The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Ep 15 Nicolo Amati part 2 The violin that almost wasn’t

 In this episode of “the Violin Chronicles”, we delve into the life and legacy of Nicolo Amati, a name synonymous with the exquisite craftsmanship of violins. Beyond his unparalleled contributions to the world of music, Nicolo Amati's life was marked by profound tragedy during the devastating 1630 bubonic plague that swept through Europe. Join us as we unravel the remarkable tale of a man who not only mastered the art of violin-making but also found strength in the face of unbearable loss.
Nicolo Amati hailed from a renowned family of luthiers, and his violins are celebrated for their delicate craftsmanship and unparalleled tonal quality. Yet, amidst the acclaim and admiration, lies a harrowing chapter of his life that shaped his artistry and resilience.
In this episode, we explore the remarkable transformation of Nicolo Amati, who channeled his grief into creating some of the most exquisite violins the world has ever seen. We delve into the technical brilliance that characterized his work, as well as the emotional depth and resonance of the instruments he crafted during this tumultuous period.
Through the lens of history and musicology, we uncover how Nicolo Amati's journey through tragedy not only preserved the art of violin-making but also enriched it, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire musicians and craftsmen to this day.
Join us as we pay tribute to the indomitable spirit of Nicolo Amati, a master craftsman who found hope and redemption amidst the shadows of a devastating pandemic, leaving us with a priceless musical inheritance that transcends time and tragedy.
Tune in to “The Violin Chronicles” for an insightful exploration of Nicolo Amati's life, artistry, and resilience during the 1630 bubonic plague, a story of triumph over adversity that resonates through the ages.
Transcript
 Have you ever heard someone say, this is an Amati Violin?  And you've thought, Ooh, wow, that must be old. And then they say, it's a Girolamo Amati or a Nicolo Amati or an Andrea Amati. But by this time, if you're anything like me, you're lost and your mind is wondering, and you can't remember which one of those Amatis it's supposed to be. Is it the grandfather or one of the brothers? Is this the Amati that's supposed to be worth more than the others? And if so, is it the right period in his making? And it is. In the end, you just settle for, it's an Amati and the rest will stay in the murky swamp of information you can't quite remember.
Well, no more, because hopefully by now, if you've been following these episodes in order, because they are in chronological order, you will know that we are now at Nicolo Amati, Andreas grandchild, Girolamo's son, the golden boy.  So stick around and we'll see together how a devastating pandemic pushed one to transform the world of violin making.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt.  As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to another episode in which we will be looking at perhaps the most famous maker of the Amati family, Nicolo. So far I have spoken about the grandfather, Andrea, and his father and uncle, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati, the brothers. And now Nicolo Amati continues on with the family tradition by making fine instruments and waiting for middle age to get married and have a family. Except in Nicolo's case, things are quite a bit more dramatic for himself and his family, as you will see in this episode. 
They were at it again, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, and the Piedmontese, fighting over who got what in yet another war, except this time, soldiers managed to spread the Black Death, and in 1628, Cremona was badly hit. Troops passing through, as they always did. to cross the Po River, were carrying and all too willing to spread the disease.  This time it was the French and German troops that brought the illness with them and the effects were devastating.  The plague was so deadly in this part of Italy in the years surrounding 1630 that it would have very nearly killed every violin maker in the city. This was indeed the case in Brescia where Maggini was working, bringing an end to the instrument makers there. And the history of the violin could have been very different if it were not for the genetically robust and freakishly lucky Nicolo Amati. Well, maybe not so lucky, as most of his friends and family died. But at least lucky not to die, and lucky for us, because thanks to Nicolo Amati’s survival, we have the violin that we do today.  So what happened? Well, there was a war. The War of the Mantuan Succession. This was the war James Beck was talking about in a previous episode where everyone decided to invade Mantua after their Duke died, and there was a bit of a hoo ha about who it belonged to now. It was basically a war between the French and the Spanish about a highway.  News from Milan was that people were falling ill with the bubonic plague and the city was quarantined.  But over the carnival season, as you do, they loosened the restrictions and the disease took off again, spreading like wildfire. 60, 000 people would die in Milan, a city with a population of 130, 000. Things weren't much better in Cremona. In the autumn of 1630, Nicolo Amati’s father, Girolamo Amati, died, and soon after his mother followed by two of his sisters and other members of the family.
Benjamin Hebert, expert and dealer in Oxford, talks about how the plague spread and made its way to Cremona.
And one of the things that we learn about with the Amatis is the plague, which wipes out the brothers Amati. It's Girolamo Amati who survives until 1613, dies in the plague. All of the Brescian makers die in the plague. And actually, we talk about the plague as if it's one thing, like COVID has been over the last few years, but actually that plague was a result of Wars in Europe, where the Austrians  Who are the Habsburgs, so Naples at the bottom of Italy, and they wanted to get their troops up through Cremona into Italy itself so that they could then go over to Austria to support, because actually more than troops, food to supply the troops from Naples is really important. So the French invade northern Italy.  Northern Italy, in order to stop this supply line from the, from the south, and it's that huge change in population, which creates plague after plague, and also suffering, and a scarcity of resources because the army is there and Cremona is just the middle of a war zone. It's, it's one of the most important crossings  connecting  the two parts of the Habsburg Empire. 
So the plague comes to town in 1630 and Discretion is not its middle name. But the city it hit was not the thriving Cremona that Andrea Amati and the brothers Amati had grown up in. By now, it was a city that was in a vulnerable and weakened state. It just wasn't going so well. We find Nicolo in his late 20s, working with his aging father in their family workshop. I spoke to John Gagne about the curious circumstances leading up to the devastating plague, and to understand what was going on, we have to zoom out and take a look at the big picture.
I'm John Gagné. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries.  The big context to put this all in is what scholars call the Little Ice Age, which starts in the 1550s.  And this is in one way the catalyst for all of these events. The plague, the famine, the war, is that it's temperatures began dropping from the 1550s forward probably caused by a variety of environmental factors. It could have been, you know, the explosion of South Pacific volcanoes, which changed the global environmental pattern. It could have been, you know, changes to the jet stream. Whatever it was, it meant that Europe from the 1550s forward became colder than it had been in a thousand years. And this was, I think, the context against which all of these things were set, was that Europe was becoming colder and all the knowledge that had been built up for agriculture and disease prevention was now faced with a new problem, which was that things were collapsing. So in many ways, it does echo the world we inhabit today, where we're encountering more bushfires and more floods. They were encountering a similar, although different, different phenomenon in reality, but it was leading to grain failures, to, you know, crop failures, to animals giving, you know, less milk or producing offspring at different paces. And so the Little Ice Age just lasts until the 19th century,  is part of the the big context of the sort of crisis that emerges around 1600, which is how do you support life in Europe when the environment is changing around you? 
So we have climate change, pandemics, famine, it's starting to sound familiar, but ultimately things were not looking good for the citizens of Cremona at this point. How did the plague affect the lives of  Cremonese people in the early  17th century? 
So I guess the first thing to say is that the plague had been around, you know, for hundreds of years already and recurred frequently. So the, in northern Italy in particular, there had been a rise in plague from the 1570s. So there's the the so called Plague of San Carlo. In Milan, which is 1577- 78.  The next big one was, you know, 60 years later in the 1630 plague. And that was even more catastrophic in terms of loss of life. Many of the, you know, Milan in particular lost a huge, a large portion of its population. And much of the rest of Northern Italy was, was badly affected too. I think there was a lot of death in Turin, in Venice, so across the sort of flatlands at the foothills of the Alps. It was, it was really traumatic. And that comes on top of a number of other factors. Famine that had started in the 1590s. So I think in a way the plague, Was attacking an already vulnerable population that had been suffering from a food crisis in the, in the 50, for several decades already.
So how did the plague affect, you know, Cremona was just what they didn't need because everyone was already sort of teetering on the edge of a, of a demographic crisis.
The plague of 1630 was a dark chapter in the history of Cremona. The city was one of many in Europe that was decimated by the outbreak, and its residents suffered greatly as a result.  The streets of the city were deserted, grass was even starting to grow on people's doorsteps.  No one dared to wander out unnecessarily, and when a family member fell ill, they knew that they might very well be next. At the height of the outbreak, the streets of Cremona were eerily quiet, as many of its residents had either fled or fallen ill.  Those who remained behind were forced to confront the horrors of the disease, watching helplessly as friends, family and neighbours fell victim to the deadly illness.  When Niccolo's brother in law started feeling unwell, the illness hit him so fast they had to send for the solicitor during the night to dictate his will. He died a few hours later.  So also did two of his sons, Nicolo's nephews. When Elizabeth, his eldest sister, wanted to make her will, the solicitor refused to enter the house, so they had to dictate to him standing in the street for fear of the disease.  She would eventually survive and recover, but her husband would not. The city's economy was brought to a standstill as trade and commerce came to a halt and many businesses closed their doors. The people of Cremona faced severe shortages of food and medicinal supplies, and many struggled to find the resources they needed to survive.  And yet, despite the tragedy, in his family, Nicolo continued to make lovely instruments during this period.  The likelihood of him selling them straight away would have been slim, but this was of little importance, he could always sell them in the future.
That's a bit like us, we were just making violins during the pandemic.
Unfortunately for the people of Northern Italy, the plague was not something new to them, to the point that they had systems in place for just this kind of event. But even the authorities could not have anticipated the power of this particular pathogen. Just to have an idea, Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague, has a mortality rate 200 times higher than that of COVID.
John Gagney. 
This part of Italy was a, you know, economic hub of Europe. There's a lot of movement between, you know, Tradespeople pilgrims, that sort of thing. And interestingly, Northern Italy was in fact a European leader in terms of plague prevention. So there were strong measures in place for sanitary passes, for access to, you know, getting in and out of cities, for transit, all the kinds of things that we've had during COVID. It was, a lot of those things were generated in. this part of Europe between the 14th century and the 17th century.
Yeah, because the word quarantine is a Venetian word for the 40 days that the ships had to wait before coming into the port. Yes. To see that they had, didn't have a, was it the plague? Yes. And in fact, that's, that's one of the first measures just as we went into lockdown in March, 2020. In 1630, when the plague was discovered, much of northern Italy went into a form of lockdown, all the way from Florence up to the foothills of the Alps. Successively, obviously not at the same time, but as it was discovered, many of the cities went into 40 day quarantine. But as we know from our own experiences, that doesn't always, that's not a fail safe. And so it was only partially successful. So we're talking about something that Europeans were familiar with. Plague was never out of people's minds. In fact, if, you know, if you look through any of the centuries, the 15th century, the 16th century, the 17th century, and you look at any city in Europe, you're going to see recurrent patterns of plague over the course of, you know, could be two to three years.
It could be 15 to 30 years, but it's there. It's always percolating in the background.  Okay, and so, in this particular bout of plague, a lot of people associate it with the, the Mantuan War of Succession, which brought soldiers from France and Germany, I believe.  Yes. So in Spain, I suppose the, the, the broader context here is the 30 years war and maybe even the bigger, broader context in which the 30 years war fits is this ongoing European struggle between France and Spain, which had been going on since, you know, at least the 14th century had lasted through the 16th century in the Italian wars. We've talked, you and I have talked about before. And. Yeah. through transformations into the, into the 70th century was still lasting.  The French and the Spaniards were still battling over control of Italy, and it was inflected in addition by Protestant Catholic conflicts. And that's, you know, the story of the Thirty Years War is a mixture of this political battle for dominance in Europe with a Protestant Catholic contest.
In 1618, the Thirty Years War is launched by a dispute between the Holy Roman Emperor, who was a Habsburg, and the Kingdom of Bohemia, which were Czech Protestant people.  That led to conflict, and that conflict kept going for 30 years. Hence the creatively named Thirty Years War. So, but within those 30 years, of course, there are all kinds of subsidiary The story of the War of Mantua and Succession is interesting. Mantua was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, so it belonged in theory to the Habsburgs, but had been an ally of France. at least since the 15th century. So this always put the Mantuan rulers at an unusual position because they were technically they owed their allegiance to the empire, but they had also married into the French aristocracy. So from the 15th century, the Mantuan rulers There are Gonzaga elites. That's the ruling house of Mantua, the Gonzaga family. Many of the Gonzagas married into French aristocratic families, including the Bourbon family, which, as we know, became the sort of, the dynasty from Henry IV in the 16, early 1600s forward. So that put the Mantuans kind of at the crossroads between these two warring kingdoms of France and Spain. And so what happens in the War of Mantuan succession in the late 1620s, Is that the last of the Gonzaga heirs dies,  and both France and Spain claim to want to have the next  So there is a kind of subsidiary Gonzaga who puts himself forward. There are, you know, there are all kinds of lower branches of that family. And so one of the lower branches says, I should go, I should inherit the the duchy. Whereas the Habsburg emperor has a candidate of his own who he And so the War of Mantua Succession breaks out because this can't be agreed in the, by the diplomats. And so they go to war over who will be installed as the next Duke of Mantua.  This, of course, brings, brings soldiers from all over Europe, from the south of France, from Germany. up from other parts of Italy. It doesn't last that long. It's sort of like an 18 month, two year struggle. But it does, especially at a moment when the plague is, this is 1629 1630, right? So it's right at this moment when the when the plague is afoot. It's, you know, exacerbates the transmission of plague, most likely. That seems to be the theory of many scholars that this, you know, the conflict leads to further transmission. Yeah, because of all the, like, the to ing and fro ing and coming from different areas. Yeah.  So Cremona is minding its own business. They are already stretched for resources. Next door everyone appears to be fighting for Mantua, but to get there they all seem to pass through Cremona. This would have been fine for the Amatis if the soldiers were picking up violins on their way to war, but instead they just brought gems.
The other thing to say about the War of Mantuan Succession is that the toing and froing was also very much a part of what's going on in Milan as a hub of commerce. So sort of Mantua belongs to  Lombardy, which is part of the Duchy of Milan. All the Duchy of Milan belongs to the Habsburgs. So Mantua, you know, it's all subsidiary to the Spanish crown, basically the Spanish Austrian crown. And this part of Europe. Mantua, Milan, Genoa is part of what's called the Spanish Road, which is the hub of transit for soldier movement and money movement to fund the war effort. You know, already it's part of this kind of axis. It's a very strategic location. So, you know, the War of Mantuan Secession in a way takes place in the, at the crossroads of an already very busy part of Europe. And, you know, throw into this an increasing, you know, sort of demographic Challenge from a famine in the 1590s, the plague that's circulating in the 1630s, and the war that then breaks out. It becomes a kind of perfect recipe for demographic, yeah, perfect storm for demographic collapse.
Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's a very important city for the Spanish, but then I can imagine, I mean,  I was imagining being French and you're feeling a bit of a squeeze because you've got the Spanish, they're down the south, they've taken that bit of Italy, they tried to get England with with Philip, Mary, Mary, but that was before.
They've gone over to the Netherlands, they've almost completely,  encircled France, haven't they? The Spanish. So they're probably feeling quite threatened. Like in there, there's that one, that door in Mantua that they don't, that was traditionally allied with France.
Yes. I think this was the concern of the French and many other European states. I mean, what you described is exactly correct. Spain. The Hapsburg Spain was on the rise in the 16th century in a spectacular way. I mean, there had been a Spanish presence in Europe before, but this was immense, largely due to the success of Emperor Charles V in the first half of the 16th century, who was one of those rare emperors who inherits kind of everything in Europe. He was both king of the Spanish kingdoms and Holy Roman Emperor, was also the emperor who was  seated when The Americas were brought into the Spanish crown. So, you know, his was the empire, the original empire in which the sun never set. And I think that concerned a lot of Europeans. So  France felt itself being encircled, but also other parts of Europe were watching the Habsburg rise with trepidation because they knew that, you know, it was going to be possibly a complete domination of Europe by, by Spain. In fact, I would say by the, by the late 16th century, it effectively was a complete European domination by Spain. 
And there was just this like, I can imagine from the Spanish point of view, there was this annoying France just in the middle of it. Like, it's like literally this big blob in the middle of there, what they'd conquered all around.
Now, amidst the stress of death and disease, something quite extraordinary happens. Nicolo Amati makes a violin and places an Amati Brothers label in it. It's a different model to the ones he has been previously making. He conceived a slightly wider soundboard than what they had been making before, the corners being a tad longer and turning just a little bit more. In his experiment to improve on sound and design, he created his grand pattern violin. Whether Nicola realised it or not, this was a turning point in the design of the violin and its future.
I speak to Carlo Chiesa, violin maker in Milan and prolific writer and researcher on many different violin makers. If you look in the front of a lot of books on different violin makers, there is a high chance you will see his name in the historical section, writing about their lives. One of the points is that because instruments, there are many.
 
