Scan 276
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1875
2 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 8. See the scan on archive.org.
1journey to Italy was undertaken when very young. With this view I do not concur. In all cases where there is an absence of direct evidence, opinions can only be formed from particular analogies bearing on the case under consideration. Now in the case of Stainer we have nothing to guide us but his variations of style, and dates of time and places. What is the result of a careful investigation of every particle of evidence that we can glean? The style is ever German, although the great maker is head and shoulders above all his countrymen who followed his art. I am thus forced to believe that had so excellent an artist visited Italy in his youth as reported, there would have remained but the faintest trace of his German origin. That men of less ability should be unable to entirely sever themselves from their national style of work, even under the most favourable circumstances for such a release, I can readily understand (it is an incapacity which has been exemplified over and over again), but Jacobus Stainer was not one of these ordinary men; he had not his superior in the school of Cremona as a finished workman, with the single exception of Antonius Stradiuarius. I believe therefore that the German style was deeply rooted within him when he ceased to be young, and that his subsequent visit to Cremona was not undertaken until he recognised the inferiority of the school in which he had been bred, as compared with that of the Cremonese. That he did not go far enough in his "second thought," is pretty well acknowledged
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