FORENSIC CASEBOOK: Detecting half-tone lithography on an obscured label.
Recently a colleague brought to us a German nineteenth century violin with a manuscript label written in kurrentschrift (not sutterlein, as we reported originally) which is typically difficult to read, and obscured by dirt and chemical damage. As is normal in a case like this, the instrument was closed and the only way to examine […]
FORENSIC CASEBOOK: High levels of carbon in printer’s ink illuminated through the back of a violin at 850nm.
Violin by Jack Lott, c.1860 Of interest, we can see that the printer’s ink used to make the copy of a Stradivari label has a very high carbon content. Variations in the thickness of ink show that this was printed from moveable type in a form of makeshift printing press, with issues of over inking, […]
James Tubbs & The Elgar Bow
Amongst the great composers, Edward Elgar’s intimacy with the violin stands out. In his compositions he is one of very few to be specific in his bowings, and in his early life his ambitions were focussed towards performance rather than composition. When he began studies with Adolf Politzer in 1877, his teacher believed that as […]
A Violoncello by Barak Norman, London, 1704
Barak Norman (1651-1724) is one of the most distinctive and interesting makers of the violoncello, and this is one of the most beautiful examples of his work that I have seen. Norman lived at the same time as Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) and was certainly the leading instrument maker of his time in London. His earliest […]
Vitruvian Man, the braccio, the gamba and the beginning of the violin.
In the last twenty years François Denis’ Traite de Lutherie has revolutionised the way that we understand the geometry of Cremonese violin forms, but there is no criticism to his work in asking questions about how the fundamental shape of the violin was formed long before Andrea Amati perfected. You can see an animation of […]
Michelangelo, Marco Girolamo Vida and some art-historical foundations for Andrea Amati…
A long read: We tend to fall into the idea of Andrea Amati and the invention of the violin as happening in isolation – there was no pre-established tradition of Cremonese instrument making that we know of, and without digging deeper into the cultural world of Cremona in the sixteenth century, it has always seemed […]
Andrea Amati, the Campi family and the artistic milieu of 16th Century Cremona.
At length, I hope to write more on my interest in the lyric and narrative poets of Cremona in the early 16th century, and the profound influence which I believe shaped the cultural acceptance of the city towards embracing Andrea Amati’s new form of instrument, but this blog is more about the painters in Amati’s […]
Andrea Amati and the Spanish Set.
The first thing that I would like to do is to wholeheartedly commend the brilliant work of Marie Radepone, Jean-Phillipe Échard and their colleagues for their 2020 scientific paper Revealing lost 16th-century royal emblems on two Andrea Amati’s violins using XRF scanning. Back in 2005 at The Secrets, Lives, Violins of the Great Cremonese Violin […]
Markneukirchen 1906: villages of violin makers
Where did your century-old violin with a fake Stradivari come from, and what does it mean to be a German “trade” of “factory” fiddle? The small town of Markneukirchen became symbolic of everything from industrialised production of violins to small cottage industries making everything from individual parts to complete instruments, and at a range of […]
It woz me wot done it…
What a delight to see my homage to Larson going viral on the interweb. It’s something I did for a few friends but it escaped and has a life of its own…. What’s the story? The British Violin Making Association ran a professional development restoration course at West Dean College for years, but we discovered […]
