Books › The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892 › scan 35
Scan 35
The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1holes. There is also a tail piece to this viol attached to the end of the instrument in precisely the same fashion as many old specimens of tail pieces are still attached. In addition there is in this drawing a most important feature, which must not be overlooked. The fingerboard is quite a long and broad one, and displays no frets. A drawing of this kind having such a striking resemblance to violin form, and found in a work published in Italy in 1491—long before we have any historical trace of lute or viol makers anywhere, should dispel for the present all the hazy speculative notions regarding the post-historic Arabian origin of either the violin or the bow, for, side by side with this viol there is the drawing of a bow as like the modern violin bow in principle and in measurement as could well be expected in so early a specimen. It is a little longer than the instrument and has a mechanism shown on the stick quite evidently for the purpose of increasing or decreasing the tension. The original bow might even have a backward curve when in a relaxed condition as the hair in the drawing is represented to be tight while the stick is drawn straight. In view of all this, in the picture of a viol coeval with the cruth, and almost identical in style and stringing with known forms of the latter instrument, it appears to me difficult to avoid at least one tentative conclusion, namely, that the "First Book of Songs" of Augurellus temp 1491, confirms in a singularly cogent fashion my previously expressed opinion that the cruth was the progenitor of the violin.
3Subsequent to the publication of the above work, one or two musical treatises came from the early printing
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