Scan 48
The Violin Gallery: Comprising: Section I. South Kensington Special …, 1890
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Cremona Fiddles.
3Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, August 19th, 1872.
5UNDER this heading, for want of a better, let me sing the four stringed instruments that were made in Italy from about 1560 to 1760, and varnished with high-coloured yet transparent varnishes, the secret of which, known to numberless families in 1745, had vanished off the earth by 1760, and has now for fifty years baffled the laborious researches of violin makers, amateurs and chemists. That lost art I will endeavor to restore to the world through the medium of your paper. But let me begin with other points of connoisseurship, illustrating them as far as possible by the specimens on show at the South Kensington Museum.
7The modern orchestra uses four stringed instruments, played with the bow: the smallest is the king: its construction is a marvel of art; and, as we are too apt to underrate familiar miracles, let me analyze this wooden paragon, by way of showing what great architects in wood those Italians were, who invented this instrument and its fellows at Brescia and Bologna. The violin itself, apart from its mere accessories, consists of a scroll or head, weighing an ounce or two, a slim neck, a thin back, that ought to be made of Swiss sycamore, a thin belly of Swiss deal, and sides of Swiss sycamore no thicker than a sixpence. This little wooden shell delivers an amount of sound that is simply monstrous; but, to do that, it must submit to a strain of which the public has no conception. Let us suppose two claimants to take opposite ends of a violin string, and to pull against each other with all their weight; the tension of the string so produced would not equal the tension which is created by the screw in raising that string to concert pitch. Consider, then, that not one but four strings tug night and day, like a team of demons, at the wafer-like sides of this wooden shell. Why does it not collapse? Well, it would collapse with a crash, long before the strings reached concert pitch, if the violin was not a wonder inside as well as out. The problem was to withstand that severe pressure without crippling the vast vibration by solidity. The inventors approached the difficulty thus: they inserted six blocks of lime, or some light wood; one of these blocks at the lower end of the violin, one at the upper, and one at each corner—the corner blocks very small and triangular; the top and bottom blocks much larger, and shaped like a capital D, the straight line of the block lying close to the sides, and the curved line outwards. Then they slightly connected all the blocks by two sets of linings; these linings are not above a quarter of an inch deep, I suppose, and no thicker than an old penny piece, but they connect these six blocks and help to distribute the resistance.
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