By Nicolo, but there are not many instruments, many violence by the brothers. There are more violas by the brothers than by nicolo,  probably for historical reason. There was a search for Violas until about  the twenties of the 17th century. So about but after 30, the viola was not so important as a musical instrument as it had been before.
 
And from that point on, Makers went on making mainly violins, and Niccolo made many violins. So that's the first point. If there are many instruments around, you can are a more important maker than other makers who has not,  have not so many instruments around. And  then he was of course more modern  than the brothers.
 
So his instruments are usually better sounding, in my opinion, for modern ideas than the brothers. And the other point is that he anyway worked a lot developing a new model, and he slightly enlarged,  en longed  the variant. He made the grand pattern which is the grand  new pattern slightly bigger than before, and that gives you a better acoustic results than the brothers.
 
As a, as a rule, usually  I would prefer.  The quality of workmanship in the Brothers work,  Nicolò's, but I must admit that as musical instruments usually Nicolò violins are better instruments than  those by the Brothers for sounding properties.  In a modern setup. In a modern setup. I have no idea about ancient setup because  We have no idea how they were set up originally.
 
We have no original neck in an Amati instrument. So we have no idea what it was. And of course there was also a development of different  way for necks and bridges and so on in a story of 150 years. So it would be also wrong to say there was a Baroque setup or a Cremonese setup because 150  years  And I was wondering when Niccolo made the, developed the grand pattern was Andrea Guarneri working for him at that time?
 
It was possibly slightly before then then Andrea Guarneri arrived in his workshop. I'm not sure about that. We don't know when. Exactly, Andrea started working for Ola, but yes, it is around the same time, but at first we must consider that Andrea, together with Giacomo Janero, they were just pupils.
 
So they were probably making just the boys work of  rough work in the workshop. And I'm sure that at time.  The finishing of the instruments was in the hands of the master,  as it was later always in the Amati, in the Stradivari workshop.  So you see actually the hand of the master in all his production because he followed the  making of every instrument and finished  them direct.
 
And, and then did Andrea Guarneri,
 
Did he go on to his instruments? Were they based on the Nicola's Grand Patton? Sometimes and sometimes also on the other side. Yeah, that size? Okay. Andrea was a good maker, intelligent maker, and he also, and I'm sure he went on working for Amati also after. He moved it to his own workshop.
 
So here we see the violin taking over in importance from the viola and Niccolo making lots of instruments. He's also using his grand pattern that leads to good acoustics in a modern setting and these may be some of the factors that lead to his success as a maker we still know today.
 
There is also something to be said about the sheer number of violins Niccolo made as Carlo Chiesa pointed out.  But also Niccolo's instruments were adapted to what musicians wanted now. And that was power.  In this episode, we saw just how close we came to losing the Cremonese violin making tradition forever.
 
But be sure to join me in the next episode where we will see what Niccolo does to make sure this instrument he is making becomes a superstar. And we'll never run the risk of dying out like it almost did.  I'd like to thank my lovely guests, John Gagneux, Benjamin Hebert and Carlo Chiesa for joining me today.
 
If you have enjoyed this podcast, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform you're using. This is in fact, a great way of supporting the show so that I can continue to make more episodes for you. And if you feel like being an absolute legend, you can become a Patreon over at Patreon forward slash The Violin Chronicle.
 
I hope you'll join me next time on the next episode of The Violin Chronicle.
 
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Ep 14 Maggini, the real thing... or a copy, with Florian Leonhard and Benjamin Hebbert

In the history of violin making Maggini is a must. I speak to two violin experts Florian Leonhard and Benjamin Hebbert about Giovannin Paolo Maggini. Maggini's Brescian style of making violins was very distinctive and an incredible amount of copies of this luthiers work has been copied in the intervening 400 years, the two violin makers I am talking to will shed light on why and how this came about and we will give you some tips on how to recognise a Maggini instrument and make one yourself....perhaps. 
 
