Books › The Repairing & Restoration of Violins, 1903 › scan 19
Scan 19
The Repairing & Restoration of Violins, 1903
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1with—"honey-combed" from the inroads of those vandals of all time known as "the worm," all the supporting, rebuilding of the interior and re-decoration of the exterior must be taken chiefly as means to an end, that of the resumption of its rightful position among friends or rivals in the same line.
3This restitution becomes of increasing importance and necessity every day, a condition arising from the verdict emphatically given by his majesty the public that there are not any instruments of the violin family ready to take the place—that is, worthily—of those made by the principal masters of Italy during the two hundred odd years before the commencement of the nineteenth century, and also that there does not seem to be much probability of others arising at least for a few generations to come. No wonder then that the most energetic searching has been going on for a long time, not only in Italy but over the whole of Europe, with the hope that in some out of the way court or alley there may yet be reposing in obscurity some long forgotten, unrecognised work by an old master of the art of violin making. Should one be unearthed, if but a wreck of its former greatness or even a portion, this is not refused but eagerly grasped and placed—not yet in open daylight before the gaze of the world, but in the hands of a specialist in re-vivifying these dry bones of a bygone age, re-habilitating them—perhaps having by him or given him other portions of a similar maker, or it may be—it has sometimes occurred—the actual missing parts.
5The specialist in the repairing and restoring art is now not of the same class as in olden times. When the Amatis, Stradivaris, Guarneris and the like were being turned out one after another, there was not so much necessity for preserving all the pieces or splinters of precious pine that had been separated by the fracture of the upper table from any cause, there was a better remedy at hand, the nearest maker would naturally be sought whose reputation was possibly more than local and whose self confidence prompted him to make a fresh table rather than devote time and labour for which adequate com-
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