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 that Andrea Amati was an outlier – the kind of qualities that we associate with genius, and the idea not dissimiliar of that of Leonardo, of ideas evolving out of nowhere. I have written an introduction to the artisitic milieu in Cremona in another blog, but here I want to look at the realisation of some of the fundamental ideas of Renaissance, unified through literature and art and music, which provide a platform for Andrea Amati’s ideas to emerge. I have taken two figures who applied surprisingly parallel ideas to those found in Amati’s instruments, first Marco Girolamo Vida the Cremonese poet and cleric, whose work has been derided by modern critics for a percieved lack of originality. The other, Michelangelo held a significant influence over Cremona’s artistic community, and in critiquing his most famous work for its reliance on earlier Classical form, we are afforded the opportunity to balance Andrea Amati’s achievement in conversation with arguably the most overrated and most underrated works of his time in order to provide an idea of a common artistic grammar that explains his motivations for the origin of the Cremonese violin.
Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566)
There are reasons why Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566) doesn’t jump immediately to mind when thinking about the Renaissance greats, but if there was an opening for a fifth member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I am increasingly convinced that Vida would be right there. Moreover I am fairly certain that he would be furnishing excellent references for the job from the Popes Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII and Isabella d’Este. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth century his work was so widely disseminated, republished and translated that there is a good argument to see him as the most significant poet of his day.
However, modern literary criticism developed in the nineteenth century which gave preference to modern languages and there was the obvious unpopularity that his writings are all in Latin rather than Italian. Hence even though in the land of Shakespeare, poets and literary heavyweights including Milton, Swift and Pope held him as one of the greatest poets that has ever lived, after the age of Shelley and Keats critics seeking originality turned away from celebrating his work. Views that spanned claims of plagiarism to simply being derivative, all made him deeply unfashionable amongst modern scholarship, and contrary to the praise he received as ‘the Christian Virgil’ during his lifetime. From one point of view, we can see his work as deeply unoriginal – his widely distributed 1527, De Arte Poetica, which gained him significant attention after its simultaneous Rome and Paris publication, takes its name from Horace’s Ars Poetica (19BC) and Aristotles earlier work of Greek dramatic theory, Peri poitikês, in Latin: De Arte Poetica. His Bombyce, which he dedicated to Isabella d’Este is a poem about silkworms that is analogue to Virgil’s writing on bees, the subject of his fourth book of Georgics. Hence it is Vida himself that pulls no punches in robustly likening his work to those of the greatest poets of Greek and Roman civilisation.
In fact Vida’s De Arte Poetica was the culmination of a poetic tradition that had arisen in Cremona. In the early Renaissance there was an awakening to a view that the great poet of the Roman age, Virgilio Pubilius Maronus, (Virgil) owed his origins more to Cremona where he received his schooling, than to Mantua where he had spent his childhood as the son of a farmer outside the city in a place called Andes. In the same way we might debate whether Sir Isaac Newton owed his reputation to Cambridge University where he studied or the tiny village Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth in Lincolnshire where he was born, or indeed how important it is that he was bonked on the head by an apple in the gardens of Woolsthorpe Manor when he was supposed to be in Cambridge. These timeless sorts of debates occupied the minds of thinkers through the middle ages and into the Renaissance with respect to Virgil (as they may do now), and towards the end of the fifteenth century there is evidence of scholastic accademias in Cremona, particularly of Nicola Lucari, of whom Vida was a student, that focused on reviving the lyric and narrative poetry traditions of Virgil because there was a strong enough belief harboured in Cremona that it was their scholastic tradition that had been critical in shaping Virgil’s career. The epigram quoted from a late sixteenth century portrait engraving of Vida sums up the intellectual contest and how Vida contributed to it: Virgilio gaudent Thebanæ moenia Mantus; Ut vicina sut est læeta Cremona Vida, translating to “The Theban Mantus (a reference to the founding of Mantua from the Aenid) celebrates it’s own Virgil; But Cremona, it’s neighbour, delights in it’s own Vida”
