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Scan 28
An Encyclopedia of the Violin, 1925
10 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. Printed page 4. See the scan on archive.org.
1It is only just to remark, however, that the unfortunate rebec was not always treated with such contempt. For a long time, in fact, it figured among the instruments whose use was permitted at the royal court. Its importance began to decline with the first years of the seventeenth century. This decline was an irrevocable one, since, a century later, in 1742, when Guignon was named "King of the Violins," after a sufficiently long interregnum had left this office—which he was the last to fill—vacant, one of his first acts of authority was to issue the following order:
3"Since it would be at once impossible and opposed to the projects of the community, as well as to that perfection in the arts for which it is striving, to include among those making the effort a certain number of persons lacking capacity, whose talents are restricted to the amusement of the people in the streets and the public-houses, these last are to be allowed to play only a kind of instrument with three strings, which goes under the name of the rebec; but they are not to make use, under any pretext whatever, of the violin with four strings."
5Thus the rebec went out of existence, although, as has been shown, it was still in use in France during the seventeenth century. Since then it has disappeared so completely that I have been unable to find a single specimen of the instrument either in public or private collections. The instrumental Museum of the Paris Conservatoire, however, possesses an exact copy made by J. B. Vuillaume, an example of great interest for students of the history of instrumental art.
7According to Vidal, there is very little information to be had with regard to the manufacture of the instruments in use in the old days, and yet, in the third book of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes he has discovered the name of a certain Henry, called "Henry of the Vielles," since he was one of the best-known vielle makers of his epoch.
9Caspar S. Duiffopruggar (Plate 4), named Tieffenbrucker, a Bavarian who became a nationalized Frenchman, was long reputed to be the first maker of violins, but Vidal declares that all the so-called Duiffopruggar violins are spurious, having been made by Vuillaume, who, in 1827, conceived the idea of making violins after the pattern of a viola d'amour built by the former. That Duiffopruggar came to France with King Francis I, who, after the battle of Marignano, had proceeded to Bologna to confer with Pope Leon X, and brought back the viol maker with him, is proved by an engraving made by Woeriot, in Lyon in 1562. Vidal estimates that Duiffopruggar worked in Paris from approximately 1515 to 1530, but, in spite of their contentions that Duiffopruggar was a wonderful artist at inlay work, there is absolutely no proof existing, as Vidal asserts, of the authenticity of the violins he is said to have made.
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