Who knows if they are waiting for their owner to return, these cymbals and other musical instruments abandoned on a
table between a small portable writing desk, a score and already opened letters.
Who did they belong to? Who were they playing for?
Time goes by and, like an hourglass, only the dust that accumulates makes us perceive it, settling in a
unequal on the convex wood of stringed instruments.
If we could move freely inside the painting, we would see a ray of sunlight penetrating through the half-open shutters into the
hall of the building in which we find ourselves. Like a projector, before the film runs, one can imagine the dance of the
dust in the empty room.
A particularly sensitive nose might smell the odours, a mixture of seasoned essences, coming from the
instruments made by Cremonese luthiers.
If we were musicians we could read the score and artfully pluck the strings of the instruments painted by Baschenis
resting at the Accademia Carrara. We seem to hear the musicians cheer the members of a rich family on evenings
summer, when you keep the windows open to circulate that little bit of fresh air that the Po Valley nights are stingy with. The
noble palace, we imagine it in Bergamo Alta, a nest protected by mighty walls that would nevertheless fail to
retain the sound that emanates from the soundboxes. Music, in our minds, dances sinuously in the narrow streets
of the city to counterpoint the chirping of the cicadas that slowly fades as darkness falls.
In this suspended atmosphere, in this hiatus, the soul is predisposed to speculate on the ephemeral time we are allowed to
live and on the vanity that these instruments encircled by pink ribbons represent. Perhaps we are like those strings
held by the pegs that hang gracefully from the viola da gamba's curl, everything else is silence and accumulations of
dust.
- The workEvaristo Baschenis, Still life with musical instruments, Accademia Carrara Bergamo
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