Scan 32
The Violin & Its Story: Or the History & Construction of the Violin, 1905
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1under the name of "Mater Verborum." Amongst the miniature paintings, which are unusually beautiful and artistic for that period, is an angel holding a fiddle in its hand. In another parchment manuscript, the Bible of Jaromèr, dating from 1529, there are several figures holding similar instruments. Another figure holding a three-stringed violin is to be seen in a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the Imperial Library at Paris. It is the figure of a woman seated on a horse, and it is evident that this instrument has a volute somewhat like that of the modern violin. Again, in the Castle of Carlstein, in Bohemia, which was built in the fourteenth century, there is a representation of a bowed instrument which very nearly resembles the violin of to-day—a proof that the art of violin-making must have made great strides from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century.
3Besides the above, there are numerous other evidences of the condition and progress of the violin-maker's art. In the meantime it is worthy of remark, that we are almost entirely dependent upon such accidentally preserved relics of the pictorial art as have come down to us, for our ideas of that progress down to the close of the fifteenth century, although among these relics there are undoubtedly some which are to the last degree deceptive. However thankful we are in the habit of feeling for such archæological mile-stones, it must at the same time be matter for great surprise that information from the learned men and the musicians of those days is almost entirely wanting. Even where such information has reached us it is exceedingly meagre, and gives us no glimpse whatever of the knowledge we so much desire as to the condition of bowed instruments or the method of their handling.
5Thus Jerome of Moravia, a Dominican friar of the thirteenth century, talking about the Rebek, merely says that the instrument of this name was of a deep tone, and that its two strings were tuned C and G. The writer, also, of an anonymous dissertation on musical instruments, which belong to the thirteenth century, informs us that a
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