Vida had taken holy orders whilst at Mantua between 1505 and 1510, and had continued his education in Bologna and Padua before arriving in Rome, and evidently ambitious for patronage in 1513 when he published Carmen pastorale in quo deploratur mores Iulii secundi, a eulogy on the death of Pope Julius II. The work, written in Virgilian hexameter and echoing the bucolic themes of Virgil’s Eclogues. For this work he had sought the patronage of Cardinal Leonardo Della Rovere – surely an astute appeal, for he was one of the conclave that elected Pope Leo X as Julius’s successor. It appears that this was the same year that he wrote Scacchia Ludus. (It eventually entered into print in the same 1527 volumes of De Arte Poetica.) The objective of the poem was to describe in Virgilian Latin a game of chess played between Apollo and Mercury in the presence of other gods. The challenge of describing the game in real time seemingly serving as a virtuosic exercise in how to bring the action and temporal reality of contest into classical literary form. In this respect it seems to offer the same challenges that painters were experiencing of depicting moments in time. In this respect, there is a question that interests me of whether during his time in Mantua, Vida had engaged with the painting known in modern times as Fête Champetre (Musée du Louvre) that had been painted for Isabella d’Este either by Giorgione or Titian in 1509, for the theme of the painting is very clearly referential to Virgil’s Eclogues 3 or 7 (the shepherd with a bagpipe as a reference to the singing contest of Theocritis). It was Isabella d’Este to whom Vida had dedicated his poem on silkworms, Bombyce. There is much to say on this painting and it is one I keep returning to for many reasons. But it is noteworthy in this respect because just as Scacchia Ludus is an attempt in poetry to use all the classical devices to tell a completely new form of poetry to describe action in the present tense, this idea is central to the various actions found in the Titian/Giorgone painting.
The artistic innovation of Scacchia Ludus was sufficient to inspire Pope Leo X to commission Vida to write the his Virgilian epic Christiad on the life of Christ. To encourage him further, he received the priory of San Sebastiano on the outskirts of Frascati, a town that from Roman times to the present has been an enclave for the rich and powerful of Rome’s citizens. The project took longer than the Pope had hoped for and was unfinished upon his death in 1521, whereupon Clement VII continued the encouragements for Vida to complete it. The phrase that “time is the enemy of art” is Vida’s in explanation for his delay, but I like to think that another reason contributed to his slowness, for the 1500th anniversary of the death of Christ was in the Christian conscious, and a plausible time for the Second Coming. Vida’s may have had strong reasons not to create a work that foretold the Apocalypse, either for the religious reasons of not supporting the idea, or for the pragmatic reasons of not wanting to lose his reputation in the event of the Second-Coming failing to materialise. Given the Biblical uncertainty of when in his mid-thirties Christ was crucified, the publication date of October 1535 seems to be about the earliest safe date after the possibility had passed. Vida seems to have had a continuous loyalty to the place of his birth and for reasons that are otherwise unfathomable, he chose it as the place of a metaphorical second coming, in which Christ would be greeted at the banks of the River Po by the clergy and townspeople of Cremona.
Vida was resident in Cremona in 1549-50. By now his works were widely published across Europe, but the only Cremona edition of his poems (aside from the 1535 first printing of the Christiad) was published in 1550 during his stay in the city. There may be some significance in this with the dating of two paintings by prominent Cremonese artists, Giulio Campi and Sofonisba Anguissola. They seem to have deliberately responded to Vida’s virtuosic notions, as if to rise to the challenge of the Paragone and express the same sentiments in painting that Vida had achieved in ink. Giorgio Vasari encountered Sofonisba’s painting when staying in Cremona as the guest of her father. About the painting, subtly but firmly expressing elements that appear alive that it shared with Vida’s Scacchia Ludus. He recalled in the 1568 (2nd, enlarged edition) of Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (The Lives of Famous Painters…) that “I have seen this year in Cremona, in the house of her father a painting made with much diligence, the depiction of his three daughters, in the act of playing chess, and with them an old housemaid, done with such diligence and facility, that they appear alive, and the only thing missing is speech.”
I have seen this year in Cremona, in the house of her father a painting made with much diligence, the depiction of his three daughters, in the act of playing chess, and with them an old housemaid, done with such diligence and facility, that they appear alive, and the only thing missing is speech.
