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Scan 42
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 28. See the scan on archive.org.
1this latter act of heroism, or the former incident of a day, and what is it that has made Cremona famous? Not the bravery of the French soldiers—notable as that was—nor the capture of their commandant; not even the former sufferings of the town itself, chanted by the immortal Virgil, nor yet the fact that that greatest of Latin poets spent some of his early years there—but the patient skill of a few artisans working in its Square of St. Dominic at what was then so humble and unacknowledged an art that its presence entirely escapes the notice of visitors bent on seeing all the sights and recording all the impressions which this enterprising place offered to their senses. Nothing more surely indicates the complete lack of interest in this branch of art-industry than the total absence of any allusion to it by writers and travellers of the time, whose object, it may be presumed, was to note the condition of these places, and the development of their various manufactures. Plenty of allusions there are to architecture, pictures, statuary—not a word about fiddles. And yet there they were, fiddles and fiddle makers, slowly and unostentatiously working their way to the front, and preparing the initial chapters of a new fame which bids fair to outlive, as it has already surpassed, even the memory of Cremona's afflictions.
3The founder of the Cremona school was Andreas Amati. The date of his birth has not been ascertained. The church registers of Cremona do not go farther back than the beginning of the sixteenth century, and all researches in other directions have been fruitless. Upon an instrument—a kind of rebec—which at one time was in an important collection formed by a Count Cozio de
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