Scan 66
The Violin Gallery: Comprising: Section I. South Kensington Special …, 1890
16 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1put the fiddle to their noses, and smell amber. Then I burning with love of knowledge, used to rub the fiddle very hard and wipe it to my nose, and not smell there amber. But that might arise in some measure from there not being any amber to smell. (N. B.—These amber-seeking worthies never rubbed the coloured varnish on an old violin. Yet their theory had placed amber there.)
32. That time does it all. The violins of Stradiuarius were raw, crude things at starting, and the varnish rather opaque.
53. Two or three had the courage to say it was spirit varnish, and alleged in proof that if you drop a drop of alcohol on a Stradiuarius, it tears the varnish off as it runs.
74. The far more prevalent notion was that it is an oil varnish, in support of which they pointed to the rich appearance of what they call the bare wood, and contrasted the miserable hungry appearance of the wood in all old violins known to be spirit varnish—for instance, Nicholas Gagliano, of Naples, and Jean Baptiste Guadagnini, of Piacenza, Italian makers contemporary with Joseph Guarnerius.
95. That the secret has been lost by adulteration. The old Cremonese and Venetians got pure and sovereign gums, that have retired from commerce.
11Now, as to theory No. 1.—Surely amber is too dear a gum and too impracticable for two hundred fiddle-makers to have used in Italy. Till fused by dry heat it is no more soluble in varnish than quartz is; and who can fuse it? Copal is inclined to melt, but amber to burn, catch fire, do anything but melt. Put the two gums to a lighted candle, you will then appreciate the difference. I tried more than one chemist in the fusing of amber; it came out of their hands a dark brown opaque substance, rather burnt than fused. When really fused it is a dark olive green, as clear as crystal. Yet I never knew but one man who could bring it to this, and he had special machinery, invented by himself, for it; in spite of which he nearly burnt down his house at it one day. I believe the whole amber theory comes out of a verbal equivoque; the varnish of the Amati was called amber to mark its rich colour, and your a priori reasoners went off on that, forgetting that amber must be an inch thick to exhibit the colour amber. By such reasoning as this Mr. Davidson, in a book of great general merit, is misled so far as to put down powdered glass for an ingredient in Cremona varnish. Mark the logic. Glass in a sheet is transparent; so if you reduce it to powder it will add transparency to varnish. Imposed on by this chimera, he actually puts powered glass, an opaque and insoluble sediment, into four receipts for Cremona varnish.
13But the theories 2, 3, 4, 5 have all a good deal of truth in them; their fault is that they are too narrow, and too blind to the truth of each other. In this, as in every scientific inquiry, the true solution is that which reconciles all the truths that seem at variance.
15The way to discover a lost art, once practised with variations by a hundred people, is to examine very closely the most brilliant specimen, the most characteristic specimen, and, indeed, the most extravagant specimen—if you can find one. I took that way, and I found in the chippiest varnish of Stradiuarius,
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