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of Famous Painters, (2nd Ed.)1568
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564)
The Shade of Michelangelo in Cremona…
There is no hard paper evidence that Michelangelo and Vida actually knew one and other, but sharing the same patrons and the same artistic space it seems that the absence of evidence is far from evidence itself, and to my mind the shade of Michelangelo is much in evidence in Vida’s footsteps (readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy will see what I did there). Likewise there is no record – so far as I know – of Michelangelo coming to Cremona. I am not saying he did, but listen to what I have to say…
I find myself returning to Sante Margherita e Pelagi, the church in Cremona whose rebuilding was commissioned by Vida in 1547, whose design by Giulio Campi involves the clean Vitruvian lines of the Roman temple that would have been quite revolutionary to the Cremonese eye of the time. Dig inside Giulio Campi’s designs for the ceiling paintings here, in San’Abbondio and Sant Sigismondo all clearly belong in the mould of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel both in the layout and the execution. The statues of the apostles in Sant’Abbondio recall Michelangelo’s intended works for Florence Cathedral, or the figures accompanying Moses in the eventual tomb of Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.
Another painting too crude to by Campi, but possibly by Gian Giacomo Pasini which I have identified as recording simultaneously the triumph entry of Charles V to Cremona in 1541 and equally imagining Cremona as Vida described it as the site of the Second Coming from Christiad in 1535 is also relevant forthe layout of the painting has remarkable similarity to Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (painted 1535-41) for the the Sistine Chapel with Vida’s 1535 Christiades in mind, for they are awfully similar. Engravings of Michelangelo’s work do not seem to have circulated until 1548, which is likely to be long after the painting was completed. We can imagine a number of scenarios in which The Last Judgement came to influence Cremonese iconography, which may move the conjectured date anywhere from 1541 to after 1548 – perhaps 1549 when Philip II of Spain made his own triumphal entrance into Cremona, as a way of commemorating the passage of his father nine years before.
Finally there are the letters of Amilcare Anguissola, to Michelangelo,
‘…we are much obliged to have perceived the honourable and affable affection that you have and show for Sofonisba; I speak of my daughter, the one whom I caused to begin to practice the most honourable virtue or painting… I beg of you that since, by your innate courtesy and goodness, you deigned by your advice in the past to introduce her (to art), that you will condescend sometime in the future to guide her again… that you will see fit to send her one of your drawings that she may colour it in oil, with the obligation to return it to you faithfully finished by her own hand… I dedicate Sofonisba (to you) both as a servant and daughter…’
Amilcare Anguissola to Michelangelo, 7 May 1557
and a year later…
‘…I place among the first of so many obligations that I owe to God, that I am alive during the lifetime of so many of my children and that such an excellent gentleman, the most virtuous above all others, deigns to praise and judge the painting done by my daughter Sofonisba.’
Amilcare Sofonisba, 15 May 1558
If there is a sense that Michelangelo’s drawings were circulating in Cremona, the first of the letters was to solicit a drawing that his daughter, Sofonisba, could copy, and the other is to thank him for his help and encouragement.
King David
With everything that I have written in defence of Marco Girolamo Vida’s reputation as the Christian Virgil, and to demonstrate the complex manner in which his ideas were woven into the broader Renaissance mindset, it is now time to turn to Michelangelo’s David, created between 1501 and 1504. Lionised as perhaps the greatest work of art of the Renaissance I would like, perhaps a little theatrically (and in a voice dripping with loathing, disdain, and contempt) to describe it in terms of being wholly derivative, of verging on plagiarism and at best a pastiche. Why so harsh you ask? The reason is to highlight that despite the varied directions that modern criticism of art and literature has taken, I see no ideological difference between Michelangelo and Vida, in fact they were certainly drinking from the same waters, both metaphorically and in actuality.
On the face of it, Michelangelo had no choice when conceptualising his statue of David than to take heed of the tropes that were already present in the other famous Florentine statues of the same theme. Donatello’s bronze of David Victorious (about 1440) is one of the earliest examples of the revival from classical sculpture of contrapposto (see the uneven shoulders and the bent knee, the hand on the hip… the relaxed pose…). When Piero de Medici commissioned Verocchio to produce a figure to compete with it (1475/6) the result was to solidify this vision of David, within an iconography that was particular to the artistic identity of the City of Florence.
For all the magnificence of Verocchio’s statue, as the illustration shows I don’t think that we can escape from the idea that its creation was totally centred on the existence of the Donatello sculpture. If it was not for the political power that it conveys, and the idea that it was the very rivalry between the citizens of Florence and the Grand Dukes of Tuscany that compelled a great artist to subvert his predecessor, I am not sure that we would accept it as any more than a ‘later version’ of an original by Donatello. Whilst the same political rivalry put pressure on Michelangelo to follow the same iconography in his own rendering of David, and it is manifestly clear that he had these statues in his mind when embarking upon his project, it is too easy and too simplistic to think of these as the basis of his inspiration. Instead he he went further back into the roots of Classical form, as if conscious that the learned observer would see his work as derivative unless he took the effort to build his idea from it’s foundations.
