I’m always thrilled to visit the Cambridge Violin Making Workshop in what has become a yearly routine giving lectures during the summer schools. This year was a chance to talk about Andrea Amati, and most of all to ponder where the ideas came from that gave birth to the violin. Would you have guessed that the same combination of maple back and sides with a spruce soundboard was common place in the Roman and Byzantine empires. Here’s a forerunner to the violin (or lute) from Roman/Byzantine Egypt dating to the third or fourth century A.D. from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a hardwood body and spruce top.
