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Scan 205
Old violins, 1905
6 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 183. See the scan on archive.org.
1ment has been made in the violin since the last one left the hand of the great Antonio at Cremona, and not even a trifling modification of any sort has been adopted or applied to the grand violin of the golden period for at least a century. The excuse then for introducing the name and portrait of Paganini into this book is not because he reacted in the least degree upon the art of violin-making, but because he accepted it as an absolutely finished art, and asked for nothing which he found not in Strad and Joseph.
3Now this is important and interesting, because Paganini was the greatest of all players in this culminating century of the musical art—a man admittedly unsurpassed in the opinion of violin experts like John Ella, Cipriani Potter, Onry, and others, who, for forty years after his death, listened to all the phenomenal violinists of an age which boasts of Ernst, Joachim, Wieinawski, and Sarasate and Ysaye. As it has not been possible to produce the face and figure of any of these great old makers, with the one exception of Lupôt, who belongs at best to the silver age, I have thought it worth while to glorify their work by reproducing the grand though eccentric face and figure of the one man who has invested their chef-d'œuvres with that romantic glamour, that almost unearthly prestige which the violin alone amongst instruments can lay claim to.
5Paganini's favourite violin, a Joseph Guarnerius, lies in its case under glass to this hour, open for all eyes to inspect, in the Town Hall at Genoa, his native town, to which he has bequeathed it. His dying directions,
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