In this regard, I think we can be confident in tracing Michelangelo’s thoughts all the way to an awareness of the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos, who is understood to be the inventor of contrapposto in the 4th century BC. He was the author of a lost literary work The Kanon of Polykleitos which explained his theories of proportion and how an understanding of his proportional theories would lead in turn to greater versatility in understanding of the human form, allowing for this technique of more relaxed form. Contrapoosto or ‘counter-pose’ begins with the shoulders set at a different axis from the hips, normally enammbled by putting the weight on one leg with the other relaxed. Though his work and it’s precise theories were lost to history, they were well enough known in ancient Rome where his works were celebrated and copied, and where Vitruvius incorporated the principles that were understood of the Kanon into his own work on architecture. In turn the first printed edition of Vitruvius, marking his significant revival was in 1486.
The drawing by Leonardo da Vinci that we call Vitruvian Man is in reality derived from the Kanon of Polykleitos through the Vitruvian lens. It is commonly dated to c.1490, which is effectively concurrent to the appearance of the first printed edition of Vitruvius’s de Architectura of 1486 (without illustrations). Michelangelo began David in 1501 barely a decade later. Here we not only see the concern for proportion that is equally to be found in Leonardo’s study of the Vitruvian Man, but we also see elements of contrapposto that exist in Polykleitos’s sculpture – or more specifically in Roman copies that Michelangelo would have seen. Between Discophoros (the discus bearer) and Dorophoros (the spear bearer), two sculptures of idealised Greek beauty the former seems the closest of all to Michelangelo’s David. I have thought to illustrate only though the two seem so profoundly connected to seem to me that Michelangelo was bringing a more universal understanding of Polykleitos’s works into his preparations for David.
If we see Polykleidos, even through the lens of Donatello in the contrapposto form of David, there is more to be gleaned from it in terms of Michelangelo’s dependence upon earlier classical forms. When one has spent quality time with the extraordinary bust of Antinous that is now in the sculpture gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, it is impossible not to equate it totally to Michelangelo’s David. There are shared elements of the idealised face, the girth of the neck, and the hair. My first encounter with Antinous had that unfamiliar feeling of misplaced-homoeroticism that one also gets with David, but is easier to decipher in this case – especially in a gallery where there are other examples of classical art side-by-side rather than the solitary space of the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence. The clue to the eroticism is in the thorax of Antinous, which expands outwards so that although it is anatomically male, it has the presence of the female bust so that the androgynous beauty is not a dilution of male and female features but rather a way of expanding them into a universal sexuality.
Later in life, when Michelangelo was building the Piazza di Campidoglio in 1536-46 on top of the Capitoline Hill he had the marble remnants of the 4th century AD Colossus of Constantine moved from the Basilica Nova where it was found to the courtyard of the next-door Palazzo del Conservatori close to where he was working, and where they remain to this day, but it seems unarguable that following their discovery in 1486, he had fixated on these as prototypical for the colossal statue of David. The deeply carved pupils of the eyes have a remarkable similarity. In part this could be so that they would stand out at a far distance, copying the tricks of the Roman sculptors, but equally Michelangelo seems to be intent on advertising the likeness of David to the Colossus of Constantine. Witnessing the parts of the statue as they sit in the courtyard today of the Capitoline it is difficult to reconcile the parts, although it is obvious to see how disjointed they are in terms of scale, as if from entirely different statues of different sizes – it is thought the statue was mostly covered in bronze and that was salvaged in the medieval period, accounting for the loss of much of the statue, but a recent project to reconstruct the statue brings clarity to the proportions of the body. The way that they have been distorted on Constantine goes beyond the perspective tricks for a statue that is to be observed from below, and into another realm of sculptural illusion.
A popular explanation for the proportions of David is that the statue was intended to be erected high up on the cathedral in Florence, and that its positioning in the Piazza della Signora was not as Michelangelo intended it, but I think that this is far too easy… The size and potential placement of both David and The Colossus of Constantine gives rise to some degree of foreshortening, but there are many Classical and Neo-Classical statues designed for display atop high buildings which demonstrate the techniques necessary, and these two statues go well beyond this in their caricaturing of the human body. I do not know if earlier colossal statues give precedent prior to Constantine, but there there is another work, the equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius with his outstretched arm from earlier in 176 or 180 AD – one of the few Roman statues that remained on public view through the medieval period that seems to me to address the idea of compensating the proportionality of the true human form.
