Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 60
Scan 60
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
8 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS AT CREMONA
3less spent on the cutting of corners or neater purfling—what did it matter? Strength, power, was what he wanted, and the sentiment is thrown off in the bulldog type of his head or scroll, in the thickness of his boards so much criticised, in the boldness rather than the grace and delicacy of his curves.
5He tried many experiments: flat make, full make, sound-holes cut almost perpendicularly, shortened, slanting, and sometimes disproportionately long. He was watching the effect on the volume and quality of tone, and when he had in his own way conquered that secret of grand sonority, whether empirically or by calculation, then, and not till then, his workmanship improves.
7He was like a man who had no time to think of the delicate cooking till he had stayed his main appetite. His frequent habit of cutting the wood upon the cross, à contre sens, as in the case of Mr. Alfred Gibson's instrument (1897), a superb specimen of Del Gesù, shows up the coruscations of the grain, and brings out each pore and vein by the agate-like varnish—not agate-like in the sense of the French chippy varnish, but in its clear crystalline depth and transparency. Del Gesù's varnish is never clotted, but is laid on thoroughly, yet with a light hand. Mr. Ruskin used to say that Sir Joshua Reynolds' touch was so light that he could paint on a gossamer veil; Del Gesù's brush is also as light as a feather. Some of Del Gesù's later violins, dating from about 1740, after the death of Stradivarius, are amongst his finest. The one used
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