Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 84
Scan 84
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
12 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS AT CREMONA
3price of his violoncellos and violas does not seem to be known.
5Although he had a large family, he must have made, if not inherited, money, for there seems to have been a proverb current at Cremona, "As rich as Stradivari."
7Some years ago, fresh from my visit to the house of Stradivari, then still standing in the Piazza Roma, Cremona, I gave a full description of the great maker's entourage, which I need not here repeat; but a single paragraph may serve better than anything that I can now write, at the distance of over a decade, to place the reader in the atmosphere in which Antonio Stradivari worked for more than half a century.
9I stood in the open loft at the top of his house where still in the old beams stuck the rusty old nails upon which he hung up his violins. And I saw out upon the north the wide blue sky, just mellowing to rich purple, and flecked here and there with orange streaks prophetic of sunset. Whenever Stradiuarius looked up from his work, if he looked north his eye fell on the old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio, if he looked west the Cathedral with its tall campanile rose dark against the sky, and what a sky! full of clear sun in the morning, full of pure heat all day, and bathed with ineffable tints in the cool of the evening when the light lay low upon vinery and hanging garden, or spangled with ruddy gold the eaves—the roofs and frescoed walls of the houses.
11Here, up in the high air, with the sun his helper, the light his minister, the blessed soft airs his jour-
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