With many works of art, I think our loss of context blinds us to the reasons why a work of art was considered important at its time and it has the capacity to settle into retrospective critique that may have little to do with the original intention. The importance of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa paved the way for many paintings that are more appealing but at the time there was nothing quite like it, so regardless of how we view it now, it takes a deep understanding of Renaissance art to see it through the revolutionary lens it once enjoyed. The same is true of a work like Michelangelo’s David, with the exception that it all too literally stands out because of its unrivalled scale. It continues to have admirable qualities, as beautiful as it is imposing, and with our modern obsession for originality, we see enough that separates it from classical sculpture to imagine that it was created as the solitary act of genius out of nowhere.
To get to the truth of it, it is as if Michelangelo pulled together all the elements of classical sculpture and his genius lies in creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts. That is perhaps more remarkable an achievement than a belief that as a great work of art its genius lies in its originality. Hence, just as Vida has been criticised as derivative, plagiaristic and pastiche, I think as a commentary on the artist’s craft nuances of these words have parallel resonance to both, it is just that we overstate the importance of one of these artists and denigrate the other when they were both fundamentally connective to the same underlying philosophies of classical revival.
Andrea Amati
There is no originality to the idea that the Cremonese violin has some sort of geometrical form, and a system of designing it that not only allowed instrument makers to design proportionately similar violins, violas and cellos, but that allowed them to coherently work within a formula to create original and contrasting forms. However, the whilst we can see that the ‘secret’ formulas of the Amati family passed through the Cremonese Golden Period, and thence to Venice, by the end of the eighteenth century they were for all intents and purposes lost. The extraordinary advance in our current understanding is that thanks to the French violinmaker François Denis, we now know what it is. In the past Antonio Bagatella in his Regole per la construzione de’ violini, viole, violoncelli e violoni, (1782) was so influential in his theories of how the classical Cremonese makers produced their instrument, that the late Cremonese violin maker Giovanni Baptista Ceruti adopted those ideas over anything that may have been inherited from the classical Cremonese world. The importance of Bagatella to us is less about the makers who used his theories, but that the ideas of the Cremonese Golden-Period were nowehere to be found.
I think the familiarity of the violin scroll blinds us to how utterly extraordinary it is to find so pure a form of classical architecture on the earliest violins of Andrea Amati. I would go much further than that, for the precision of carving is not simply a matter of the craftsman’s skill, but of an intellectual need to observe the classicising elements represented within the violin scroll as a kind of declaration of architectural intent, and therefore whilst the mathematics of the Cremonese scroll is visible right through the Golden-Period, we really see so precise and focussed a rendition of it as we find in Andrea Amati. I will comment presently on the way that the body of the violin is almost naturalistic in the way that the proportions reflect nature, so that the specific architectural schema is harder to detect, or even seem on some level to be absent or so organic as to be created without concern for the higher ideals of architecture. In my mind Andrea Amati was utterly consicious of these concerns, and whilst the scroll has many functions, it serves as an unambiguous pointer towards the idea of a verifiable classicising scheme to the design of the entire instrument.
Through seminal works such as Simone Sacconi’s Secrets of Stradivari, and Kevin Coates Geometry Proportion and the Art of Lutherie luthiers thinking about design have tried rational ways of explaining the shapes that they see. Although Sacconi and Coates are amongst those who fell short of answering the questions they set themselves, their contributions have been invaluable in testing the problem, and they produce sensible ways of looking at shape and form. It was not until 2006 that François Denis published Traite de Lutherie, the first work to properly look at the internal templates of Stradivari’s work rather than the completed object as the subject of analysis. His work transformed the way that we think about the violin, and to my mind (although we have enjoyed friendly but robust sparring over it’s application to English viols), I think for Northern Italian concepts he is absolutely on the mark!
The Traité de Lutherie is a practical and theoretical guide designed to provide instruction in measuring and drawing techniques. Although its primary subject is instrument making, it sheds light on an enigmatic aspect of craftsmanship which involves extracting proportions and measurements from the rotation of regular polyhedra.
François Denis, Traite de Lutherie, 2006.
Those who are intrigued to find the ramifications of neo-Pythagorean thought still at work will find in this section reflections on some of the specific themes which underpin the book.
