Books › Cremona violins. Four letters descriptive of those exhibited in 1873 at the South Kensington museum. Also giving the data for producing the true varnishes used by the great Cremona makers, 1900 › scan 17
Scan 17
Cremona violins. Four letters descriptive of those exhibited in 1873 at the South Kensington museum. Also giving the data for producing the true varnishes used by the great Cremona makers, 1900
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1SECOND LETTER.
3AUGUST 24th, 1872.
5IO PAOLO MAGGINI is represented at the Kensington Museum by an excellent violin, No. 111, very fine in workmanship and varnish, but as to the model a trifle too much hollowed at the sides, and so a little inferior to some of his violins, and to the violin No. 70, the model of which, like many of the Brescian school, is simple and perfect. (Model, as applied to a violin, is a term quite distinct from outline.) In No. 70 both belly and back are modelled with the simplicity of genius, by even gradation, from a centre, which is the highest part, down to all the borders of the instrument. The world has come back to this primitive model after trying a score, and prejudice gives the whole credit to Joseph Guarnerius, of Cremona. As to the date of No. 70, the neatness and, above all, the slimness of the sound-hole, mark, I think, a period slightly posterior to Gasparo da Salo. This slim sound-hole is an advance, not a retrogression. The gaping sound-holes of Gasparo da Salo and Maggini were their one great error. They were not only ugly; they lessened the ring by allowing the vibration to escape from the cavity too quickly. No. 60, assigned to Duiffoprugcar and a fabulous antiquity, was made by some 'prentice hand in the seventeenth century; but No. 70 would adorn any collection, being an old masterpiece of Brescia or Bologna.
7THE SCHOOL OF CREMONA.—Andreas Amatus was more than thirty years old, and an accomplished maker of the older viole, when the violin was invented in Brescia or Bologna. He does not appear to have troubled his head with the new instrument for some years; one proof more that new they were. They would not at first materially influence his established trade; the old and new family ran side by side. Indeed it took the violin tribe two centuries to drive out the viola da gamba. However, in due course, Andreas Amatus set to work on violins.
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