Books › The violin: its famous makers and their imitators. : With several wood engravings from photographs of the works of Stradiuarius, Guarnerius, Amati, and others, 1880 › scan 52
Scan 52
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators. : With several wood engravings from photographs of the works of Stradiuarius, Guarnerius, Amati, and others, 1880
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 36. See the scan on archive.org.
1Declining, therefore, all speculation as to what the varnish is or what it is not, or any nostrums for its re-discovery, we will pass on at once to the description of the different Italian varnishes, which may be divided into four distinct classes, viz., the Brescian, Cremonese, Neapolitan, and Venetian. These varnishes are quite separable in one particular, which is, the depth of their colouring; and yet three of them, the Brescian, Cremonese, and Venetian, have, to all appearance, a common basis. This agreement may be accounted for with some show of reason by the supposition that there must have been a dépôt in each city where the varnish was sold in an incomplete form, and that the depth of colour used, or even the means adopted for colouring rested with the maker of the instrument. If we examine the Brescian varnish we find an almost complete resemblance between the material of Gaspard di Salo and that of his coadjutors, the colouring only being different. Upon turning to the Cremonese, we find that Joseph Guarnerius, Stradiuarius, Carlo Bergonzi and a few others used varnish having the same characteristics, but, again, different in shade; possibly the method of laying it upon the instrument was peculiar to each maker. Similar facts are observable in the Venetian specimens. The varnish of Naples, again, is of a totally different composition, and as it was chiefly in vogue after the Cremonese was lost, we may conclude that it was probably produced by the Neapolitan makers for their own need.
3If we reflect for a moment upon the extensive use which these makers made of the Cremonese varnish, it is reasonable to suppose that it was an
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