Books › British Violin Makers: A Biographical Dictionary of British Makers of Stringed Instruments and Bows and a Critical Description of Their Work, 1920 › scan 122
Scan 122
British Violin Makers: A Biographical Dictionary of British Makers of Stringed Instruments and Bows and a Critical Description of Their Work, 1920
6 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 100. See the scan on archive.org.
1which they copied and dub it "classical," is the usual way with the flippant connoisseur, who does not trouble about the wider issues of history.
3The truth is, no work of art is absolutely original, and all nations are copyists by turns. What we borrowed from the Italians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Italians themselves borrowed from the Greeks in the fifteenth and sixteenth.
5Dr. Johnson said that "No man was ever great by imitation": if that is true, then we must say that Banks was great in spite of imitation, for great he most certainly is. His best work, if not original and distinguished by subtle and delicate feeling like the art of the Italian masters, is yet marked by decisiveness of execution, freedom of manner, and exquisiteness of finish. His Amati copies show that he was not only a master of the principles of his art and craft, but also that he was imbued with the knowledge and feeling of form. It is many years since I began to make a careful study of the work of our old violin makers, and it has been my good fortune to come across some very fine examples of Banks' handiwork. I look upon him as summing up in himself the whole tradition of the old British School of violin making. The tradition of that school, if not remarkable for its insight, is sincerely reverent. It has been recorded of Michael Angelo when he was a pupil of Ghirlandaio that "he was wont daily to contemplate reverently the saints and angels whom Fra Angelico seemed to have drawn from heaven." And such is the figure I have drawn in my mind of Benjamin Banks, save that for saints and angels I have substituted violins, violas, and 'cellos. Reverence, I have observed elsewhere, is characteristic of all true art—reverence, that is, for the Idea, in Plato's sense of the term, and not merely for any special form under which the Idea is visualized. The inspired artist loves the form—his model—not so much for what it is as for what it represents. The best work of Banks impresses me with the feeling that the artist had set himself the task of discovering
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