Transcript
  Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie, Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often, when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect. But here, my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius. Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to the story of Giovanni Paolo Maggini. In the first episode about this maker, I have briefly covered his life story. We don't know all that much about this maker during his lifetime, but his influence and style is definitely long lived. And the sheer number of copies of his instruments that have been made in the intervening 400 years is simply staggering. And so in this episode, I will be talking to two experts about why and how Maggini instruments were and are such hot stuff.
To begin with, In these conversations, the mention of the Hills book comes up quite a lot. Let me quickly explain why.  W. E. Hills and Sons, if you don't know, was one of the great English violin workshops in London, only to be rivalled by J& A Beares. A bit like what Batman is to Superman. Big players.  Did you, did you know, by the way, that Bruce Wayne, Batman's alter ego, is actually the owner of the Daily Planet newspaper, who employs Clark Kent, making Batman technically Superman's boss. I find this fascinating because this is kind of what happens in the story of the Beares and Hills companies, but I digress. 
The Hills Workshop was founded by William Ebsworth Hill, 1871 to 1895. He was the son, grandson, and great grandson of violin makers. But when he founded W. E. Hills and Sons, he really took things to the next level. The man's energy was boundless. Under William's direction was the company's workshop, of course, that was producing new instruments and bow makers making bows.  They would also deal in older instruments and were well known for their quality restorations. They had a line of accessories as the workshop continued to be run by his sons, and these included rosins, cleaning polish, chin rests, shoulder rests, bridges, instrument cases, strings, little tuning pipes, peg paste, if your pegs got stuck, the pegs themselves, music stands, and the list goes on.
Whatever product pertaining to the violin you could possibly think of, the Hills made sure there was a Hills version of it.  If this sounds like a handful, then hold on to your seats, because not only was W. E. Hill a violin maker and musician, he was also interested in photography and astronomy. And let's not forget his family, because it is Hill and Sons, so he obviously had children. Nine, in fact, somewhere along the line.  But to really prove oneself as an authority in the field, what better way to do it than to write a book? And to make a splash, the first one was on the wonderful Brescian maker, Gio Paolo Maggini, published in 1892. And this is the book that we often refer to as the Hill's book in our discussions about Maggini.
To make this book, research was made from archives and really to date, this book still stands as one of the only works documenting exclusively the life and work of this maker. Even though research has continued over the years, this is still a book makers keep coming back to. And so now you know a bit about the Hill's book, or more precisely, it's called The Life and Work of Giovanni Paolo Maggini, the author of which is a woman named Margaret Higgins, who is fascinating in her own right.
I spoke to Florian Leonhardt, who is a London based violin maker, dealer, restorer, expert, and owner of Florian Leonhardt Fine Violins.  We spoke about Brescia, the city Maggini lived and worked in. Brescia was a, was a city that, had a very rich musical life. It was completely devastated by the invasion of, was it the French?
The French? Yeah, the French sorry about the French so they invaded, and ransack the city completely. And then the venitians took it back, took control over it and then there was another battle. It was ransacked again. And, you know, it was really, really destroyed. But Brescia didn't benefit from a big rich duke  that, that would kind of, control the cultural life of the city. Unlike most other big cities, like Milan and Florence and Rome. But even Venice had a lot of wealthy people who kind of had demands  on their cultural life. And Brescia, interestingly, had a big, probably middle class, intellectually interested, that furthered music making in a big way. And particularly, instrumental music making, or opera, that is not just singers and so on, but had lots of different musical instruments. And these Brescian makers during Gasparo Da Salo's time, particularly in his earlier time, were cittern makers, they made the plucked instruments, as well.
So they were busy doing those things as well, but actually you had in Brescia, you had already the word Violin for Violin Maker. And Gasparo Da Salo's time before it's a Pellegrino. Zanetto's, Micheli's, family time. You already had the, term violino or violini maker, but we don't know exactly what that thing looked like, whether that was actually the violin. Because, you know, something that looked a bit, uh, better than a Rebek and different to a, to a viol, maybe it was called that.
It's kind of on the way. It's on the way, yeah.
I'm Ben Hebbert, I've got a workshop in Oxford. Occasionally I sell violins. I do a lot of writing about them and a lot of research and a little bit of expertise as well.
Okay. And where, where can we find your, um, where can we find your writings? 
My writings? I've got, uh, violinsandviolinists. com is my blog.
And, uh, it sort of everywhere else, occasionally in the Strad magazine and things like that. Chapters of books. Things.
Nuggets of wisdom. 
Something like that.  Um. Page fillers.
All right. So today I wanted to talk about, uh, Maggini. Actually, I did have a, I did have a thought, about, the difference between Cremonies and Brescian instruments. And that was, we looked at, you, you said how, was it Virgil that went to school?  In Cremona. And Cremona was well known for its schools and it had a very, educated, merchant class.
And I was wondering if it wasn't for the education level in Cremona and the fact that an artisan like amati could have a Renaissance education, would, the violin have the shape that it does today if it wasn't for  school? 
Oh, yes and no. Uh, I think it's the answer. When we look at, when we look at Amati, we're looking at something which is architecturally wonderful, and it works. But if you go backwards in time, so there's some amazing frescoes in Ferrara by a guy called Cordenzio  of Ferrara, and, they show musical instruments, bowed instruments of every single, you know, imaginable shape,  and including some things which may actually be purposefully wrong, because they're being held by angels, but, within those there's one or two instruments which are violin like, and at the end of the day, what, you know, what is a violin shape?
Well, it's, it's the biggest, it's the biggest amount of surface area and volume in order to make a good sound.  And yet, at the point where the bow crosses the strings, it's got to be narrow enough that the bow can touch each of the strings individually without you know, having a bit of a road crash.
So, the violin as we know it,  you know, might have appeared around 1500.  There could well be instruments which are even older than that, which are quite like the violin. In fact, 14th, uh, 13th century, uh, precursor of the violin tend to have a sort of jellybean kind of shape to them, again with this narrowing at that point.
So, the shape is in the ether one way or another, but just the shape in terms of you know, what an instrument has to be.  But I think, you know, one of the things that an architect can do, whether we're talking about a violin or a shed, is, you know, there's a whole difference between sort of sticking some sticks in the ground and sticking a roof on it and architecturally designing a shed. And I think that's kind of where someone like Amati comes in. He says, with all of this Renaissance knowledge that I've got, this thing is already working. It's already a perfectly good thing for doing what it does. But I'm going to, understanding the necessities of it, the string length to get pitch the, site, the, volume of it. In order to get the sort of sound, the narrowness and all of this, I’m going to make a beautiful architectural version of what already exists. I mean, I'm thinking of the difference between the Bressian violins and the Cremonese violin.
Yeah. I think, uh, I mean, Bresians aren't without a geometry of their own and that's very clear. But I think, I think they're using sort of slightly sophisticated, you know, further thoughts. And, you know, rather than just, you know, again, we can take this analogy and, you know, the Brescians  have got a number of geometrical rules which will work in order to render the thing workable. But the Cremonese They're taking it to this further level of perfection. And we see that, you know, by the 1630s, we've got Galileo,  who's writing to, Father Micanzio Fulgnensis,  or whatever his name is, who's writing to Monteverdi, who's writing to his  unknown Cremonese makers, who must be Amati. And we're hearing about Amati's being worth about four times what a Brescian instrument is worth. And obviously, you know, they're having to do something to justify the, premiums that they're able to charge.
Florian Leonhardt.
You know, like anything you do in life, everything's quite complex. And the deeper you look, the less  simple you can just, make the story. So Andrea Amati for me, of course, is a giant. Because he has, unlike the Bresian makers, created a design that could be replicated for centuries,  more or less unchanged, incredibly well conceived with Renaissance principles  and in a Baroque shape. If you want. So, construction method, golden section. He has, also construction sequence that was  maybe derived from the lute makers  from Fusen who came, in droves, to Italy because Italy had a great big market, of interest in music making.  But to cut away from now, the Amati and Cremona, coming to the Brescian, which is your topic about Gasparo Da Salo, if I understood right that of course is for me the hero of the city,  Brescia, because he has created Maggini, if you want. Coming to your question, why, you feel that  Maggini in some ways might overshadow in fame even Andrea Amati.  And Gasparo Da Salo might be due to the fact that, one, he made many more violins than Gasparo Da Salo, and the violas always a little bit the suffering, joked about instrument in the orchestras in our classic music world. So the violas were less important in some ways, and less, less easy to, talk about in big numbers. So, Maggini made many more violins than violas.  While Gasparo Da Salo made very few violins and many more violas. But Maggini continued in the footsteps of Gasparo Da Salo, and he seamlessly continued the tradition working and the method.
But coming back to the fame, why you feel he's more known, there's another fact. So already in the early 1600s, early 17th century in Brescia.  Was immediately written about as the great maestro violin maker when he died, round about 17 30, 31, 32, during the plague, he had already achieved considerable fame and people started shortly after, already even naming themselves as pupil of Maggini, even if it wasn't necessarily true.
Right. Okay. Who wrote about the music? Uh, culture at the time. And that is actually also an interesting thing, which made, Brescia so famous  and because, you know, when I was a child, I grew up also with thinking, Oh, Maggini is the inventor of the violin which is obviously, I wouldn't say I wouldn't agree with that because obviously we know that Andrea Amati is before, and Gasparo Da Salo in some ways before, even though maybe, yes, arguably, Gasparo Da Salo came more from the violin making, viola making, bass instrument kind of making, and you had a more sonorous, warm, earthy kind of sound idea at the time, but also maybe possibly because instruments didn't sound much differently because it maybe didn't  in those archaic instruments, sound posts, etc.
That was one thing that he was already written about. So people could read now about Maggini and the importance of the maestro violin maker. And Maggini was also prolific in the production of the instruments and had La Franchini as well, who, who already worked for Gasparo Da Salo as his assistant.
Then we had the 19th century, eventually, a couple of hundred years later. And that's, I think, is  probably the biggest source of why we create, where we created a lot of romantic things, because the 19th century was the romantic era in the art history, in music making, in, painting and in sculptures and architecture. So it was the time where, where castles were rebuilt,  but wrongly rebuilt.
The, follies.
Yes, because they created some romantic middle, aged like looking castle, which  didn't actually look like that when it was first built. So they, had this romanticized idea and you know, Maggini.  Unlike Amati and everything that followed, because everybody admired Stradivari and Amati and Guarneri and Ruggieri, etc. So, Maggini and Gasparo Da Salo were a bit forgotten, because they looked so archaic, they looked  ancient, they looked primitive and simple in their making. And so In that romantic time, I think, I mean, this is only my interpretation, but I look at people like Vuillaume,  who now created Magginis  and he made lots of Magginis and he had this interesting idea about that extra turn on the scroll, in the volute of the scroll, to create this as a Maggini thing, which differs to all other violins that, were kind of produced by.
Was Vuillaume, oh sorry, was Vuillaume the one to add the extra?
No, there are some, there are a few.  Magginis that have that extra turn because that, but maybe we talk later about stylistics.
But that must have been his model that he picked up on that model.
Yeah. He must have seen one scroll that, that exists by Maggini and maybe it wasn't Maggini who made it.
It wasn't Maggini. So we see later makers working in Paris, such as Vuillaume, who lived in the 19th century, copying Maggini in a romantic style, perhaps drawn in by this unusual looking model that really didn't resemble anything like the classical Cremonese instruments people were used to.  Benjamin Hebbett. 
There were people like Di Berio, one of the great early 19th century players who had a Maggini, Ole Bull had a Maggini, and those, those start to get copied. Actually it's Gand et Bernadelle in Paris, Nicolas Francois Vuillaume. Brussels really sort of start the way in copying, and then you get the German cheap, cheaper copies, which always seem to come from those Forms and those Bernadelles.  Now we see things orbiting around Parisian musicians and violin makers, who at this time were the influencers of the 19th century on these things.
Florian Leonhardt. 
But I have still haven't, um, finished your, your The original question because there's another  aspect to Maggini. So once Vuillaume created, picked up on this  archaic looking instrument to make another romantic looking thing, because here you also he also had a, Tiefenbroecker, you know, so he, they liked those sudden ancient looking instruments with heads  and different heads and different F holes.
But of course, Vuillaume didn't understand Maggini at all because he built it with an outside mould, built it very square and in you know, more what, what they learned in violin making at the time. And also like all violin makers in the 19th century, they no longer constructed with that form within, they drew around things and copied them  and kind of idealized it, but didn't really build.
What, was the, the real, intention of the maker at the time? And so he now created the Maggini model next to his Guarneri model, next to the Amati model, next to a Guarneri del Gesù model.  So it became one of the five models.  So the whole world now knows Maggini, Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri. But, uh, so people had now those models and Maggini became one of them.
And therefore, from the Brescian makers,  he became  the archaic, the oldest and most ancient looking one. So it became interesting. And then the hills in 1892.  wrote their famous book on Maggini, which again is also the Hills did an enormous job in doing research, quite good research. And they found also in that book, you find lots of beautiful evidence and, people who ordered instruments from them in.
Have you in the Hills book where it has sort of a, a guide to faking a Maggini almost it tells you how to make a fake Maggini well, it talks about Magginifying instruments.
I've got my, copyright here. Fifty-seven or so. Fifty-six, fifty seven. There's a whole load of, uh, pointers for connoisseurs.
A very successful Maggini copy was made by Bernard Fendt, Jr. Naturally, the first necessity for the Maggini forger was to obtain suitable violins on which to operate and consequently all violins of large dimensions and antique appearance were sought out and their fitness for adaptation thoughtfully considered. Two lines of purfling were needed and as but few violins possessed this feature. It had to be added. French violins of the Bouquet Pierret, period. 1700, 1740 and German violins of all periods were easily Magginified as regards purfling and the elongation of the sound hole. When the violin to be adapted was sufficiently large and of suitable model, the inner line of purfling was inserted. When of smaller size or unsuitable in form, the original ledge and purfling were removed, and a new rim of wood, about three quarters of an inch, three quarters? Three eighths of an inch in width, added all around, which was joined to the old part by an underlapping joint. This new edge was then slightly hollowed and purfled. The groove for the inner line of purfling being made over the joining of the old and new wood effectually hid it.  Clover leaves were inserted in the top and bottom of the back, and the central device of Maggini at the middle of the back. The scroll was also worked on, but here the peculiarities of Maggini were not mastered.And the scroll was invariably turned too far. 
Yes, it tells you how you can forge. I like how they give you like, uh, just the tips. Just, just a bit too much, isn't it?  And like, and how they say like, in every German violin, because you know how those German trade instruments are often big, so yeah, okay. 
Yeah, I mean, the Maggini book's written at exactly the same time that people are sort of getting into their Sherlock Holmes and stuff like that, so. There is an element of it of, sort of giving, giving the Hills. the voice of the expert.  Yeah. It's, it's, it's quite a good point to, you know, give, away all, of the secrets because actually you don't often see Magginis or Maggini fakes. So they, they can say everything about expertise and it won't, it won't really affect their bottom line.
But returning to Brescia and the Brescian style. Florian Leonard talks about Maggini's assistant, La Francini, and the style of Maggini's scrolls compared to the work that was being done at the same time in Cremona, and the different construction techniques that the two schools of violin making used.  Because La Francini in particular he was as far as I remember he was a Carver and, furniture maker, who also, supplied the, or restored the local church furniture or, you know, whatever it is.
And if you look at the scroll, the scroll is made like this furniture.  So it has a kind of leaf, structure that goes around. When you look at the scroll from the front, it's wide. And it's all tapered back, the peg box as well, and everything. There's a completely different idea to the Cremonese idea.
There's not a chamfer structure on the scroll. It's a kind of like a leaf with a fine edge that kind of rounded off over the past 400 years into something like a but it was kind of not thought to be like Amati, very clearly from day one, he constructed a spiral out of mathematical proportions  and then had to solve the problem how to end with the volute carving out  in the eye.
So you have a channel, which is the carved out channel part of the volute, but you have to end somewhere in the spiral.  And so that end is quite a complicated thing for young violin makers. They don't know how to do that. Do you have a gouge that kind of fits into there and meets the other gouge in the point?
Or how do you construct the point? Maybe with a knife cut? But you need to kind of arrive in a parallel. Buy the perfect gouge with the perfect curve.
I remember, um, I went to Mircourt and everyone's like, I found it. I found the gouge.
You see, there we go. You understand. But other people are there with a knife. Yeah. So you understand. So, so the, the Brescian didn't bother about this. So they just had a piece of paper that spiralled up into something and then you had an eye. And it's all undercut because the undercut gives a certain lightness to the design of that paper flow that's like, like, you know, the scroll or something. And the eye, because you didn't have much of a chamfer, could just end sometime whenever the gouge finished in their turn. And that is each time different, but the principle is similar,  but they were not trying to replicate like industry. The Cremonese created a system that is absolutely, until today, there to be replicated.
