Scan 336
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1909
2 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 272. See the scan on archive.org.
1cable, and cause him to believe that Fiddle admirers of past times 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 Jacob Stainer has been estimated higher than even Stradivari by the Germans and English, must not be understood as a reflection on his abilities, since it refers 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 Stradivari—a fact which makes it more than ever unintelligible that he should have been content with it. To arrive at anything approaching to a satisfactory solution, we must endeavour to trace the history of this model. Jacob Stainer was born in the Tyrol, and passed there his early years, and probably received his first instructions from one of the old Tyrolean Lute and Viol makers, at a period when they raised their model, and introduced into the German School the scooping round
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