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Scan 26
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 12. See the scan on archive.org.
1The best-known examples of this master, besides the one already mentioned, from which his portrait is supposed to have been taken, are the celebrated violoncello, with a plan of Paris inlaid on the back (and which, after passing from the possession of M. Raoul into the hands of Vuillaume, is conjectured to be at the present moment owned by someone in Moscow), and another with a horse's head carved at the end of the scroll, and beautifully inlaid all over the back, the lower half being almost entirely occupied by a fine design representing an old man in a little square frame, on which is a sand-glass. This is the design attributed to Baccio Bandinelli, and is called "Le vieillard à la chaise d'enfant." The circumstance that Duiffoprugcar is described as having been a mosaic worker in the Tyrol previous to his settlement in Bologna as an instrument maker, opens up a field for conjecture as to whether he had his first impulse towards violin making in the land of his nativity or in that of his adoption; and, following that conjecture, was it in the Tyrol, Bologna, or Brescia where the modifications of the violin shape known in his day first originated? These surmises I leave to the curious, caring rather to go on systematically over known ground.
3The accepted information regarding Gaspar Duiffoprugcar may, therefore, be summed up as follows: That he was born in the Italian Tyrol, was there an inlayer, was in Bologna in 1510, went to Paris about 1516, probably afterwards to Lyons, and then disappears. Further, that the evidence upon which the above rests is of the flimsiest possible kind. In the Exhibition at Kensington before referred to, there were
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