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Scan 46
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 32. See the scan on archive.org.
1of 1697, it follows that the period of activity of the two brothers extended over at least one hundred and seven years—a somewhat unusual extension of working life, it must be confessed; and if we, in addition, accept the conjectural date of their birth to be correct, viz., 1550, we must further conclude that Providence afforded to these two celebrated fiddle makers an abnormal span of existence stretching through a flight of 148 years.
3This is too startling to be quite true, and we are therefore driven to one of two conclusions, viz., either that there were two pairs of brothers of the same names, having a father named Andreas, and surrounded by the same social circumstances, or that these later tickets are forgeries. It is impossible now thoroughly to clear up this mystery. By the time their violins came into note, and long before it, the stream of fraud had, no doubt, set in. The demand for Italian violins commenced in this country, as I have previously pointed out, just about the date assigned to these later tickets. We can hardly assume that their birth date is very far out, seeing that it is founded on the circumstance that their father's name disappears about 1580, and theirs appears in 1591, and there is no trace whatever, apart from these later tickets, of a Hieronymus and Antonius Amati, other than the sons of that Andreas whose name disappears at the date mentioned; neither is there any trace of another Andreas, who must also have been a violin maker to have his name inscribed on their tickets. The two brothers had a number of pupils, and it is not in the least degree improbable that these tickets were abstracted or fabri-
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.