Preface – Tim Ingles

In 2005, to mark the publication of Four Centuries of Violin Making, we commissioned John Dilworth to write an article about the history and development of the violin. Sixteen years later, we are making the instruments featured in the book available online as part of a significantly expanded online archive of highlights from Sotheby’s and Ingles & Hayday’s auctions and private sales.  By the end of 2021 the archive will feature more than 1,000 instruments by 400 makers. To mark this launch, we are publishing John’s article in six segments over the next three weeks.

So it was in the 18^th century when English gentlemen finished their education with the ‘Grand Tour’. This European adventure, intended to acquaint the young men of the aristocracy with the customs and traditions of the Continent, seems to have had its main purpose in the acquisition of adornments for their stately homes. Among the most sought-after trophies were Canaletto paintings and Amati violins from Cremona.

The localised development of such technically and artistically refined objects usually depends on quirks of geography — raw materials and skills handed down within a small community — or, less often, on the effort of a single originating genius. Both these conditions apply to the Italian violin.

The violin itself was to all intents and purposes an Italian invention; the template for the instrument as we recognise it today was probably first laid out some time in the mid-16^th century by Andrea Amati of Cremona, the original genius of the violin. Whereas Canaletto was the product of an existing and already highly evolved artistic environment, we know little of Andrea Amati’s background.

Documentary and iconographical sources trace the violin itself back as far as 1520, by which time Amati, who was born about 1505, was probably already being trained as an instrument maker. His labels are recorded from 1542, although these early instruments have not survived. Amati’s teacher was probably Giovanni Leonardo da Martinengo, a Jewish convert to Catholicism living in the relatively liberal city of Cremona.

There is a great deal of speculation over the form and development of the early violin. A clue to the instrument’s evolution from the medieval rebec and fiddle, and the then-current viola da braccia, is provided by the frescoes of Gaudenzio Ferrari in the cathedral of Saronno (north-west of Cremona), dated to circa 1535, and his Madonna of the Orange Trees in the church of Vercelli (west of Cremona), dated 1529-30. But there is no surviving identifiable precedent for the exquisitely refined instruments that Amati made to the commission of Charles IX of France and Pope Pius V from about 1566 onward. Technically, he may have added a fourth string to a louder, outdoor cousin of the viol that was intended to accompany dance music. Artistically, he changed everything.

Each detail of Andrea’s surviving violins, violas and cellos is fashioned with an artist’s eye. Bowed instruments of any sort from this period have an ad hoc appearance, however charming they may now seem. Amati’s brilliance raised the status of the violin from a farmhand’s entertainment to an embellishment fit for a royal court. Nor was his design merely cosmetic; it was a masterful demonstration of woodworking skills, subtly engineered to provide a delicate yet strong, resonant, and above all, durable object.

For nearly two hundred years, the Amati family preserved the precise methods and techniques laid down by Andrea — a process largely unknown to the growing numbers of violin makers outside Cremona. In Venice, Bologna and Brescia, various makers contributed their interpretation of the newly popular instrument, but none had a design or a technique as refined as Amati’s.