted the dust that settles on an instrument nobody has lifted for weeks, and the marks where fingers have been drawn through it. The canvas is 60 by 88 centimetres and hangs in Room XXXIII.