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. [Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.], 1873 › scan 36
Scan 36
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. [Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.], 1873
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 30. See the scan on archive.org.
1they flattered the eye with something like the light and shade and picturesqueness of the Cremona violin, these pseudo-antiques, though illimitable in number, sold like wildfire; and hundreds of self-deceivers heard them by the eye, and fancied these tin-pots sounded divinely. The hideous red violins of Bernardel, Gand, and an English maker or two, are a reaction against those copies; they are made honestly with white wood, and they will, at all events, improve in sound every year and every decade. It comes to this, then, that the varnish of Cremona, as operated on by time and usage, has an inimitable beauty, and we pay a high price for it in second-class makers, and an enormous price in a fine Stradiuarius or Joseph Guarnerius. No wonder, then, that many violin-makers have tried hard to discover the secret of this varnish; many chemists have given days and nights of anxious study to it. More than once, even in my time, hopes have run high, but only to fall again. Some have even cried Eureka! to the public: but the moment others looked at their discovery and compared it with the real thing, "inextinguishable laughter shook the skies." At last despair has succeeded to all that energetic study, and the varnish of Cremona is sullenly given up as a lost art.
3I have heard and read a great deal about it, and I think I can state the principal theories briefly, but intelligibly.
51. It used be to stoutly maintained that the basis was amber; that these old Italians had the art of infusing amber without impairing its transparency; once fused, by dry heat, it could be boiled into a varnish with oil and spirit of turpentine, and combined with transparent yet lasting colours. To convince me, they used to rub the worn part of a Cremona with their sleeves, and then put the fiddle to their noses, and smell amber. Then I burning with love of knowledge, used to rub the fiddle very hard and whip it to my nose, and not smell amber. But that might arise in some measure from there not being any amber there to smell. (N.B.—These amber-seeking worthies never rubbed the coloured varnish on an old violin. Yet their theory had placed amber there.)
72. That time does it all. The violins of Stradiuarius were raw, crude things at starting, and the varnish rather opaque.
93. Two or three had the courage to say it was spirit varnish, and alleged in proof that if you drop a drop of alcohol on a Stradiuarius, it tears the varnish off as it runs.
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