Violin, Brescian school, ca. Ex coll.: Bisiach, Milan. Witten-Rawlins Collection, 1984. Skins para fl studio 20. This violin, possibly made in the northern Italian city of Brescia, has geometric inlay on the back and a carved lion at the top of neck, in place of the conventional scroll and pegbox. It’s based on a large tenor viola by the 16th century Brescian maker Gasparo da Salo. The original viola is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. I’ve rescaled the viola to a slightly smaller and more comfortable size then the original, and I pay a lot of attention to keeping the. Gasparo di Bertolotti, commonly known as Gasparro da Salo, was born in Salo, a suburb of Brescia, in Lombardy, Northern Italy, about the year 1542. He is the first great maker of violins of whom we have any record. Violins were undoubtedly made prior to his time, but owing to.
Stradivarius Violins • Antonio Stradivari
There have been hundreds if not thousands of great violin makers throughout the centuries. Here are five of the most famous early violin makers who have contributed important innovations to the art of violin making.
Gasparo da Salo (1540-1609)
Born in Salo Italy, Gasparo da Salo is credited for turning the manufacture of bowed instruments into an art. He produced many grand double-basses and violas, which were considered the foundation of Italian violin-making. Although he did not found the Brescian school, he became the head and rose to prominence within his lifetime.
Gasparo Da Salo Violin
Andrea Amati (1520-1611)
Born around 1520, Amati began a dynasty of master luthiers and founded the violin-making school of Cremona. There is not enough evidence to support when or where he received his training; however it is suggested that he learned his trade from Gasparo da Salo. Perhaps the finest instruments by Andrea Amati were twenty-four violins, six tenors and eight basses he made for Charles IX. The National Music Museum owns The King, the worlds oldest extant cello made by Andrea Amati. The museum also owns Amatis 1560 viola, 1560 violin and 1574 violin.
Caspar Da Salo Violin
Nicolo (Nicolaus) Amati (1596-1684)
Museum Violin Da Salon
The grandson of Andreas Amati, Nicolo was the most talented violin-maker of his family. He was responsible for developing a grand pattern, wider than his predecessors violins. The new pattern also featured pronounced corner points. Some believe that Nicolo Amati taught the great Antonio Stradivari, however there is little evidence to prove this theory. He did have many pupils including Jacob Railich, Bartolomeo Pasta, Bartolomeo Cristofori, Giacomo Gennaro, and Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri (1698-1744)
The grandson of Andrea Guarneri, he was the most famous member of the Guarneri Family of violin makers in Cremona, Italy. His violins always had good tone, although they were not as elegant as Stradivaris designs. His violins featured longer, less refined versions of Stradivaris f-holes. Still, he is considered the only rival to Stradivari and many musicians covet his violins over Stradivaris work. It is estimated that he handcrafted around 250 violins, 150 of which survive today.
Carlo Bergonzi (1683-1747)
Bergonzi was another great violin maker from Cremona, Italy and one of the last to use its beautiful varnish. His violins featured the perfect combination of Stradivari and Guarneri designs including carefully carved scrolls, elegant edge-work and precisely cut f-holes. He was also inspired by del Gesus strong, flat arching. He handcrafted his best instruments from 1730 to 1740.
Little is known of the independent work of Francesco Bertolotti, the son of Gaspar (see part 1) and one of the makers active during the second Brescian school. Although he took over the workshop after his father’s death in 1609, there is only one label of his recorded, in the back of a tenor viola that has been considerably modified. He was completely overshadowed by his father’s apprentice Giovanni Paolo Maggini, who joined them in about 1595, when Francesco was already aged 30.
The almost illegible label of Francesco Bertolotti ‘da Salò’ in a tenor viola. Photo: Chi-Mei Museum
Maggini was born in 1580 in Botticino Sera, in the outskirts of Brescia, and gained all his early experience with his master, Gaspar ‘da Salò’. He left the workshop in 1609 to establish his own business in Contrada del Palazzo Vecchio del Podesta, moving to the Bombaserie in San Agata in about 1622, directly in competition with Francesco. His wedding in 1615 was witnessed by Giacomo Lafranchini, his fellow apprentice with Gaspar, who seems to have joined Maggini in his new shop. In 1626 he informed the notary that he had an employee to whom he paid a salary of 300 lire (about $1,500 today), who was presumably Lanfranchini.
Maggini’s output consists almost entirely of instruments of the violin family, which evidently by this date had established their popularity in Italy. Violas both of tenor and contralto size, violins also in two sizes, cellos and basses are known, and Maggini seems to have been fairly prolific. It is often hard to distinguish between his work and that of Gaspar, complicated by the lack of label dates, but this suggests that Maggini’s may have been the dominant hand in the making of violin family instruments in the Gaspar workshop. His technique is altogether more consistent than Gaspar’s, although pure, unrestored instruments from which to observe his methods are very rare.