Books › Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883 › scan 94
Scan 94
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
2 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 80. See the scan on archive.org.
1and the date 1732, and is described as one of the most magnificent examples of Italian manufacture that has come down to us. In points of model, construction, tone, and preservation, it merits so to be classified. Connoisseurs are unanimous in recognising in it another than Stradivari's hand, because the arching is much more pronounced both in back and belly than is characteristic of that great master. The rims are lower, the f holes differently designed, the varnish itself —of a warm reddish-brown—is a little darker and heavier-looking than that usually employed by Stradivari. The workmanship inside and outside is a model of perfection. The present owner, a M. Bonnet, in Paris, ascribes it to Gennaro Gagliano, on the faith of the following account, which has accompanied it to the few hands through which it has passed since it left the workshop. It was bought from Gennaro Gagliano himself, about 1740, by an Italian amateur (name not given), who sold it in 1765 to M. Champson, a well-known violoncellist in Marseilles, who died in that town in 1826. It passed then into the hands of an amateur, and, at the death of the latter, it was bought by its present proprietor, M. Bonnet. The authority who reports this violoncello says that he feels able to affirm that no one ever came across an instrument signed by Gennaro Gagliano himself that even approached the perfection of the above specimen, and there he leaves the matter; but I think there is something more to be said. The instrument is there, and to accept it as the work of Stradivari would prove fatal to the theory of that great maker's decadence, which it has hitherto been the custom to receive as true, for this perfect instrument was
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