Books › Chats on violins, 1905 › scan 98
Scan 98
Chats on violins, 1905
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1height, length, breadth, etc., and wielding the witchery of glue-pot and sand-paper at will. Here he attained that maturity of experience which gave him power to produce instruments free from his master's influence: a flatter form, a gracefully reclining sound-hole, and a beautiful individuality in the shape of the scroll. And here he carefully copied out on the fly-leaf of his Bible the recipe for his wonderful varnish; the secret of which has been so jealously guarded by his descendants, that the present generation count it a lost art.
3On 20th May 1698, his first wife, Francesca Ferabosca, then about fifty-eight, died, and her husband, ten years her junior, buried her in a conspicuously sumptuous manner for those days. Among the items of her funeral expenses, which exceeded £20, are fees paid to fourteen priests and choir-boys, to over a hundred fathers of different denominations, to twelve torch-bearers; for the "Velvet and gold pall of the Cathedral," for "grave-diggers with capes," for the "Big Bell," the bells of St Matteo and Domenico, and the little bells of the Cathedral, etc. From all of which careful Strad, considering himself overcharged, deducts eight lires.
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