Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 37
Scan 37
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
14 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3information which enable us to show him in his workshop with one apprentice, Franchino, and a young wife, aged nineteen, Maddalena Anna, who brought him a dowry, and afterwards children.
5A picture of his house in the Contrada del Palazzo, Vechio del Podesta, lies before me. It has but two storeys, and the family lived upstairs, surrendering the ground floor to the violin business.
7In a woodcut by Jost Anian, Zurich (1539–91), we have an authentic picture of such easy, leisurely, calm workers as Maggini.
9There is the rude substantial bench, the tools, the glue-pot, the planks and the wood in blocks, bits of fiddles and strips of timber hung up on the walls; the aproned artificer is carefully trying a lute as he sits on his three-legged stool.
11What simplicities! Were we to enter in imagination the studios in which the greatest pictures in the world were being painted about this time, the same meagre appliances and absence of superfluous luxury would doubtless have greeted our eyes.
13But our gorgeous modern studios hung with the spoils of the East, and iridescent with precious pottery and curiously worked metals, our modern workshops with their exquisite mechanical appliances and all sorts of labour-saving machines, somehow fail to rival in quality of production those old masters who sat on three-legged stools, ground their own pigments, made their own glue and varnish, and chopped and chiselled their own wood.
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