Of course, in the 19th century, it was no longer constructed like in the 17th century or 16th, 16th and 17th century in Cremona was clearly only constructed with dividers, callipers, proportions. And therefore you had the inside mould, you build everything around it and so on. The Brescians didn't have that idea.
They had a free, architecture. They had the back, they stuck the corner blocks on it and they put very thick ribs around it, starting with the cc bouts, then meeting with mitres. Relatively blunt mitres on the corners, open C bouts. C bouts are quite, open C's, because that's much easier to, bend, because these very thick ribs, when you see an original that hasn't been re graduated, and hasn't had, uh, linings fitted. Later by people in the 19th century who want to do better those instruments. Then you actually see that you had those thick ribs and, you know, to make these middle, very small red radiuses on a violin or viola is quite tough to bend without breaking it.  And so that they kept it quite blunt. And therefore the corners are not very long, unlike Zanetto di Pellegrino, before it's long corners, but also in Amati's time, of course, they had long corners. And that was a feature of the instrument, the corner, while in Brescia it was kind of an archaic thing that came from the viol.
Yeah, and the Hill's book on Maggini I like it I feel like it's really, it's very well done. It's like, you've got the, the biography and then you have these, like these tips on how to  make your own Maggini. Then it has a few anecdotes that are a little bit. Indiscreet as she like they name the clients, uh, involved.
And yes, the, the Fendt copy, which was made as an honest, honest copy, but it was bought by someone whose widow was then hard up and tried to sell it.  And in the end you have in the, at the end you have, the body, the measurements, the table of measurements that has, which is sort of a little bit confounding because the violins, it, it does like pre strad. It compares like a, pre 90, pre 1690 Strad, a long Strad and a Maggini. And then for violas, they totally changed to, a Da Salo and then an Amati and an, a Maggini they're comparing. And then they go back to Strad for the cello, which is like, it's confusing. And then they have all the little, the little notes and the explanation. I find it's quite, you know, it's all in there. And then it even has a thing on how to find Maggini’s house at the end.
We were talking about the woman who wrote it, Margaret Huggins, and she’s interesting cause she's like, she's a real fan. You can tell as you're reading it, it's like, she's a real fan of the Hills. And I find it interesting that they, they asked her to write. So, yes, she marries a guy called William Huggins, and he's an astronomer. And, but the fascinating thing is that she really seems to be the person who's into photography. So in terms of being able to record what he sees, it's her. And she becomes a pioneer in the 1870s of spectral astrophotography.
Spectropi I can't say it Spectropi Spectropsy?  She becomes really good at pronouncing it. Anyway, whichever one it is. That's taking is that was she actually taking photos of light? Like, sort of rainbows type thing? Like, you know, when you see a rainbow with the light.  Was that? I suspect so. Okay,  I'll have to check that out. I think there's a whole load of stuff which is going on about with, before, colour photography, actually, there's a lot of understanding of which light waves the camera works best at or, sorry, not the camera, but the process, so you can say actually, if we look at a lot of photographs of the time and compare them to ultraviolet or infrared photography, we actually see, you know, violin photographs, they're all opaque, because,  you know, what's a perfectly good spectrum for a black and white photograph of a person is actually a little bit on the ultraviolet spectrum.
So we're not able to see the wood underneath the varnish. Oh yeah, and then in this, in this book, there's amazing Yeah,  well not, you say the paintings are amazing and you're welcome to. You're absolutely right.
It is so hard to draw a violin. I am just really, you know, uh, admirable of anyone who can do a painting of a violin.
But to me, it's the, it's the photographs, which are absolutely, you know. Before I knew who Margaret Huggins was, seeing these photographs, which are  absolutely to scale, really done with precision, and then comparing them to other early, early violin photographs, and, and they're just astonishing. And I think that we might be seeing, you know, the same, the same eye and the same photographic skill on those as, you know, the inventor of Spekof, of stuff that we can't pronounce.
Spek Spektro Spektrop Spektroposi? Spek Spek Spek That one. Which is really, really important.
Margaret Huggins was a pretty amazing woman. Born in Dublin in 1848, she was an accomplished astronomer and spectroscopist who made significant contributions to the fields of astrophysics. She was also a very talented photographer, artist, and musician.  In 1873, when she was 25 years old, She attended a lecture by a Mr. William Huggins, a prominent astronomer and spectroscopist on his research on stellar spectra. Oof, that's a tongue twister. Margaret, who was already captivated by astronomy and spectroscopy, was deeply impressed by William's lecture and sought an introduction to him.  After the lecture, her uncle, who was acquainted with William Huggins, organized a meeting between the two, and the spectral sparks were ignited. In 1875, two years later, They married, and together they conducted groundbreaking research in spectroscopy,  which is the study of the interaction between light and matter. It was a marriage of intellect and the heart. I find it really hard to say spectroscopy, spectroscopy. Anyway, in addition to her scientific contributions, Margaret actively participated in astronomical societies and institutions, which is kind of extraordinary for a woman at the time. She was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Astronomical Association.  She was also involved in promoting women's involvement in science and was a member of the British Federation of University Women.  Margaret received recognition for her work throughout her career, and she was the first woman to receive the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1903, which was a remarkable achievement at the time.
She also received honorary degrees from the University of Dublin and the University of St Andrews, when this was still a tricky time for a woman to attend university. As to how she came to write the Maggini book for the Hills, apart from being one smart cookie. Her husband, William Huggins, was an avid amateur violinist and was friends with the inventive and nimble minded William Ebsworth Hill. William Huggins also possessed a golden period Stradivari, so this could have helped the connection.  This violin is now called the Huggins Strad. Today, it's lent to the winner of the Belgian Queen Elizabeth's violin competition. Because Margaret was also a very talented photographer, she helped in the production of the images of not only the Maggini book, but also others the Hill Workshop produced.
Today she's only really remembered for her scientific endeavours, but here I'd like to give a little shout out to her and her work on Maggini. You go girl.
So the Hill book was another book that put him on the map, Maggini. And the Hills also idealized him a little bit by, by saying he was the kind of establisher of the violin. 
Do you think the Hills book is still, uh, The reference book for Maggini? Yeah.
Today, is it still what they say, valid?  Um, the, the facts, the facts of the book are still valid because they, they did proper research in Brescia. And so they, looked at sources, they, found. This lady, um,  Oh, are you talking about Isabella D'Este? Isabella D'Este, thank you. Ah, okay, so I thought you were talking about, like, modern, okay, the Gonzaga court. Yes, that's the one. And so she was, of course, a patron of the arts, in that sense, yeah? And so people like her furthered this, and her demands were fulfilled by Brescia. And that's another interesting thing. Why did Brescia live so confidently next to Cremona, where Amati, of course, made instruments also for a big society throughout Europe. He became also famous, but they lived side by side, not influencing each other not that I can see that. And you can see that not, not rethinking, Oh, maybe they are doing something better than us. Let's change a little bit the style. No, Maggini confidently continued the style of Brescia Only at the very end of Maggini's life and career, you can see a little bit of proportioning, the scroll getting a little bit, more carefully made, et cetera, not quite so large and heavy.
Whether that is influenced from, and also linings are used suddenly,  whether that's influenced from Cremona or whether that's demand for musicians that have seen a Cremonese instrument or whether That is an evolutionary thing that just happened because those instruments had a relatively fast evolution in, in Brescia. Because from the very primitive, instruments, suddenly, the Micheli family and your other makers, and then Gasparo Da Salo was the big genius in many ways because he, transformed a lot and established things and you became very successful that he became wealthy as an instrument maker  and he could afford to have several employees and different premises to own.
So that's, that's quite an achievement as an instrument maker of the day. Yeah. So I think the Book of Hills  helped Maggini's name as well and then the mystery  of the earliest violin maker was of course In the ears of all the laymen about the topic, particularly if Hills also kind of supported this, uh, model of, that Maggini is the earliest, violin maker or creator of the violin.
Well, it's interesting because they don't actually say that. And in the Maggini book, in the front. You might have like one of the first editions, there's a paper that says, you know, we've got all this information about Gasparo Da Salo. So then they knew that about Gasparo Da Salo, but they brought out the Maggini book first  and the damage was done.
I think the damage was done and then they didn't want to peddle back too much. But I, but they did say in that book, I remember that they said that he is the person who established the violin, the modern violin. Oh yeah, so you have Gasparo. They don't say it's the inventor directly, but they said, I think they said established.
But I think out of that established probably interpretations came and the people then made out of it, he invented. Yeah, because you jump quickly from established to invent. 
Yeah, you can imagine someone reading it and then telling a friend, Oh, you know, I read this book about the guy who invented the violin.
Yeah, I mean, I would say in 1732,  the Brescian violin making or violin making was dead for a bit.  So until the arrival of G. B. Rogeri, who came with a completely Cremonese idea  into town and then adopted. Features of Maggini and Gasparo Da Salo, I cannot  say who, probably some Maggini violins that would have been more  in numbers available to him, have influenced his  design of creating an arching.
It's, it's interesting that he instantly picked up on that arching,  because Rogeris  are always and,  Much fuller arched. The arching rises much earlier from the purfling, right? So he came from the Cremonese tradition, but he adopted the, like the Brescian arching idea. He, came from Nicola Amati and has learned all the finesse of, construction, fine, making discipline, and also series production. Get an inside mould and have the linings, and have all the blocks including top and bottom block, and nailed in the neck. So he did a complete, package of Cremonese Violin making, and brought that into Brescia, but blended it in certain stylistics and sometimes even in copies, with the Brescian style  for a long time. We have had, before dendrochronology was established, the Magginis, going around, and they were actually, G. B. Rogeris.
Right, yeah, we did a condition report on a, Maggini, and, it had an old  certificate, and,  And then we did the dendrochronology, and so I had to change the title to attributed to.
Yeah, and it might have been, you know, I mean, I have, I've seen  about three, three Rogeris that used to be Magginis.  Okay. Yeah, very nicely made. But you can see that the construction behind it doesn't have that more loose idea of creating that shape, but it was a constructed shape.
Okay, so how, how is  Maggini different to  and why do you think, Maggini is so much, better known than  Da Salo, or am I just making assumptions? I feel like a lot of people know, if you say a Brescian instrument, they'll be like, Oh yeah, Maggini. 
Benjamin Hebbett. 
Well, I think Gaspar much rarer than we sort of take credit for and actually, you know, they're also, I think when we look at Magginis, well, there's actually two problems with Magginis because there are the spectacular Magginis. And throughout his, throughout history until dendocrinology, that's, uh, tree ring dating came along. We, you know, we, saw these instruments, which were really quite one, you know, really quite wonderful, almost cremonese  quality,  which we kind of thought of as, you know, the, the, the best Maggini’s, but then what we discovered, and there's quite a lot of those, and quite a lot of those have become the very famous Magginis, but actually, then Dendrochronology comes along, and given that Maggini died in 1630, when these were coming up with Dendros of 1670, 1680, 1700, we, you know, suddenly, began to realize that these aren't by Maggini at all, but they're by somebody 60, 70 years on.
And, you know, stuff like the Prince Doria, So painted for Prince Doria in the 19th century, but, uh, but they're actually, you know, they're not, they're not even meas at all.
So you've got all of this stuff by Giovanni Batista, Rogeri.  He's a contemporary of Stradivari, making Maggini fakes,  which we still, you know, are associating with Maggini. Then you've got the real Magginis, which are  a little less refined. Then you've got the period where Maggini are working together. Maggini and Da Salo's workshop.
And those  are a little less refined again.  And then you've got the true Gaspar Da Salos, which are, you know, a small number and actually quite rough.  And then the problem is, is that, you know, I think so much stuff, you know, it's more likely that a Maggini will get reappraised into a Maggini Gasparo Da Salo collaboration than a Gasparo Da Salo coming into that. So essentially there's three different kinds of Magginis. And very little, unless you're into double basses, from Gasparo Da Salo.
So, uh, so one of my questions was, in the, was actually in the Hills book, uh, I don't know if it's her, it's a bit ambiguous when you're reading it, I'm like, is it, is it the Hills talking, or is it her talking about she actually has a funny story where she talks about clients and she actually names the client.
Um, it's, I love these old books where they're just like, you know, Mrs. So and so. Politically incorrect.  Actually, when you read the Hill book. It's kind of escorting everyone, you know, they give their own opinion.
And she'll be like, yeah, Mrs. So and so came in and it was clearly a fake and then she sold it as a real one. And then that guy came back and I had to tell him it was a fake and,  but she says, so she talks about, well, no, or the Hills, who knows about, Maggini, Stradivari, the idea that Stradivari was influenced in his long period of making by Maggini. What, what are your, do you think that's a relevant observation?
Florian Leonhardt.  What do you think I would answer to that?  I say very clearly 100%.  100%, no doubt.  So, you know, the Brescia was plodding along with their style on their own and creating something that, yeah, they just were confident because the musicians wanted to have those instruments. They were busy. They got rich from it, you know, nobody was poor making those instruments. And they, which we can see in the archives today. So you can, you can see that they were successful. They had constantly musicians from all over the country to consult them because the musicians were the ones driving. what was in demand. You know, in parallel, in the parallel universe, Cremona supplied some other chords with their instruments, and they were successful within that, and that system worked very well. But I don't see much cross pollination there going on between those cities. So Cremona will have noticed that musicians  like sometimes to have these kind of Maggini like instruments.
And Rogeri was already making such instruments as well, maybe visible for Cremonese violin makers, because they, the musicians would travel, because Brescia and Cremona is not that far apart. But obviously the, the link wasn't so established culturally, as you can tell from the violin making history. So, but Stradivari, who totally deserves his name as the genius of, of our he was constantly, from day one, from the earliest instruments, when we analysed him,  you can see from the earliest instruments his strong character and drive to find out how to make it better. So I think from day one,  he tried to see how can I improve this thing. And by 1690, he arrived by saying, let's radically change the design of the arching because, because the musicians talking about the sonority and warmth and  depth of, uh, Maggini instruments and so he, he felt that's lacking. Let's try to find this out. And then he saw something and he said,  let's try it. And he did it and it created some effect and he continued this.  And so he did it for just under a decade, building those long pattern instruments because long Magginis were longer  and they were fuller arched. And you see that in, in Stradivari's design.
But Stradivari still was bound by the very strong, incredible principles that the Amati have created in Cremona. So he had the discipline to build it beautifully with long, slender corners, with choice of wood that looks beautiful.  Magnificent. And it's very, it's aristocratic in the way. So the Maggini model by Stradivari doesn't look like a Maggini, you know, so it’s a much more graceful, in design in my view.
He combined in the golden period, the two things. So his arching became fuller, which is the major change in Stradivari's. Design for the sound.
Yeah, there's less of that. Um, the, the scooped like towards the edges, it's less, the less, although, yes, I mean the, Amati brothers. I, I don't, yeah.
The brothers Amati were really quite full there's a view. It's, yeah. It's hard to tell. Since you mentioned the Amati brothers, the Amati brothers were more advanced in the arching from our modern perspective of, of ideal arching than Niccolo, because Niccolo exaggerated that deep, long, wide, wide channel, and therefore has nearly a slightly pinched arching, which you see in some Rugeris as well. And that influence you can clearly see also in Stradivari's idea. So there was something going on, but, but Stradivari was the most consistent to bring that forward.
 So he took, uh, yeah, so it's a little bit of Maggini that made Stradivari.
Yes. You could say that. It's probably Maggini, um, that influenced that.
And, of course, the other big guys, Guarneri del Gesù was the other big guy and successful violin makers of all time.  He also got influenced by that because you can see he made a wide breast, uh, Stradivari didn't adopt that, you know, he, he still saw an advantage in the arching, but he didn't want to deviate too far away from  the established idea in Cremona.
While Guarneri del Gesù, he, he did that already 30 years later, you know, 30 years later, he started, he was in an, at a different time where the sons were already all rebels, you know, I mean, look at Stradivari's sons, I mean.  What a disgrace.  I'm telling you, dissapointment they must have been for him because  how can the father achieve this level of workmanship and then you have those sons who just  Don't give a damn about precision.
Well, it's the, you know, it's the father who makes the fortune and then the children who spend it.  They were that generation. And so, Del Gesu grew up in that generation, but he grew up in a family that was already much rougher in making, you know, the Guarneri's,  Filius Andrea, his father.  Pretty rough, you know, so he didn't build like a Niccolo Amati in a sweet, beautiful, perfectly mannered and disciplined way. He left the tool marks, he didn't always bother about exact precision.
Thank you so much for listening to this final episode on Gio Paolo Maggini, but stay with me for the next episode as I return to Cremona. And I continue with the story of Niccolo Amati and his revolutionary practices in the workshop that would change the violin landscape forever.  I'd like to thank my guests, Benjamin Hebbert and Florian Leonhardt for talking to me today.
Please do leave a comment and rating. And if you would like to financially support the podcast, that would be amazing. You can go to patreon.com forward slash the violin chronicles to do that. On social media, I have Instagram with the handle at The Violin Chronicles, and Facebook is The Violin Chronicles Podcast.
Thank you for joining me. And I hope you will tune in to the next episode of The Violin Chronicles.
 
