Books › Old violins and violin lore. Famous makers of Cremona and Brescia, and of England, France, and Germany (with biographical dictionary); famous players; and chapters on varnish, strings and bows, 1893 › scan 18
Scan 18
Old violins and violin lore. Famous makers of Cremona and Brescia, and of England, France, and Germany (with biographical dictionary); famous players; and chapters on varnish, strings and bows, 1893
6 lines. Read by computer on 14 September 2026. Printed page 12. See the scan on archive.org.
1market or are picked up briskly by the great dealers, sometimes for fabulous sums. Mr Hill of Bond Street thinks nothing of a thousand pounds for a really fine specimen of Strad.
3Watch the collector exhibiting his treasures to a select company after lunch. You will soon see he is not the daft creature whom the uninitiated who only want to hear the fiddle are apt to suppose. He knows the influence which that old Gasparo or Maggini had upon the Cremona school. He marks with admiration the emergence of the Amati and Guarnerii from the Brescian models; for him even the quaint long ff's of the old makers stand in lovely contrast with the more graceful but still pointed sound-holes of Joseph or more rounded ones of the great Antonius. To him that ancient viola cut down from a larger-sized model of viol now extinct, and placed side by side with an Amati tenor, is as interesting as the study of comparative anatomy to a scientist.
5Then your collector is never tired of dwelling on the perfection of those forms which slowly emerged as the survival of the fittest in that exciting quest for the sensitiveness, sweetness, and sonority of tone which occupied the lifelong meditations of Nicolo Amati and Stradivari. Anon he will call your attention excitedly and sympathetically to the grace of the curves, the surface never flat or board-like, but full of a variety of levels like the satiny surface of a fine human body. You might almost believe that a whole system of muscle—a very living organism—lay beneath the "back" and
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