Scan 274
The Violin: Its Famous Makers and their Imitators, 1875
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 216. See the scan on archive.org.
1SCHOTT, Martin, Prague. Instruments of little value.
3SPEILER, Tyrol.
5STAINER, Jacob, Absom, born about 1620. The celebrity of this maker is second only to that of the great Cremonese artists. Jacobus Stainer in Absom prope Oenipontum. 16— His admirers in Germany and England were, at one time, more numerous than those of the principal Italian. To the connoisseur of to-day such hallucination will seem inexplicable; and he is driven to the conclusion that the Fiddle admirers of past days were incapable of appreciating true beauty of form and its bearing upon sound, or else that fashion made its influence felt on the Fiddle world as elsewhere. It would be absurd to deny that the greatest German maker of Violins that ever lived was a man of rare abilities, because it is indelibly written on his chief works that he was a thorough artist. Therefore an expression of surprise that Jacobus Stainer has been estimated higher than even Stradiuarius by the Germans and English, must not be understood as a reflection in any sort whatever on his abilities, as it refers only to the form that he chose to give to his works. To account for the apparent inconsistency in the works of Stainer, and to strike the balance between, his exceptional abilities on the one side and his model on the other, is not easy. His form was not a borrowed one; it is as original as that of Stradiuarius,
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