Nicolo Amati, the third generation of the illustrious Amati instrument makers, must have begun to assume a leadership role in the family workshop by the early 1620s. His rise was interrupted by the plague epidemic of 1629-1630, the worst mortality crisis of the early modern period in Italy, which took the lives of as much as 30 to 35% of the population in Northern Italy.¹  Read more…

Prior to 1701 the Stradivari workshop built cellos of large dimensions, in keeping with standards that had been established and sustained in Cremona by the Amati family for three generations. Only a few of the large form Amati cellos have survived unaltered. Of the 25 pre-1702 Stradivari cellos known today, only the “Medici” (1690) now residing in the Instituto Cherubini of Florence, the “Castelbarco” (1697), housed at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., and the “Servais” (1701) at the Smithsonian remain intact with their original dimensions. Read more…

To fully appreciate the exquisite instrument shown here, it is instructive to go back to the dawn of the Amati violin-building tradition, believed to be sometime around 1525¹ although a more precise date has so far remained elusive. Prior to the counter-reformations of the Council of Trent implemented from 1563², church records did not routinely include births, deaths and marriages, making it difficult to verify the dates of key historical events. From legal documents in the Cremona archives we know that Andrea Amati (c. 1505-1577³), the patriarch of the Amati instrument-building dynasty, leased a large residence with a workshop and prominent storefront in Cremona in 1538–39.⁴ From this we infer that the Amati atelier was already well established and thriving by 1538. Read more…

François-Nicolas Voirin (1833-1885) was perhaps the most important French bow maker of the second half of the 19th century. After an apprenticeship in his hometown of Mirecourt with Jean Simon (a relative of the more famous Pierre Simon), Voirin moved to Paris in 1855 to join the workshop of his cousin, J.B. Vuillaume. Read more…