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Ep 13. Giovanni Paolo Maggini; his life and the Brescian School of violin making.

This is the captivating journey through the life and craftsmanship of Gio Paolo Maggini, a renowned violin maker hailing from Brescia, Italy. Join us as we unravel the legacy of this extraordinary luthier whose instruments continue to mesmerize musicians and collectors worldwide.
Delving into the fascinating world of Gio Paolo Maggini, exploring his innovative techniques, distinctive designs, and the enduring influence he had on the art of violin making. Not much is known about this enigmatic maker but the tragedies and hardships of his life have not deterred from the allure of his violins, celebrated for their robust tonal quality, remarkable projection, and distinctive stylistic workmanship.
Christopher Moore principal Viola of the Melbourn Symphony Orchestra talks to us about his relationship with his Maggini Viola made in Brescia, and the journey he has been on with his four stringed friend.
TRANSCRIPT
  Long, long ago in the realm of ancient Italy, a great strapping hero strode upon the earth. His name was Hercules, a mighty warrior favoured by the gods.  One day, after crushing grapes in his rock-hard biceps and shaving his chiselled jawline, Hercules embarked for his legendary quest for the Golden Fleece. His path led him eventually to a region near the powerful Po River.  In this land, a proud and formidable king named Eurytus ruled with an iron fist. His beautiful daughter, Calliho, possessed a grace and radiance that could rival the sun.  When Hercules laid his eyes upon her, his heart was captivated, and he yearned to make her his bride. Yet King Eurytus, blinded by his own ambition, refused the hero's request.  He scorned Hercules and cast him away, denying him the hand of his beloved daughter.  This act of defiance set in motion a clash of titanic proportions.  Determined to prove his worthiness, Hercules faced King Eurytus in a series of gruelling challenges.
With each feat, the hero showcased his immense strength remember the grape crushing biceps and indomitable spirit.  But it was a test of unparalleled magnitude that would forever mark the destiny of Brescia. Hercules set his sights on the Mela River. A waterway that flowed through the land. Its currents were wild and untamed, often causing havoc and destruction. Undeterred, the hero summoned his god given might and diverted the course of the river. With Herculean force, Hercules carved a new path for the Mela River, leading it through a marshy and forsaken terrain. The once desolate and waterlogged land now bloomed with life and fertility. It was a transformation of remarkable proportions.
King Eurytus witnessed this incredible feat. Finally understood the true strength and valour of Hercules, and he saw the hero's unwavering determination and boundless love for Calliho.  Overwhelmed by the hero's prowess and the sincerity of his heart, the king relented.  Being able to challenge the course of a river and chiselled features were obviously great husband material, it seems. But moving on. In a great celebration of their union, Hercules laid the foundations of a magnificent city. He named it Brixia.  The Latin form for Brescia.  It was a testament to his strength and the indelible mark he left upon the land. The city grew and flourished, becoming a beacon of culture, art, and prosperity.
And this is the legend of how the city of Brescia was founded.
The mighty Maggini In this episode, we will be looking at the oh so influential Gio Paolo Maggini. If you haven't already listened to the first episodes on Brescian makers, stop and do that now because to truly understand this maker, you'll need to know where he and his city came from. Episodes 1, are about his master Gasparo Da Salo and the Brescian school.
In the previous episodes of the Violin Chronicles, I have been looking at the Amati family, but it would be greatly remiss of me to bypass this Brescian maker. Living and working at the same time as the Amati brothers and Niccolo Amati, a mere 60 kilometers away.  Now, remember the city of Cremona was still under Spanish rule and Brescia was part of the Venetian state, which made them quite different. And this is also seen in the production of their instruments, as we will soon see.  So I'm taking a break from Cremona just now to travel up the highway to the land of guns and violins.
Hello, and welcome to the Violin Chronicles. A podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine Lespets, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de lutherie, Mirecourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
In the small village of Botticino situated in the hills an hour from Brescia lived the Maggini family.  Zovan and Giulia lived with Zovan's father Bartolomeo Maggini and their two small children.  Zorvan, somewhat like the Amatis, had taken his time in marrying and was in his forties when he eventually did find a wife and started a family of his own. As time passed, so did his elderly father, and it was all too evident that there was no future for their family in this small rural village.  His children were getting older, and there were more possibilities and prospects for employment in Brescia.  When Zolvan was 57, his wife, Julia, had just given birth to another child whom they named Gio Paolo, the star of our story.
He was born in the autumn of 1580.  Zolvan's eldest son was eager to work as a shoemaker and so the family moved to the large city of Brescia to start a new life.  Over the years, the Maggini family settled into life in the vibrant city of Brescia.  The youngest son, Gio Paolo, does not seem to have had an extensive education, like his Cremonese counterparts, and when Gio Paolo Maggini was still very young, his father passed away.
When they had arrived in Brescia, Zoran, his father, had set out to make a shoemaking business and failed, and then went on to promptly die. Perhaps his death was not a surprise, but to make ends meet after his death, Maggini's mother sold land to keep them afloat. And it is around this time, in 1595, that the young Maggini becomes an apprentice of the well-known instrument maker, Gasparo Da Salo.
It would have been a big change for Gio Paolo Maggini to begin with, but his apprenticeship in the well-established workshop was a success.  Despite his lack of education, he may have also been a musician or singer, as many of the early Luthiers were both.  Life was looking good for Gio Paolo Maggini. He had a close relationship with his boss, Gasparo Da Salo. He trusted him in the signing of legal documents. His life revolved around the musical district of Brescia and his friends and acquaintances, including musicians, well known instrument makers, and other assistants who worked for Da Salo.
In 1602, he became friends with Paolo Virichi, who had returned from exile. Paolo's father was a close friend of Gasparo Da Salo, whom we spoke about in the Da Salo episodes.  Still very young, in his early 20s, Gio Paolo Maggini, after 8 years of working with Gasparo Da Salo, was ready to head out on his own. He appears to still have had amicable dealings with Gasparo Bertolotti and his family, even though he did leave and set up a new workshop with La Franchini,  Gasparo's other assistant, who came along with him.  In 1606, when Maggini was 26 years old, he bought a workshop and house near Gasparo's. He paid slightly higher than its real value, and the noble Ludovico Seria feared for its payment. Maggini is able to pay with his mother's credit for her lands in Bottino. Thanks to the good old bank of mom and dad,  this new workshop is very visible in front of the Piazza  del Podesta, near Gasparo da Salo, and  Annis. He's the organ builder. They're workshops, and it was in the prime instrument maker's quarters.  In 1615, he is in his mid thirties with a well established workshop that has been running for nine years.
Gio Paolo Maggini married the young Anna Foresti, a furrier's daughter, in January of 1615.  She most probably knew Da Salo's younger sister, Ludovica, who was also married to a furrier in Brescia. They undoubtedly lived in the artisanal district of the city, and Maggini was 34 and Anna 19 years old when they were married. The couple lived in the house in Contrada del Palazzo Vecchio de Podesta, opposite the old palace, and eight days after the wedding, Maggini's wife signed in the kitchen a receipt for her dowry given by her father. The witnesses included a carpenter and a bootmaker, and her husband's assistant, Giacomo Della Franchini,  maestro di Violini, living in the house with them.
We can see that when he married, Maggini was in a comfortable position with a house, a workshop, a maid, and an assistant, running a thriving business.  He had a good trade stock and paid his employees well.
Here I'm speaking to Christopher Moore, Principal Viola of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, who plays on a lovely Gio Paolo Maggini. 
My name is Christopher Moore. I'm a viola operator.  I I'm currently the Principal Viola of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and before that I was the Principal Viola of the Australian Chamber Orchestra for 10 years.
Yeah. And owner of a puppy that we can hear sometimes.
Sorry. That was actually my child. Both. One of them has a, has a pupil free day and the other is.  Just not going to school. 
Yeah. The teachers I know, they're like, why don't we have a teacher free day?
Well, yeah, they seem to have a lot down in Victoria.
So your principal viola and what viola do you play, Christopher?
I'm very lucky to be the, what would you call it?  The, not the, I'm not the owner. I play a wonderful Giovanni Paolo Maggini. Viola from around 1610.
Custodian.
Custodian. There we go. It was made about around 1610. Of course, I was listening to some of your podcast earlier. And as we know, some of these, these Brescian makers didn't really date their instruments until.  Later on.  Yeah. It's tricky. Yeah. So they just have to go on the dendro. Dendrochronology. Dendrochronology?  Yeah. The dating of tree rings? Mm hmm.  And what, what's your dendrochronology? I've got it here actually.
So the report said that the youngest tree ring on the front is dated around 1591. So that puts the, yeah, puts the, the making of the instrument 10, 20 years after that. Mm. Yeah.
Cause that, yeah, it's, it's kind of complicated to understand, but the youngest tree ring would be on the outside of the tree and then it's not necessarily  the one on the most outside, depending on what piece of wood they used.
Yes. So, so it's a guide, but you know, it can't be earlier than that or, yep.  So, yeah and how long, how long have you been playing this viola?  When did we get it? It was like 2014, I think, when I was Well, that was when it was procured, but I was sort of searching for a viola in the, in the Australian Chamber Orchestra for me to play around 2012, 2013. And we're comparing it to my wonderful instrument. It's a, it's a Arthur E. Smith from 1937.
Great Australian maker. 
And we're comparing all these wonderful instruments to the Smith and nothing really stacked up until we found this Maggini, which had that sort of similar fruity viola tone that to, you know, to compete with the Smith. So then we'd, we'd actually sort of given up the search and this one sort of fell in our lap, the Giovanni Paolo Maggini. And we just tried it and we, we all fell in love with it.  And so the anonymous benefactor who may or may not be the, enigmatic alter ego of Batman. You just don't know. Oh yeah.
I think of, I do think of Batman.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so he's, he, he or she has purchased this viola for the ACO ostensibly. But anyway, then I left the ACO and viola stayed there for a bit. And it was sort of passed around a few hands, but then eventually the owner decided to give it back to me to play. So I'm, so now it's on loan to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. And I get to play it. 
Excellent. Actually fun fact about, I do remember when you were trying, you were trying two Magginis actually, at one point. Yeah. Yeah. You tried both? Because I remember they were both in the workshop at one point and I think that was before we had this one. I can't remember. Because there was your, that one. I remember that one. And another one. Yeah.  And I remember that time because the anonymous benefactor was in the workshop and I, I was actually very pregnant and I had gone into labor and I had run into the garden and I'd run up to see our child and the anonymous benefactor was there and he said, You still haven't had this baby?
Yeah.
And I just went, yep, I'm working on it. And then I ran back downstairs.
Gosh.
So I, I remember that time and then just a few hours later, had the baby.
Well, there you go. And then we had ours.  We got ours.  Anyway.  Yeah, no, it was, it was a one interesting time. Wonderful.
Like when you, you could. When you play another instrument, and then you come back to your Maggini what, what's sort of the thing that stands out to you about your instrument?
Yeah. The thing that I think about these, feel about, about a lot of these Italian, old Italian instruments is this, it’s just got this sheen about the sound. It's not something necessarily that you'd, that you'd want to hear under your ear, close up. You it’s kind of got this penetrating tone that's not necessarily pleasant under the ear. But what you've got to be relying on is if you, you know, if you give it to somebody else and walk a couple meters away even, and then even further out into the hall, you then hear that what, what's coming, coming out to the audience, you know,  and  sometimes is lacking in,  in other instruments. And it's sort of, when it's nice under the year, you go, Oh, this is great to play, but it doesn't translate to something beautiful in the hall. Whereas this thing, I know that it can, that it it's, it's sounding absolutely warm and rich and fruity out, you know, further you go back purely as a playing experience.
What I love about this one, I mean, it's just really easy to play as well. It's been doing,
shush, shush.
That's his little puppy making noise in the background. 
It's been doing what it's been doing for, you know, 400 years now. So it's just like all of the,  all of the bits,  all of the atoms are aligned. I don't, I really just don't know. I can't, it just works incredibly well. It just does what you want it to do. without having to work too hard.  And also, it's got a very thin neck, which makes it very easy to play. So, the last owner was Erwin Schiffer, who was a teacher and player,  like the Haydn String Quartets and the Ducati and Tahoe String Quartets. So that was 47 years.  So that, that was, that was owned by him for 47 years until 2011.  Before that it was Louis Boday from about 1920 to 1964, who was a Parisian player.  So we don't know anything before that, but I just sort of assumed that it was someone with a small hand.  To make it easier to play, but I appreciate that. I don't have small hands, but just makes it easier to play, which is wonderful.  Yeah. Well, that's good. Yeah. No, it's interesting having to, like you were saying, it sounds good in a concert hall setting and that's another consideration people have to take when. Choosing an instrument, like where they're going to play it and how it sounds.
Yeah, for sure.  And is it a big viola? What are the dimensions?
It’s, I can tell you exactly. It's 43. 8 centimeters.  Well, 17 and a quarter inches.  Okay. So obviously that was cut down.  Like all these instruments, they weren't sort of a, you know, standard size. When we talk about a standard sized viola, what we mean is an instrument with a body length, this does not include the neck, of about 41 centimetres or 16 inches to 16 and a half inches, which makes this one quite a large viola.
But anyway, so this has been cut down up at the c bouts.  Seem to be original. That's about it.  And it's got an original scroll, which  is interesting as well. Which is sometimes, sometimes they don't. And it's quite rough, the scroll. It's funny. When you, when you hold it up to look at it both sides don't really match up.
Not symmetrical. No. Yeah. Not like, it's not like Stradivarius scrolls were something to behold, but this one's just a bit rough.  It's tricky with Maggini. Like, Giovanni Paolo Maggini, we don't know much about him. His instruments aren't dated. But the 1610, that's like he in his life, he was pretty well established.
He was actually quite wealthy. And he was living in a he had a workshop. He'd left Gasparo Da Salo by this point. And he was in his own workshop with his own family making instruments and it was just him and his assistant. Yeah, right.  So there weren't huge amounts of instruments but that's when he would have made this particular one.
Two years later, in 1617, Maggini now defines himself on a legal document as Master of Violins and owner of violins, wood and strings.  Maggini's workshop was on the ground floor and the family would be living upstairs in the living quarters.  Giovanni Paolo Maggini made various instruments like his master, Da Salo, but in this era, the violin was gaining popularity and he appears to have made lots of them.
He also made cittars, tenors and violoncellos.  Musically we are moving into the Baroque period and the musical expression was emphasizing feelings and emotions. The violin was a good instrument for this.
In this earlier period of Magginis, we see the backs and scrolls and sides of the instrument mostly cut on the slab. The corners are quite short and his earlier works resemble quite closely those of Da Salo's.  In the beginning of the 1620s, Maggini's family is growing. He has been married for five years and already has four children. One boy, Giovanni Pietro, and three girls, Giulia Barbera, Domenica and Cecilia Elana.  Giovanni Paolo Maggini decides to move his family and workshop to a bigger premises, and they sell the old house and have now moved into a new house with his four children and assistants.  Maggini's business was successful, even though his family life would become somewhat tragic.
The salaries and wages of his assistants and servants were increased over this time, and his trade stock was larger. In 1626, their new house was in the Contrada della Barca.  Sadly, his first son and daughter died in infancy, but his wife had also had three more children, Giulia, Veronica and Carlo Francesco. So there were now five children.  He also had a property on the hill surrounding Brescia of 10 acres with both a farmhouse and a residential house, and another property on the plains of about seven acres and even a third one closer to the estate of the heirs of the Giovanni Paolo Maggini at Botticino. He most likely inherited property and also had the dowry of his wife. All his wealth probably did not come from his instrument making as he only had one assistant.  The properties of seven and ten acres were most likely came from his wife's dowry as they border on her father's properties.  As his career continues his craftsmanship improves. Very slight hollowing from the edges and higher archings than his earlier work, and later work. Neater purfling and more graceful sound holes.  The heads are more symmetrical and better cut. The bellies are never on the slab and the backs are very rarely so. These instruments could be comparable to Cremonese makers in craftsmanship but would be less fine. The Dumas Tenor is a good example of this second period.
Maggini continued making beautiful instruments, even as the hints of plague and famine were knocking at the door.  In 1628, two years before he died, and at the age of 48, they had another son who would die the same year, and then in the same year that Maggini himself died, Giulia, his wife, had twins, Forstino and Caterina. Faustino would die after two months, but Caterina would live on.  The characteristics of Giovanni Paolo Maggini's making in the years before he died were, according to the Hills, Maggini's third period. He had an even greater quality of workmanship. He may have seen and been inspired by the Amati brothers work, or done so on his own.
His arching is significantly lower with higher edges. Giovanni Paolo Maggini was one of the first in Brescia to use side linings and corner blocks. His earlier instruments had a browner varnish like Da Salo's, but his later instruments have a more brilliant golden orange yellow colour. His characteristic double purfling. And the sound holes are undercut like viols, not perpendicular like the Amatis and Cremonese school.
In 1630, Giovanni Paolo Maggini appears to have died. He was most probably buried in the common pit in the eastern part of town.  During outbreaks of the plague, towns and cities acted differently. In Cremona, people were quarantined in their houses, and as we saw with Nicolo Amati, and in Brescia, the sick were taken to plague houses organized by the city.
This would explain the lack of information about his death, if he died in one of these places and was buried in a communal grave.  In Brescia, during the plague of 1632, the city provided these houses that I spoke of to receive the sick and then throw the dead bodies into the streets. Giovanni Paolo Maggini may have died in a pest house, and this was why there is no record of his death.
He would have been about 51 years old.  Gio Paolo Maggini’s wife and children survived him. Anna survived him and died in November 1651 at about the age of 58.  Of Giovanni Paolo Maggini's sons, Gio Paolo II became a merchant, Carlo Francesco became a silk merchant, and his youngest son, Marco Antonio, became a priest. None of his children took up the trade of violin making.
In this episode, I have gone through the life of Giovanni Paolo Maggini fairly quickly, because it is Strangely now, after his death, that the biggest story of Maggini's career begins to unfold. And for this, I will be talking to two experts who will explain this fascinating story, Florian Leonhardt and Benjamin Hebert.
So join me for the next episode on Giovannin Paolo Maggini, one of the most influential Brescian violin makers, as we unravel the mystery to his posthumous bounding success.  I'd like to thank my lovely guest, Chris Moore, for talking to me today. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please do leave a comment and rating.
And if you would like to financially support the podcast, that would be amazing. You can go to Patreon forward slash the Violin Chronicles to do that. On social media, I have Instagram with the handle at the Violin Chronicles and Facebook is the Violin Chronicles podcast.  Thank you for joining me. And I hope you will tune in to the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.
 
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Ep 12. Nicolo Amati, The calm before the storm. Lutherie and beyond!

In which we look into the young life of Nicolo Amati.
I talk to Timo-Veikko Valve principal cellist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra who plays on an Amati Cello with a fascinating past. 
Tracing the extraordinary life and career of Nicolo Amati, one of the most influential violin makers in history. Join us as we delve into the early years of this legendary craftsman, uncovering the formative experiences and remarkable craftsmanship that laid the foundation for his illustrious career.
Looking into Nicolo Amati's life, exploring the influences, techniques, and artistic vision that shaped his path as a violin maker. From his apprenticeship under his father, Girolamo Amati, to his explorations of innovative designs and meticulous craftsmanship, we unravel the milestones that propelled Nicolo Amati to prominence.
Join us as we uncover the triumphs and challenges Nicolo Amati faced throughout his career, the collaborations with renowned musicians of his time, and the legacy he left for generations of violin makers to come. Explore the craftsmanship, precision, and artistic finesse that made Nicolo Amati a true master of his craft.
 
