It would have been very interesting to have heard of results after
further trials by the same experimenters upon upper or lower tables of
violins by now not very much less celebrated makers, who, although of
the same class or school, were living--for those times--far away from
the central luminary of the Cremonese art. What would have been said of
Montagnana of Venice? a star of the first magnitude, curiously near in
quality and quantity to the great centre to which he was willing to pay
obeisance and throw out a reflected light; of Gobetti, perhaps more
"Straddy" than any other Italian, Gofrilleri, Seraphino, two or three of
the Tononis, besides other lights of lesser magnitude, with exceedingly
fine qualities, but perhaps open to the charge of intermittency.
Further, several of the Milanese school,--offshoots of the Amati and
Stradivari,--of Lorenzo Guadagnini, a master of his art in all its
details, if ever there was one, his son Joannes Battista, steadier in
his working, but more uncertain in his results--shifting from place to
place, may have had some connection with this--and the occasionally fine
artificers of the same place, Landolfi, the Grancinos and Testores and
later on Balestrieri of Mantua and Storioni of Cremona. These men,
always good, and when circumstances were favourable, great in their art,
often grand in their individuality and power, were, by these modern
scientific interrogators placed aside or quietly ignored, apparently
either as unworthy of their recognition, or of such inferior renown as
not to come within the scope of their investigations.
A close and searching inquiry into the causes that enabled different
masters of their art to bring about the desirable end of their labours,
that of imparting a distinct quality and individuality of tone, might
have enabled them to get at least a hint as to the means whereby
Stradivari gratified the tastes of his patrons at the time and
connoisseurs in general of the present day. As indicated before, the
Venetian masters were--probably by the same means--able to put before
their patrons that kind of tone most in agreement with the luxurious
surroundings of the Venetian nobility, or offered and found acceptable
to the musical public generally there.
A prolonged, earnest examination of the peculiarities of tone attached
to the violins of the makers of the chief seats of violin making, has
led to the inference that the difference in kind or degree was not from
individual choice, but chiefly owing to outside influence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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