François work clearly demonstrated the consistency from Stradivari all the way back to Andrea Amati’s original designs, and having established his work through an analysis of the existing Stradivari moulds in the Musée de la Musique in Paris, and the Museo del Violino in Cremona, he was able to show how it was present in it’s purest form in the surviving works of Andrea Amati. For everything that François has explained about neo-Pythagorean thought, the rotation of regular polyhedra and the other ramifications of classical architecture, we find ourselves returning to the same ideas that I have expressed in terms of both Vida and Michelangelo as archetypes of a system of thought that existed in the early sixteenth century.
There are elements to violin design that share a problem of any kind of very perfectly designed object, in which we can constantly throw theories at an individual instrument that may be seen to work well. This is the curse of things that are also very beautiful to the eye, indeed François Denis was able to show the profoundly different approaches to the architecture of the violin in Brescia that are incompatible with Cremonese thought (the Cremonese saw the interior shape as sacred, whilst the Brescians designed the overall external outline as architecture), so that even though the instruments ostensibly look the same, one system is incompatible with the other. This helps us to understand why a myriad of other experiments that seem to be fruitful in explaining violin design may not be, for it is the successful replication of a single geometric schema over different shapes and sizes of Cremonese instruments that provides the proof of a consistent set of architectural rules. More recently, my dear friend Harry Mairson has viewed the formula and variables that François Denis discovered and it dawned on him that the geometrical sequence could be expressed as a line of simple computer code. It was my pleasure to invite him over to England and the Ashmolean Museum to demonstrate his Digital Amati system to members of the BVMA. Just like François’ discoveries, this has also proved of incredible value to modern violin making in terms of creating new ideas as well as allowing us to understand the genesis of old ideas more clearly. The system allows for precision and prototyping of numerical adjustments to different forms without ever going outside of Amati’s classically derived formula. Evidently derived as a response to from the knowledge of de Architectura that was probably only possible after the vulgate translation of 1516. My blog on the artistic milieu surrounding Andrea is helpful in contextualising this.
Although the violin existed as far back as the 1490s, I think we can be persuasive in saying that no one had seen anything quite like Amati’s form in terms of proportional perfection and this is especially important when we imagine seeing the King Charles IX set, a whole orchestra of small and large violins, tenor and contralto violas and bass violins, all congruent and coherent to one and other despite their size. We are probably seeing a spectacle to the eye, which was as architecturally as profound as their intended musical use.
As with the naturalistic statue of Michelangelo’s David the mathematical beauty can be difficult to fathom. Although we know that the Kanon of Polykleitos presents a formula for the idealised classical form, efforts by Renaissance artists and modern scholars have so far failed to convince themselves that they have understood it properly, but this doesn’t prevent Leonardo, Michelangelo and many others from producing beautiful things out of regard for what they think it may be. We are probably aware of the many geometrical systems that are habitually thrown at the face of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, whether or not they have any relevance to his intended schema, likewise we see ideas as far-fetched as the superimposition of the violin form onto pentagrams or onto Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man which may say something about the universal nature of beautiful form, but fall short of the detailed interrogation of the architectural and proportional intentions of the maker. I mention this in order explain the number of alternative experiments that circulate, and also to say that as with Bagatella, or more recently Kevin Coates’ beautiful work on Geometry, Proportion and the Art of Lutherie, that is now tragically difficult to obtain, for even if they do not explain how things are engineered, they help the eye to understand the beauty of what it can see, which is a vastly important exercise for the violin maker who wants to produce objects that are inherently beautiful.
What the English say…
My regular readers josh at me for my ability to get an English reference into a work on an Italian subject, but I find these precious because if they are successfully done, they help to emphasise the depth of reach that these instruments enjoyed across Europe, but before writing my conclusions about Amati, I am drawn to a few comments that offer an idea of the reception of Cremonese violins within a classical ideology, and equally how much the ideas I am espousing were more obvious to the Renaissance mindset.
So as not to disappoint, here to begin with is John Milton, the great English poet and author of Paradise Lost based his work on the Garden of Eden not on the Ænid but through the Lens of Vida’s Christiad, and so anyone who has heard of Vida in anglophone literary circles shall have because of the commentary on one of the celebrated greatest poets of the English language. Amongst his other works, The Passion was published in 1645 as a purposefully unfinished work: This Subject the Author finding to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfi’d with what was begun, left it unfinisht.‘ offering a Protestant response to the Roman Catholic Christiad, to which he gives the following lines:
Loud o’er rest Cremona’s Trump doth sound;
Me softer airs befit, and softer strings
Of Lute, or Viol still, more apt for mournful things.