Transcript
 
  The man known by many in the streets of Cremona, or the poor houses, went by the name of Omobono,  or Good Man. As he crossed the Piazza del Commune, he stopped to give a coin to a beggar, huddled in a corner, and continued on to his destination.  He was visiting a family that had fallen on hard times and were in dire need of help, help that he could give them.
Omobono Tucenghi was a tailor and fabric merchant who lived in Cremona in the 12th century.  His whole life he had felt compassion for those less fortunate, and a need to make a difference in the world in which he found himself.  More days than not, you could find Omobono distributing alms from his seemingly bottomless purse to the poor and needy of Cremona, helping all those who crossed his path.
Over time, Omobono's need to help others did not diminish, quite the opposite in fact, and in his 50s, he decided to stop his trade altogether to dedicate himself to good works.  The only fly in the ointment appears to have been his family. His wife and children were not too keen on their father and husband giving away the family fortune to apparently random strangers he found on the street. But this did not deter him as he continued on helping those in need, giving money from his purse that was always full of coins and never emptied by divine providence, and attending Mass every evening.  One of these evenings, in the church of St. Giles, On a cool November night, he sang Gloria for the last time, crossed his arms over his chest and fell to the ground. At first, no one noticed the devout Omobono, but when the time came for him to read the Gospels and he did not come forward, his fellow churchgoers approached to find him dead.  The citizens of Cremona immediately venerated him as a saint and Sicardo, Bishop of Cremona, personally went to Rome to represent the cause and canonization of Omobono. He wrote in his article  “At that time, a simple, very faithful and devoted man lived in Cremona, who was called Omobono. In his death, and with his intercession, God performed many miracles”.  Pope Innocent III, satisfied with the official investigation into his life and miracles, canonized Omobonos just after two years, in 1199.
That's pretty quick if you were wondering.  And this is the story of the life of Sant Omobono, who is not only the patron saint of Cremona, but also the patron saint of merchants, textile workers, tailors, business people, and entrepreneurs.  Some might say that the real miracle here is that Omobono was an honest businessman. But he is also remarkable in that he was the first person canonized despite being both a layman, not in religious orders, and a father of a family. He was neither a martyr nor a king.  And speaking of Omobono, there is a podcast for violin makers or violin enthusiasts, if you would like to discover it, called simply Omo. You really should check it out.  That podcast is named after one of Antonio Stradivari's sons, Omobono, who was probably named after this Omobono.  But now on with the podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de lutherie in Mirecourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often, when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Nicolo Amati was born in 1596 into a country ravaged by famine and disease on one hand, but on the other it existed in the midst of artistic endeavour, exploration and invention.  Cremona, the city Niccolo Amati was born into, was not an out of the way sleepy village, it was a crossroads literally for traffic and ideas from across Europe, filled with merchants and artisans. Take, for example, the case of Sofinisba Anguissola, a Cremonese girl who was one of five sisters, all accomplished artists, having been schooled in the Cremonese fashion. She was taken to the Spanish royal court to paint portraits and led a fascinating life. Worthy of an episode in itself.  The question to this day remains as to whether she painted the famed Charles IX instruments made by Nicholas's grandfather.
During this time, and in Cremona as well, musically there was instrumental music bursting forth such as the Canzona, the Ricciare, the Fantasia, and dance inspired compositions quite different to vocal music.  In France there was ballet, and in Italy, opera.  Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance, and Cremona was no different. In Casa Amati, Nicolo Amati was a middle child, born into a sea of children, about ten. He was probably number six. His oldest brother, Roberto, joined the army, and his second eldest brother became a priest. He had six sisters, and his youngest brother died presumably as a child, leaving Nicolo Amati the only son to carry on the family business. Nicolo Amati would become the godfather of the modern day violin. He would have attended the local parish school until the age of about 12,  and then in 1610 when he was about 14 years old and truly starting his apprenticeship with his father, news came that his uncle Antonio Amati had died. Niccolo Amati’s father and his brother used to have a workshop together that they had inherited from their father. But before Nicolo Amati was born, the brothers had had a disagreement and split the shop, each brother going his own way.  They may not have been particularly close, especially if the rift between the two brothers was still a thing, but perhaps 22 years on, Girolamo Amati and his brother may have patched things up. Especially as they were still both living in the same street.  Moving on four years, a sad event affected the Amati household once again. The 18 year old Nicolo Amati and his family received the news of an accident on the Po River near Vigivano. Roberto, his older brother, was killed in an exercise during his military service. Nicolo Amati would have felt the responsibility to continue helping his father even more now that there was one less brother to help out.  In 1616, the Amati workshop, with Girolamo Amati and Nicolo Amati working, produced two five stringed cellos. Nicolo Amati was About 20 at this time, so we can easily imagine him helping his father with these instruments.
353 years after they were made, in 1969, they were acquired by the Fleming family in England. And today, one of these cellos is played in the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
I spoke to Timo Veikko Valve, Principal Cellist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, about this instrument and what it's like for him playing on it.
My name is Timo Veikko Valve, and I'm the Principal Cello of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.  I've been in that role for the past 16  years, and I come from Finland originally, but I guess, Sydney and Australia is now  my home.  So at the moment I'm playing a 1616 Brothers Amati cello, which I have had the privilege of playing for the past  Five or six years. I'm a very lucky owner of this quite,  quite special cello, in many ways. I used to play a Joseph Fillius Guarneri cello before that. Which I thought was the ideal cello. And in some ways still, It's a very, I guess, softly spoken and chamber music kind of  has a character of chamber music in, in its kind of  personality. Whereas the Amati is a more robust and more, assertive and actually can be quite loud. So when I joined the orchestra  in 2007, one of the first things that I was asked to do is to go cello shopping. So I found the Guarneri for myself,  and uh, so it was my Not bad. No, it was, it was really amazing experience actually to kind of go into that world, which I obviously hadn't visited before, you know, going instrument shopping of that level in London and yeah, funnily enough, the first instrument that I saw on that trip was the Guarneri. It was a bit of love at first sight, but I mean there were a lot of, a lot of other instruments that we tried on that trip, you know, um, Stradivarius, uh, Montagnana, so like Really top end cellos, um, worth  much more than what the Guarneri is actually worth, but, uh, but still somehow it's just,  it sounded like me.
So anyway, that was my first relationship for 10 years.  And now I'm enjoying life with the Amati. Originally, it was built as a five string cello. It was modified into a normal conventional four string cello in the mid-1900s.  It was previously owned by a British rather famous cellist called Amaryllis Fleming. Well, she was I guess a superstar of the, of the time. So she owned, a Guarneri, and two Brothers Amati.  And both of those Brothers Amati were actually five string cellos. I've met the other one, which still today remains as a five string cello in its original uncut form, which is amazing. So it's a, type of cello that was more common during that time. Nowadays it doesn't really have a, it doesn't get played often. I mean, there's a very limited kind of Baroque repertoire that utilizes the five string cello, but, unfortunately. That's why a lot of those five string cellos have been converted into conventional four string cellos.
Easier to sell.
Easier to sell, yeah. So that's what happened with this one. But what I think is also quite amazing about this particular, my cello is that, and perhaps this is because it was a five-string cello, so it wasn't played so often after it was built. It was, I don't know, perhaps it has sat in a collection somewhere for a long time, but I think in the, certificate, they describe it as a unprecedented amount of original varnish. So if you look at the cello, it looks actually, it has a bit of wear and tear, but it looks relatively healthy and new, you know, given that it's been built around 1616.  To have so much of original varnish, especially in the back, um, is quite amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's. It's quite rare.
I remember the first time in the workshop, it was just the instrument and I walked in and I just said, Ooh, what's that?
Antoine was like, Oh, that' Tipi’s.  Like, it's quite striking. Like you kind of stop and look at it.
There's another element, I mean, I guess, so like a lot of, a lot of instruments, they would have been cut down, and this one was cut down as well at some point. I guess there's no concrete date for this particular instrument, but the dendrochronology says that, um, that the latest are from 1612,  but they can also say. Based on that research that same, same word from the same tree was used in other Brothers Amati instruments, another viola and another cello. So there's, there's, um, kind of a concrete link, which is quite fascinating that they can do that. 
Yes. Yeah, it's cool.  And it has, it has double purfling, doesn't it?
Yes. Yeah. Which, which I guess is, as far as I know, is not normal for an Amati instrument. But that would have been added when it was re edged. Someone, someone said that it's probably been done to kind of give a visual kind of distraction of the, I mean, the edging work is fine. Perfect. Like you, you can't really see anything. It's, you know, you really have to look in, you can see a couple of spots where you can see seams, but it's done so well that, yeah, I don't know. It's probably just a trick of an eye. When the instrument was introduced to us about six years ago, I wasn't particularly looking for another instrument because I was, you know, I was in a very happy relationship with the old one.
Then the orchestra decided, oh, it's, you It's a great opportunity let's just go for it. Purchased it without a clear view who would play it and but it came quite obvious relatively kind of naturally that it's a cello that kind of needs to sit in the principal cello role  or the principal cello seat kind of has the ability to well as a soloist or as a leader to kind of rise above just in kind of power rise above the orchestra if needed.
I really enjoyed the collaboration with the Guarneri, it kind of, it taught me so much about  what's possible, what's actually possible on a cello, but on the other hand, that particular cello was very moody. It was very fickle at times,
It, would come unglued a lot. Yeah. I remember that. It would, it would, yeah, it would, it would react to the environment a lot.
It's quite sensitive. Yeah. So for traveling, it would, it would have a lot of bad days and, and then it would have good days as well. Once I met the Amati, things are really easy with this, like, and I can just trust it and kind of let it go. It's kind of almost doing all the hard work for me. So that was also, that was obviously, um, an aspect that was, was, um, kind of appealing. It's a colleague that kind of is making my life very easy at the moment, you know, it's just allowing me to do, I guess, even more things because certain things are just, just easier. And it might be just that physically I have to do less because the power of the instrument, the natural power of the instrument is so generous.
Just play it lightly. Let it happen.
Yeah, it's interesting you've got, like you were saying, there's your personality, your role in the orchestra, the instrument's personality, and then how your instrument fits in with the other instruments. That's right. There’re all these relationships.
Exactly.
Happening. And the bow as well, that's another.
Absolutely, yeah. You know, it definitely, there has to be a, like, it's so obvious if there's no link between the player and the instrument, regardless of what it is, if it's, you know, the best instrument in the world. If there's no chemistry. You can't force them to be friends.
So it's almost instant. Like you can sometimes when we try instruments, you just know directly that, you know, this particular violin that Hayley picks up, it just wouldn't fit her at all and then it would be fine, you know, played by Richard or someone else, but yeah, so it's definitely. I think it's very important that the instruments are, that you forge a relationship with the instrument yourself and find a kind of a comfortable place with the instrument and 'cause it's your, it really is your partner in crime.
So, yeah, I think we, you know, we're obviously very lucky to have all these instruments and kind of being able to go about it in that way that we, we are not, someone just buys a instrument X and then gives it to the orchestra and say, Hey, you have to play this. Sometimes it happens like that, but often it's us looking for the perfect instrument for the player, for the organisation, for the, you know, with the sound of the group in mind and the sort of values that we want to emphasise.
You're auditioning a new housemate.
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.  Oh, and, and it's not like this is an orchestra where there's like one amazing instrument. We're not anymore. No. And it's like, you've got all these. Yeah, it happened. It happened actually relatively quickly. I mean, it used to kind of be like that.
It's it's obviously has to start from somewhere. The first instrument was a Guadagnini violin and that just opened the gates. And relatively soon after that, it became this thing in Australia that, you know, just people wanted to support arts in this particular way and buying instruments. So going from one instrument to what I think at the moment we're sitting at about 10 instruments all happened in relatively small  time span, which is amazing.
Yeah, it's exciting. And you've got the new Strad as well.
There's a new violin in the family as well. Yeah, which is just good.
So I was wondering this, so this instrument, what's it like playing, um, music that if  Say you're playing on a modern instrument, Bach, for example, or then you're playing Bach on an instrument that's written,  like the time that it was made, do you think it  adds something to how you play?
It's an interesting question, especially because, you know, in its original form, this cello, when it had five strings, one of the most prolific, The thing that the five string cello was meant for, or what it had in its repertoire, was the Sixth Suite by Bach. That would have been probably the biggest single work that that five-string cello would play.
It's interesting to kind of think that, you know,  That's probably the music that's been most played on that cello. And also that when Bach wrote the cello suites, this cello would have already been 120 years old. It would have been an instrument that inspired Bach to write the music. Maybe it even met him at some point, who knows.
And do you set it up with gut strings? I do sometimes, yeah.
How does that go? 
Well, yeah, I think all cellos love gut strings.  Love to have gut on. At least I've kind of felt that every time I've been with different cellos, if I put gut on, I can kind of feel that they, they feel, the instrument feels happy. Like they, they're relaxed and often I feel that they just open up. Much more than what they would be in a kind of a more modern, tight setup. What I've found that even if you do it occasionally, It kind of, it just, it just gives the cello a bit of a holiday. And then when you go back to the modern setup, It's still kind of, the cello still feels refreshed. I encourage people to do that, Even if you don't want to play gut strings all the time, Or repertoire that you would play on gut strings all the time. It's really interesting to just try it  and give your instrument a holiday for a couple of weeks.
A spa.
Yeah. A gut spa. Yeah.  It's a weird thought, but it's really, especially with the Guarneri, I felt like the first time I did it, I learned so much more about the instrument. Even though, you know, neck angles and that sort of thing would have been changed from how they were. Originally, it's still kind of, it still feels like that just with changing the strings you're kind of, you know, time traveling with the cello into a place where it was previously like, you know, just jumping back  two or three hundred years and meeting that same cello, again. So it's, yeah, it's interesting. 
So you're going on a time travelling spa retreat with your cello.
Yes, yes, this is perfect. I should write a book.  A time travelling cellist.  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think actually another, another interesting aspect of the cello is that, of this particular cello, is that, so Amaryllis Fleming was half-sister of Ian Fleming, the famous James Bond author.
So, so there's um, I guess literature and that sort of stories are kind of linked to this, this instrument. And I guess, you know, potentially, well, not even potentially, I think, you know, because she was a cellist.
And a secret agent.
Well, that inspired him, Ian, to write, uh, I think it was, I don't remember what the movie is now, but, but there's a, there's a couple of scenes where Cello is, uh, is in a main role and I think even her name is mentioned and, anyway.
Yeah, there's always those play on words. Yeah.  Girolamo Amati would have made your cello.
I guess I wanted to ask you that question, maybe you know better, because I find it weird that Antonio kind of stopped his affiliation to the business quite early on, but still the label says Brothers for another almost 40 years.
Yeah, so he sort of held back a bit and then when his brother died, he like started using, quite put the label everywhere, but he was still actually using the label  before and people think it was more like a brand. Right. Even so, even though the instrument would have been totally made by. Girolamo Amati.
Yeah, it's like when you've got like a company and it'll break up, but they keep that. Yeah.  So you keep, you keep the label. And I personally think that maybe he just couldn't be bothered getting more labels printed. Could be. Yeah. So I always thought that, you know, Oh, I mean,  uh, that it feels weird that he wouldn't want to then kind of, I guess, advertise himself as the, you know, the prolific main maker.
We don't really know, but I, yeah, the main theory is that it was the  brand. It was quite successful. Keep it that way. It would just be confusing.  And people were like, actually, I ordered a Brothers Amati instrument, not a, what's this?
Yeah. What's that horrible name that I can't pronounce?
That keeps changing from Girolamo to Heronimous. Exactly. The Ian Fleming thing. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, that's a picture of her. And I think that's, that's the Strad that she's playing. But she, yeah, she had, like I said, she has had Stradivarius, a Guarneri and two Amatis.
So, they were like wealthy to begin with.
I think so. So, she would have been prolific just like the heart of her career would have been like between the worlds, I guess. So, I guess the market would have been a bit more different as well for instruments. And um, I think it says that she gave the German premiere of the Elgar cello Concerto. So very kind of big stuff and, but then was, was in a way shadowed by  Jacqueline du Pre kind of stepping onto the scene. And at that point she felt like she needs to then do something else. You know, now Jacqueline is the new cello soloist and you know, I guess there's only room for one. And she started to tour the circuit and so Amaryllis Fleming was getting less, less soloist work than what she had before. One thing that she So what she then decided to do is to look into the, into the performance practice of the Bach suites in their original form.
So that's, that's probably why she actually acquired those two.
Yeah, that's when she bought those two cellos. I believe so. So that she would start performing the suites. I mean, the suites were already obviously being played, but mostly in a kind of a modern sense. And she was one of the first cellists that really looked into the, uh, performance practice and started performing them with instruments that were, yeah, more suited to them, you know, probably using gut strings and then definitely for the sixth suite to use a five-string cello.
That's nice to be able to go, look, I'm the Bach suite. Yeah. I'm going to buy myself two cellos. Two Amatis, please. It's quite, um,  it's like, I don't, know if anyone  today, like a musician,  you know, regardless of, uh, regardless of how wealthy they may be, I don't think anyone today would own  a collection of instruments, like a musician.
And she owned them outright. They were hers? I think so, the family, you know, so, so. Because often they're like lent. No, no, I think there's a mention in there that family was wealthy, but yeah, the family did acquire all those instruments for her and now subsequently they've been maintained by this foundation
In the years following the order for these two cellos the inhabitants of Cremona may not have realized the true state of affairs that were surrounding them there was a delayed arrival in the Spanish silver from the Americas to the Spanish court, so Philip II  stopped paying his people in Milan.
Cremona made up part of the Duchy of Milan, and mucking up the market, they were in recession now, and then in 1627, the first signs of the dreaded plague started appearing in the countryside and in the larger cities.  Nevertheless, as time passed, the Amati's business prospered, and Nicolo Amati enters his mid-twenties. He's living with his parents. His father, Girolamo Amati, is in his late fifties. Some of his brothers and sisters are still at home, and it is life as usual for the time being.  Back in the workshop, instruments being produced clearly had Nicolo's hand in style, even though they are labelled with the Amati Brothers label. Their craftsmanship can be seen to differ. Nicolò Amati would make more elongated corners than his father, and his archings were conceptually different, being progressively less scooped inside the edges.  He was different to his father also, in that he used maple with a pronounced flame, and the wood was less smooth.
Slab cut on the maple. This type of wood is often seen on the brothers Amati instruments.  As Nicolo Amati was the only son helping his father in the busy workshop, they enlisted the help of the two husbands of Nicolo's sisters, his brothers in law, Vincenzo and Domenico.  We're not sure what they did exactly in the workshop, but Vincenzo was still working in the shop into the late 1620s, when the lives of the Amatis would be changed forever.
Carlo Chiesa, violin maker, expert and author, living in Milan. 
And at some point Girolamo needed, also more people working with him. And since he had only one, male son, but he had daughters he hired, the husbands of his daughters. Vincenzo Tili and Domenico Moneghini. We know their names and we know that they joined because at some point they split.
Nicolò Amati again divided his workshop with his  brothers in law.  And so since there exists these, notarial documents in which they  divide the workshop or one, sells his partnership to the other, we know that before that they were working together. But this gives us an idea of how important the business was. It was a business in which there were three people, three serious, three partners. 
So, after he split with his brother's in law, I imagine they stayed in the same street, too.
No, I'm not sure about that, because, they were all in the same street. Yeah, but, this was in the span, I'm, convincing a story that, comes out of a span of 40 years, so it's not exactly.
Okay.  But we are speaking of men  like we are today, so of course they work together side by side for years, and at some point, possibly, they say,  I go, that's it.  You want to be the owner, you keep it, but I go.  I don't think we know exactly what, the husbands of the daughters, of Amati did, one of them was called the Dei Cornetti,  which probably means he was a musician.
From the 1580s, things had begun to strain in Cremona. The cracks in the market could be seen to those who knew where to look. In the 1590s, with famine and economic downturn, it was a slippery slope. A series of setbacks and disasters had accumulated to create a crisis.  Individually, they would have been overcome, but the one after the other was devastating to the economy.  After the famine, there was a moleskin crisis. That was their textile industry. In the 1600s, there was a collapse of the wool guild. Another of their city's biggest industries. There were more famines in the 1620s, and then boom, in the 1630s, plague killed almost half its inhabitants.  This came about with the War of the Mantuan Succession.
This was the war that James Beck was talking about in the Previous episode, where everyone decided to invade Mantua after their Duke died. And there was a bit of a hoo ha about who the Duchy belonged to now. It was basically a war between the French and the Spanish about a highway.  This ended up causing the spread of disease and wiping out almost half the population of the country in some areas.
But this is a story for the next episode, where we will see the disappearance of many violin makers, but also the beginning of something big in the history of the violin.  Please do go ahead and follow the podcast and leave a comment or rating. I'm always delighted every time I hear from listeners and every rating and comment helps the podcast to happen.
A big thank you to my guests, Carlo Chiesa and Timo Veikko Valve for joining me today.  If you would like to support the podcast financially, that would be amazing. And you can head over to patreon. com forward slash the violin chronicles for that. There are bonus episodes I will be putting up on that platform also alongside all the current.
Also, if you would like to contact me, there is the Violin Chronicles at gmail. com. And I have Instagram with the handle, The Violin Chronicles. That's where I put a lot of images from these episodes up. And I'll leave you now with Tipi playing his 1616 Amati Brothers. Cello.
 
