Books › The Salabue Stradivari. A history and critical description of the famous violin, commonly called "le Messie." Containing many particulars obtained from authentic sources and now published for the first time, 1891 › scan 14
Scan 14
The Salabue Stradivari. A history and critical description of the famous violin, commonly called "le Messie." Containing many particulars obtained from authentic sources and now published for the first time, 1891
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1Monferrato (Piedmont.) The work unhappily was never completed, but Count Salabue's original sketch for the memoir (in the hand of his amanuensis, here partly reproduced in fac-simile) affords us some valuable information on the subject. From this memorandum, dated "Milan, January, 1823," we learn that, in addition to the large number of Stradivari's violins scattered throughout Europe, ninety-one were in his possession at the time of his death. In 1775 ten of these instruments were still in the hands of his son Paolo, the youngest child of his second marriage, who sold them in that year, together with two choice instruments by Francesco Stradivari (the second son), and all the forms, models, and tools left by their father, to the Count Salabue, whose collection has become so famous in the annals of the Cremona School.
3The name of this amateur must ever be held in grateful remembrance for his loving care of the Italian masterpieces. It is to such men that we owe the preservation of nearly all the finest existing instruments of the 17th and 18th centuries. Endowed with great wealth and rare judgment, he formed an unrivalled representative collection of the works of the great masters of the craft, and by his careful researches amassed an amount of information which might well have served as an invaluable tradition of an apparently vanishing art. To such a man the acquisition of ten undoubted specimens of the incomparable Stradivari must have been one of the greatest events of his life.
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