To those of us who know about instruments, Cremona’s Trump, in binary opposition to the softer airs of the viol and lute is a clear allusion to the violin, and an important reference for Cremonese and English history of the reception of Cremonese works. Milton’s connections in the English court may have influenced a reference to the Cremona violins that we know existed through the receipts of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, or from witnessing the French-style four-and-twenty fiddlers instituted in the reign of Charles I.
31 January 1637/8
* This is the first receipt from the English court that definitively records the purchase of a Cremonese violin, from the Lord Chamberlain to the Treasury of the Chamber, although the values for violins expressed in earlier receipts suggest that this was not the first purchase. George and Innocent Comey ‘of Cremona’ were amongst the Italian string players who entered the court of Henry VIII a century earlier in 1538/40.
Warrant to pay £12 to Mr. John Woodington for a Cremona violin to play to the organ, upon the certificate of Mr. Nicholas Lanier.
As a literary allusion, this is just as likely than a personal reflection on his experiences during his travels in Italy, because the symbolism had to be relevant to a broader readership than the author alone. Literary scholars take a different view of this, as a direct acknowledgement of Vida and a clarification of the difference between the two epics, The Christiad and The Passion. (For the hypothesis that the viol gains popularity in England in response to the Protestant reformation, this is one of the pieces of evidence that supports that theory – the reality of course, is never so simple). Cremona’s Trump sets Vida’s achievement and his literary reception in full perspective. Of course, the complexity of the allusion is that both interpretations were there to be found by the learned reader, reinforce each other, and perceive some kind of parallel between the two. Milton, on his travels met Galileo in Bologna in 1638. His letters to Fra Fulgentius Micanzio in Venice and thence calling on the advice of Claudio Monteverdi just the year earlier are one of the few first hand assessments of the Italian reputation of Cremona violins recorded. [I never imagined I would write positively about Trump, and apologise to my readers for whatever offence the perception may have caused]. Milton is not unique within the greats to equate the Cremona violin with a classical reference, and in turning to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), I realise rather belatedly in writing this blog, how comprehensively it fits with every argument that I have put forward, before literary criticism turned against Vida. There is no line of poetry that could more perfectly express the connections I am trying to make.
But see! each Muse, in Leo’s Golden Days,
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1711.
Starts from her Trance, and trims her wither’d Bays!
Rome‘s ancient Genius, o’er its Ruins spread,
Shakes off the Dust, and rears his rev’rend Head!
Then Sculpture and her Sister-Arts revive;
Stones leap’d to Form, and Rocks began to live;
With sweeter Notes each rising Temple rung;
A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung!
Immortal Vida! on whose honour’d Brow
The Poet’s Bays and Critick’s Ivy grow:
Cremona now shall ever boast thy Name,
As next in Place to Mantua, next in Fame!
Pope’s remarks fall short of invoking the invention of the violin, but there is another reference from Pope’s close friend, Jonathan Swift. Mark Anthony’s defeat of the conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar – Brutus and Cassius in 54BC at the battle of Philippi. Following the victory, the veterans of the victorious army were awarded lands confiscated first from Cremona and towards nearby Mantua. Cremona suffered the greatest because of it’s strategic position as a crossing point over the River Po, which meant that by the time the veteran army had reached Mantua, the reparations were almost complete. Nevertheless, Virgil’s family lost their farm in the countryside outside the walls, but Mantua was saved from the depravations suffered by the people of Cremona. … how on earth does this have any relevance to the violin… well you may ask…
The events are referred to in one of the autobiographical Eclogue I of Virgil. Sometime before 1719 (when I think the anecdote was first published), a lady wearing the fashionable dress of the time swept a violin off a chair. Upon seeing it smashed on the ground, Swift exclaimed a line from Virgil to express his sorrow for the loss of his family’s estate: Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ! (Mantua, too close to unfortunate Cremona!). This bizarre twist (it was republished an unbelievable amount of times in the eighteenth century suggesting a kind of mirth that merely serves to demonstrate how our sense of humour has changed over the centuries), helping to reconcile the idea behind this blog that in the minds of the 17th and 18th century literary greats of England, somehow Amati and the Cremona violin fit into this whole mix of Vida, Virgil, Raphael and Michelangelo.