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Ep 11.The making of Nicolo Amati with Benjamin Hebbert

The Amati Brothers were working and living in a time of musical innovation and discovery. Join me as I discover what influences Monteverdi, music and even fashion had on the instruments the brothers were making.
intertwines the stories of the illustrious Amati brothers, renowned violin makers, with the musical genius of Claudio Monteverdi, one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era. Join us on a captivating journey as we explore the parallel worlds of instrument craftsmanship and musical composition during this remarkable period.
Musicians and Luthiers of the renaissance such as the Amati Brothers had to continue their craft amidst famine, plague and war making these instruments musicians play today objects even more remarkable than we could have previously imagined.
We continue to look at the life of Girolamo Amati the father of the very talented Luthier Nicolo Amati who would in turn change the course of violin making in Italy for ever.
In this episode I speak to Dr Emily Brayshaw fashion historian and Benjamin Hebbert Oxford based Violin expert.
Transcript
  Once upon a time on the northern plains of Italy, there roamed a hero who went by the name of Romulus. You may have heard of him as the legendary founder of Rome, perhaps? But what's a strapping god like young man to do once he's founded one of the world's greatest cities?  One day, as he was travelling through the Po Valley, Romulus came upon a group of people who were struggling to defend their village from the fierce Gaelic tribes roaming the region. The people were in need of a strong leader, and Romulus knew just the man for the job, himself.  He gathered the people together and said, “I will help you defend your village from these invaders, but we must build a great fortress to protect ourselves”.  The people thought this was such a great idea that they set to work building a mighty fortress immediately on the banks of the Po River.
The people began to dream of a great city that could rival the power and glory of Rome itself.  Romulus, who had been a beloved leader of the people, heard their dreams and knew that he could help them achieve their goal. He said to them, If we are to build a great city, we must first establish a strong foundation. We must build our city upon the principles of justice, wisdom, and strength.  And so the people of the village began to build their city. They laid the foundation stones with great care and constructed a wall around the city to protect it from invaders.  Romulus oversaw the construction and he ensured that the city was built to the highest standards possible.
As the city grew, Romulus knew that it needed a name. He looked out over the fertile fields of the Po Valley and saw the bright flames of the forges that dotted the landscape. He turned to the people and said, We shall call this city Cremona, which means to burn, for it is the fires of our forges that will light the way to our greatness. And so the city of Cremona was born. It grew to become a powerful centre of trade and culture in northern Italy and was revered by many as a shining example of the principles of justice, wisdom, and strength that Romulus had taught them. 
And this is the legend of how Romulus founded the city of Cremona.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine Lespets, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie au Mircourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, But here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery, that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to the story of Andrea Amati's two boys, the Amati brothers, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati.  In the last episode, we left them after they split the workshop and Antonio Amati went off to set up on his own, leaving Girolamo Amati with the house and shop to continue alone.  The Amati brothers stopped working together in 1588, but if you remember the episodes on Gasparo Da Salo over in Brescia, you would realize that their Brescian competition was still working away, and in 1580,  eight years earlier, a future employee of Da Salo's was born. His name was Gio Paolo Maggini, and he would go on to become a roaring success.  Girolamo Amati, however, had other things on his mind. As I mentioned earlier, his first wife, Lucrenzia, had died shortly after having their daughter, Elizabeth, and his new wife, Laura, had a full house to look after and a famine looming on the horizon. Girolamo Amati, in this decade, made some beautiful instruments, including the one played by Ilya Izakovich in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Baron Knoop violin, and a painted violin for the French King Henry IV, to name a few. Girolamo Amati was now in his late 30s, and Laura was pregnant again. The news wasn't good. The Po River was rising and the plains around Cremona were flooding. The crops would be ruined again, like they had last year.  The grain yields were a third of the previous years, and outbreaks of typhus were hitting the rural areas, affecting those who grew the grain, and the disease was even worse in the heavily populated cities.
After several years of bad weather, flooding, and storms, the cities were deeply in debt from having to buy grain from abroad.  For the next two years, matters only got worse. News was coming from other cities on the Po Plains, Bologna had expelled the so called useless mouths, people without citizenship, beggars, jobless foreigners, and even those who were employed but not highly skilled in a trade. They were saying that it was to reserve the scant food supplies and to prevent overcrowding and outbreaks of epidemics.  The governing bodies in the cities were afraid that the poor would revolt and steal the little food that was left in the city's reserves. But the people from rural areas where the crops were spoiled were flocking to the cities where they knew there were grain stores. Four fifths of the population lived in rural areas but would be turned away at the city gates.  Bologna was 150km from Cremona. The same could happen here. Already 10, 000 people had died in that city and 30, 000 in the surrounding countryside. In just 10 years, Cremona had gone from a boom to simply struggling to stay afloat.
In 1594 and 1597, there was a famine and an economic downturn in the region. And it was also the year Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was premiered. Throughout these lean years, Girolamo Amati was still making beautiful instruments, violas, violins, and cellos. His choice of materials were of the finest standard and so was his workmanship. The sound quality of his instruments differed as well from that of his competition in Brescia. But he was keeping afloat and even had a recent order for a set of instruments for the chapel of the new king of France, Henry IV, who had managed to survive the religious wars by converting to Catholicism, saying famously that Paris was worth a mass. Paris vaut bien une messe. This new set of instruments were to be decorated with the coat of arms and in Latin gold leaf red. King Henry IV, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre.  I speak to Benjamin Hebbert about the authenticity of the Amati Charles IX instruments and musicians at this time.  Which is the end of Catherine de Medici's reign and the beginning of Henry of Navarre's reign.
Well, I think Catherine de Medici is, in France, is just such a huge influence.  Charles IX is a child king and really has no power. And then he dies, is sickly. And then his brother who had become king of Poland is brought back and he becomes Henry IV. And then Catherine de Medici dies. I'm going to say  1587, I know I'm wrong,  but around about that time there's a wonderful quote about, you know, people would give  more regard to a dead goat than they would to Catherine de Medici. There was a point at which her power was over.  Henry is assassinated within a year of her death, and Henry of Navarre, who is a Protestant, a Huguenot, comes in and becomes, becomes king. And at that time I think what we have to consider is that, you know, so right up until, right up until the end of the Valois dynasty, you know, it's all Catherine, it's all about Catherine de Medici, it's all about her, it's all about her triumphs and her successes.  And then one of the things that happens there's been actually sort of various Musicologists have speculated that the Andrea Amatis aren't, aren't authentic. And one of the reasons is that the earliest French orchestral music is for a completely different orchestration than these Italian instruments offer.  And what I think when you look at these things, the propaganda of the painting all over them is very specific to the Valois. The Valois were hated.  Uh, they massacred enough Huguenots to be really, really hated. When Henry comes in, he's set, you know, they're played by Italian musicians. They're playing music in every corner of the court.  Their eyes and ears, which are open for Catherine de Medici, they're, there's not. A lot of difference between a spy and a musician in the 16th century and there's, you know, right the way through spies and musicians are kind of the same things because they're the people who can pay attention to what other people are doing, they don't have any other agenda. So all of that's expelled. I think these things get, you know, stuck in a cupboard somewhere and from the point that Henry of Navarre comes in. So if we, if we only think of them in, you know,  in the perspective of Catherine de Medici, then of course it makes sense. 
And then, as things started to look a little better on the famine front, the sun poked its head out from behind the clouds, so to speak. On a cold winter's night in December 1596, Girolamo Amati and Laura had their sixth child, Niccolo Amati.  His parents were probably just hoping he would survive the winter and his infancy. But Niccolò Amati would not only survive, he would go on to change the course of violin making history forever.  I know that sounds rather dramatic, but he does, he really does.
While Niccolò Amati was busy being a baby, 60 kilometres away, a fellow Cremonese citizen, the talented composer, and accomplished viola da gamba player. Claudio Monteverdi was also about to change the history of music in his own way.  Monteverdi was working at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, and had been for the last six years. He had had the best musical education, being a student of the wonderful Marc Antonio Ingenieri, the choir master, at the cathedral in Cremona,  and was amazing people with his madrigals and other compositions. And so when the current maestro di cappella at the Mantuan court named Gesche de Wecht, (he was Flemish), died in 1596, the same year Niccolo Amati was born, Monteverdi just knew he really, really, really, really wanted that job. The new head of the strings department at the Mantuan court was his.  It also paid really, really well.  But did he get it? No. Who do you think did? It was  Benedetto Pallavicino, the other guy from Cremona. That's who. Okay, so he was like 17 years older than Monteverdi, and in cahoots with the now dead Werth, the old head of the music department, but who was better? Well, Claudio obviously thought he was, and now he had to pretend that this totally didn't bother him. But his time would come.  In an age when even royalty can drop dead of an ear infection, only five years later, Palavicino died of a fever.  Monteverdi lost no time scratching off a letter to the Duke. He wrote to him, sending his CV via a long winded letter that went something like Blah, blah, blah, blah.
“And finally, the world having seen me persevere in the service of your excellency, with my great eagerness and with the goodwill on your part, after the death of the famous Mr. Strigio, and after that, the excellent Mr Geish And again, for a third time after that, the excellent Mr. Franceschi  and No, and again lastly, after the death of the nearly adequate Signor Benedetto Palavicino, and I, who have sought not on the basis of merit, but on the grounds of the faithful and outstanding devotion that I have always displayed in my services of your excellency, the post now vacant in this sacred art.”  That was one sentence.
This was an important CV, as you will see, because only a few years later, the most excellent Francesco Gonzaga would ask Montiverdi to write what would soon become a smash hit piece of music. An opera. At the same time I would have a good think about this job that appears to have an alarmingly high mortality rate.
Dr. Emily Haw, fashion historian.
so this is in the Mantuan  Gonzaga court and what's interesting with this court is that even though they were very heavily aligned with the Habsburgs.  And so essentially the Gonzagas of Mantua, they were kind of only minor players in Europe. And so what these, so they were in like Northern Italy and what these minor players had to do was Habsburgs essentially, like, really depend on big allies and relatives and to bolster their reputation and to protect their borders. And so they kind of aligned themselves with the Habsburgs and in turn they had to show loyalty to the Habsburgs but they couldn't really afford big armies. So what they did, they did it with cultural production, and they spent all their money through cultural production, and we see this in November 1598, and this kind of is almost like the forerunner for these operas of Monteverdi And so Margaret of Austria, who's the Queen of Spain, and so she was a Habsburg Margaret of Austria. She was married to become the Queen of Spain. She passed through Mantua on, for a five day stay on her way to Spain in November 1598.  She was 14 years old and off to Spain to get married and Duke Vincenzo of Gonzaga arranged for five days of festivities and amusements and this included a very elaborate performance of Battista Guarani's pastoral play. It's all theatre.  And he wanted to, the Duke Vincenzo, wanted to show that Mantua was as magnificent as any other court, but he did that through staging these spectacles. And we've got accounts of the time. These were just amazing apparently.
And it wasn't too far from Cremona, right?
So you know, it's actually, yeah, definitely, definitely, you know, depending where the best ones are. And so we know that, um, you know, he had also at court by 1607, 800 people including writers, artists, musicians, and even a troupe of commedia dell'arte actors, enjoyed Gonzaga patronage. They're also patrons of the Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens, and so these You know, spectacles held sort of 10 years earlier, you know.
And Monteverdi.
Yeah, Monteverdi is definitely one of these patrons. Yeah, definitely. These lavish costumes and that's the thing with these Medici costumes as well, and then the Monteverdi costumes for these, they're being designed to appeal to contemporary tastes.  And so, to give you sort of a sense of these spectacles, the play for Maria of Austria, this big costume, you know, music drama, it's got more than 80 different ones in rich fabrics and colours. And that was used for the inaugural performance of Teatro Olympico. And, in portraits of the era and the shoulders are, we can see in these portraits, the neckline sits right down around the upper forearms part. Off the shoulder dress. Here we've got this here in a  Mary Princess Royal portrait, and we've got like this really low down, cut down, and it would have been very, very difficult  to raise your arms and your elbows would have been, you know, set right down. And we see this a lot in like the Peter Lely portraits. Yes, so there's a lovely portrait of a woman playing a gamba.  You sort of see with that, and she's got one of these gowns on.
