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A Violin by the Brothers Amati
Cremona, 1624
Of all the violin making families of the classical period of Italian violin making, the Amati family of Cremona is the most important. Andrea Amati (born before 1511, died 1577) is the earliest maker of violins from whom we have surviving instruments, and may have invented the present form of the instrument.
His sons, usually called the Brothers Amati (Antonio, c1540-1607, and Hieronymus, c1561-1630), forming the next generation, advanced and solidified the design of the modern violin. Their successor Nicolo (1596-1684) is the only survivor of a bottleneck in early violin history and without him the violin might not even presently exist. Further, Nicolo himself trained members of the major families working in the golden period of Cremonese-style violin making, including the Rogeri, Pasta, Gennaro, Guarneri, Christofori (the inventor of the modern piano action), and probably provided advice to the young Stradivari and Francesco Rugeri, too. Nicolo's son, Hieronymus II (1649-1740) lived past Antonio Stradivari, into the years of the decline of violin making in Cremona. In a very real sense, the history of Cremonese violin making is the history of the Amati family.
The violin illustrated here is a full-sized Brothers Amati violin which shows the influence of Nicolo, who would have been a young but experienced maker at the time it was made. Antonio was long gone, and Hieronymus had continued running the shop under the brand and label of the Brothers Amati--a somewhat mysterious situation, given that the two brothers had dissolved their formal partnership decades before, under what appear on the surface to be unfriendly circumstances. If the date of this violin is correct, in only six years Nicolo's father would be dead along with most his family. Nicolo would be the only violin maker in Italy to have survived the various waves of the plague that were sweeping through Italy in 1629-1631, and the new head of the family survivors, with new responsibilities.
The 1620s, though, are a particularly auspicious time in the Amati shop, the result of which is a relatively large number of instruments of the desirable large size that's now considered normal, combining the Brothers' superior model and arching with Nicolo's inspiration and workmanship. Consequently, these instruments are of a quality that genuinely rivals Stradivari's of 100 years later. When connoisseurs speak of "Amati influence" on other makers, such as Cappa, the various Venetians, and Amati copyists in other countries including the Low Countries and England, they refer to the instruments made after the Brothers Amati style and model.
Unlike many of the later violins by Nicolo, the arching of these is not the radically-scooped type that has given the name Amati a bad tonal reputation. The Brothers' violins are often boldly arched, not excessively high, and relatively full to the edges, similar in concept to the slightly-lower arching of the late Stradivari violins, which are respected for their power and brightness, and not unlike the concept of late Guadagnini violins, with their even lower arching and less tonal subtlety. This is a characteristic the Brothers Amati shared with their neighbor Brescian contemporaries, Gasparo da Salo (Bertolotti) and Gian Paolo Maggini, whose archings were even fuller than the Cremonese. After these makers, there was a lapse of 60 years before Stradivari rediscovered the tonal power of this type of arch for his long pattern model. Even then, this advance was not universally appreciated, nor consistently applied: both Joseph Guarneri del Gesu and Stradivari lapsed, in certain periods, into a form of arching that was widely hollowed around the edges (combined with a lower total arch height than Nicolo Amati's), and these instruments are not usually recognized as their best works, tonally.
This instrument, which we sold to violinist Frank Almond and is featured on his own website, is a beautiful example of that most effective of all Amati models, a bold, large form with strong arching, and is an exquisite concert-quality violin.