A bit of talk about menswear, so this is like a lot of cloth with gold and silver embroidery, and again, that's sort of like a rich flex.  Shoes by that period, we're getting like high heeled shoes, and we're starting to see, even before that in the 1600s now, moving forward in that decade, the farthingale, what's happening with the farthingale is the hems are rising. So we're getting these high heeled shoes for the first time with  red, heels and, square toes.  But yeah, these sloping shoulders that we're seeing in the 1650s would have contributed to that. You know, the elbows being kept closer to the body. You know, keeping your body front on the instrument being held lower against the layers of fabric and then playing like that being everything being held close in.  
The classic gamba playing posture  would have worked, but.
Oh, would have worked perfectly.
But, uh, having to stick your. elbows out or lift an instrument high just wouldn't have worked.
No, no. So that's why the instruments, you know, we do still have pictures of violins being played quite low and held quite low.
Although Niccolo Amati would have the good fortune to survive plague, pestilence, war and disease, his life would not have been an easy one. He grew up in a particularly turbulent time, even for Cremonese standards.  In the marketplace, Girolamo Amati would have participated in discussions about the state of the city and the Spanish governor, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, stated the need to fortify the city's walls,  noting that the citizens were “numerous and warlike”.
And if anyone needed a defence wall, they did.  If they needed fixing, which they obviously did, who was going to do it?  The city's defences and other repair and maintenance appears to have been an ongoing discussion with no one really wanting to fit the bill for the works needed inside the city walls.
But as time would tell, the state of the city's walls would be the least of their problems in the years to come. The Amati household would have definitely been a loud one with 10 children of varying ages, 6 girls and 4 boys. There was Niccolo's eldest half-sister, Elizabeth, who was about 14 years older than him. His oldest brother, Roberto, who was 9 years older than him, had joined the army.  His second eldest brother was training to join the clergy, and his parents were probably encouraging some of his sisters to do the same, as dowries for 6 girls were not going to be easy to come by.  He also had a little brother who died as a small child and another younger brother Stefano that we know nothing about. All we know for sure is that Niccolo Amati would help his father making instruments and soon would come to be his right hand man.  In 1607 Niccolo Amati would have been 11 and most likely helping out his father in the workshop. The Amati family still had their fine reputation and Girolamo Amati had an order for a tenor viola for Pope Paul V.
The painted decorations on the back would be done by a local artist and then returned to the workshop for its final coat of varnish before being sent off. Today this viola has been reduced and the painted griffin on the centre of the instrument has been modified somewhat. I think someone tried to fix it up but it looks like a damp bunyip in between two cherubs unfortunately.
But business was good in these years. Quite a number of instruments left the workshop and a variety of violins of various sizes. Violas and bass instruments were produced.  They were at the centre of musical life in Cremona. The workshop had a steady flow of musicians, music dealers, church musicians, clergy and messengers representing the nobility, so that they would have had news early on about the new opera coming to have its debut in town.
What is amazing in Renaissance Italy is that artistically, the area was a shining star, even though politically and economically it was in a free fall. Areas poverty stricken and ravaged by war and heavy taxation. And yet there were amazing motets, madrigals and operas emerging from all of this.
Emily Brayshaw.
So Orfeo, uh, and, and the spectacles in the Mantuan court, the use of the area in front of the stage was also used performance.  And there was also an active involvement of the audience and this kind of sought a new balance, scholars have said, in order to connect this fluid continuum of stage and auditorial. And it was kind of this representation of openness peculiar to courtly circles. So, you know, sometimes musicians would have been on the stage or perhaps in front of the stage or don't know that necessarily there was a separate pit all the time.  Or, you know, whether they're sort of coming out and playing and then going away, or whether they're coming out on stage performing while some people sing and then there are sort of lots of different. Things that they could be doing. And the Orfeo actually came to Cremona.
Girolamo Amati had just had his sixth child, which was Niccolo Amati. And so he would have been a baby. He would have been about, about two when this had happened. And they'd actually staged this in Cremona. So he could have met, there might have been like a Trip with the, going with them. It could have been local musicians. Um.
So this is something that potentially the Amati family could have gone to and seen.
Oh, look, and you know, if you are making and playing and very much involved in this world, part of keeping up to date is to watch performances, look at performances. Keeps you up to date on trends, tips, techniques. Styles, aesthetics, all of these things are, you know, really crucial to not just like keeping abreast of your skills, but also in a way, you know, the Amatis are part of the tastemakers of this era with their incredible instruments. They're setting quite literally the tone.
And so seeing and hearing how these instruments are then used and engaged with. Because the, Charles IX instruments, they were made, when Catherine and Charles did their grand tour. Right. But I'm, I'd be, I wouldn't be surprised if those same instruments were used, years later in the Ballet  de la Reine because they were, you know, they fitted in with all the bling that were covered with gold and decorations and that was. And they were this beautiful, this beautiful consort of instruments that the royal family had. And that's the thing too, like you don't just chuck it away.
All anyone could talk about in musical circles was Cremona's very own Claudio Monteverdi's opera.  It was supposed to be an amazing spectacle, mixing singing, dancing and drama.  Moving on a few years, as Niccolo was helping his father in the workshop after school, the world of music was being rethought. Where once it was being used to convey the omnipotence of God, his creativity and power. Composers were now using it to convey the human mind and emotions, to feel love, rage, jealousy and passion.  Shakespeare was writing plays in England, drawing on classical drama and using Greek and Roman plots to recreate political commentaries of the day. In France, it was Ballet, and in Italy, it was Opera.
It all started in Florence, where a group who called themselves the Camerata met. They were poets, composers, artists, scientists, and philosophers.  It was another one of those academies I spoke about earlier. They wanted to recreate ancient Greek theatre, and they believed it was done through song, not the spoken word. The group would meet to discuss what the music of the Greeks would have been and delved into conversations about astrology, literature, philosophy, and of course, singing. One of the members was Vincenzo Galilei, father of the Galileo Galilei.
After years of talking about it, they finally decided to do it. They would create the ultimate art form that would combine music, poetry, drama, dance and design.  Things got off to an awkward start in 1600 when they staged a very heavy and somewhat depressing production at a wedding. It was Eurydice's. Totally not reading the room with themes of doomed love and man's arrogance. They were not feeling the vibe at this raucous wedding feast, so that sort of deadpanned.  But things really took off when the philandering, hardcore gambling and sometimes murderous Vincenzo Gonzaga, over in Mantua, decided he would like one of these new opera thingies of his own.  But the music this time would be written by a young man working at his court, Claudio Monteverdi, a talented composer from Cremona.
This opera was called Orfeo, and like that Poof. Opera. Took off.  Fifteen years earlier, the younger Monteverdi had come to the Mantuan court to work for the Gonzagas.  Every Friday evening, there would be a musical soiree. Monteverdi would write and perform madrigals, and they would be performed in private concerts above the Duke's own rooms, in a mirrored trapezoidal room. Their reflections would have been reflected into infinity. It must have been psychedelic.  When Monteverdi wrote the opera, he wrote about human emotions, drama and passion. It was an immediate success. After being performed at the Gonzaga Court, it went to Cremona, Turin, Florence and Milan.  To accompany the singers, Monteverdi had an ensemble of instruments. A harpsichord, a chamber organ, cello, viola da gamba. Harp, and different types of lutes.  Normally you would just pick one or two of these instruments, but Monteverdi used all of them. Way to go Claudio.
So here we are in Cremona at the end of the 1500s. The Amati family are in the midst of musically exciting times, and Niccolo is a young boy growing up destined for great things as well. 
And this brings us to the end of this episode on the Amati brothers. But stay tuned for the next one as I talk to Timo Vecchio Valve as he tells me all about the fascinating history of the Amati Brothers cello he plays on.
It's a very cool story. James Bond is involved.
This brings us to the end of this Amati Brothers episode.  In the next, I will still be talking about Girolamo Amati and his work, but also introducing Niccolo Amati, his son, perhaps the most well known of the Amatis.  The father and son's lives and careers overlap, and so do their episodes.  I finished this story in the late 1500s, and just a few kilometres away, in Brescia, Gio Paolo Maggini is living and working at the same time as Niccolo Amati, and will be hit with similar catastrophes.
So very soon I will be going sideways and leaving Cremona and the Amati story to fill you in on the Brescian makers before coming back to finish the Amati dynasty.  Thank you very much for listening to this episode and I hope you'll join me next time for the Violin Chronicles.  Right now, you're listening to a live recording of the Boccherini.
If you would like to support the podcast, please head over to patreon. com forward slash The Violin Chronicles and do that. It would be wonderful to have your support and you will also have access to bonus episodes and the All You Need to Know podcast, where we go through each maker and quickly detail their life and do a rundown of the characteristics in their instruments and how to recognize an instrument from each maker.
Do subscribe to the podcast or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you want to follow on Instagram, the handle is at the Violin Chronicles.  Until next time, goodbye.
 
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Ep 10. The Amati Brothers ”Fraternal Fallout: When Brothers Collide” The age of the Viola.

Continue listening to the tale of the Amati brothers to help understand who made which instruments from now on.
 Is the violin making center of Italy the most boring city in the world? Well, we will see what 16th century tourists think in this episode continuing the story of the master violin makers that are the Amati Brothers. Violin maker and expert Carlo Chiesa talks to us about the Amati Brothers and why they had such a big falling out as does Oxford based violin expert Benjamin Hebbert. We hear from Ilya Isakovich violinist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra who plays on an Amati Brothers violin and the history of that particular violin.
 
Transcript
  In the autumn of 1441, in the city of Cremona, a great wedding was taking place between two powerful families. The bride, 16 year old Bianca Maria Visconti, was the daughter of the Duke of Milan, and the groom, 40 year old Francesco Sforza, was a brave warrior and trusted advisor to the Duke.  As the wedding feast was being prepared, disaster struck. A great drought had struck the land, and the city of Cremona was left without the necessary ingredients to create a grand dessert for the occasion.  The cooks and chefs frantically searched for a solution, but to no avail.  Desperate, one of the chefs had a brilliant idea.  He decided to take what little sugar and almonds they had left and mix them together with some honey. He cooked the mixture until it became a soft, chewy confection that could be cut into small pieces. He then shaped the nougat, or torrone, into the form of the city's famous Torazzo bell tower.  When the wedding guests were served the nougat, they were amazed at the sweet, nutty flavour and chewy texture of the new dessert. They exclaimed that it was the most delicious treat that they had ever tasted, and they begged the chef to reveal the secret of its creation.  From that day on, the recipe for the nougat was passed down from generation to generation, becoming a beloved part of Italian culinary tradition. The nougat was said to have been a symbol of the ingenuity and creativity of Italian chefs, who could turn even the most meagre ingredients into something truly magical.
This is the legend of Cremona's Nougat, and to this day you can buy Nougat shaped as the Torazzo Tower.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine Lespets, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthier, in Mircourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.
Welcome back to the story of the Amati brothers. In the last episode, we left them in the midst of a busy and productive period in their lives. Girolamo Amati, the youngest brother, is now a widower after his wife Lucrenzia died shortly after the birth of their daughter Elizabeth.  The brother's father, Antonio Amati, has passed away and Cremona, being Cremona, was insanely busy with its influx of merchants and soldiers passing through, and never far from drama and disaster, as we will see.
Because of continual war and armies marching through the town, the walls were in a sorry state, but life ploughed on as usual, and no matter how bad things got, people still wanted music, and musicians still needed instruments. Towards the end of the 16th century, 1583, Cremona was described as  a city filled with sumptuous buildings, both private and public. There were an abundance of temples and monasteries, wide and spacious streets. The walls of the city have almost completely fallen to the ground due to the numerous wars in the region, and the villages around the walls were ruined.  One traveller to Cremona at the time was a little bit nonplussed by the place.
This is an excerpt from a 16th century tourist writing what appears to be a type of lonely planet guide. His name is Maximilian Mission and his book is  ‘A New Voyage to Italy Together with Useful Instructions for Those Who Shall Travel Hither’.
We followed the course of the Po at some distance. Until we came over against Cremona, where we crossed over the river in a ferry boat. There are no bridges on the Po below Turin. Cremona is seated on the left bank of the river in the Duchy of Milan. It is a pretty large city, but even poorer and less populous than Piacenza. There is nothing at all to be seen in it, though its tower and castle are very much extolled.  One of their authors has the confidence to tell the world that the Tower is reckoned to exceed all others in height, and for that reason, esteemed one of the wonders of Europe.  And that the castle is the strongest and most formidable citadel in Italy.
If I had not been accustomed to the lofty and hyperbolic  expressions of the Italians, I should have been strangely surprised, after all these rodomonts.  To find nothing at Cremona worth observation.  The castle is an old, shapeless, and half ruined mass, which in its very best state deserved not to be compared to a well contrived fort,  but perhaps might have been reputed tolerable in the days of crossbows. And the tower is neither handsome nor very high, but inferior to a thousand that are not so much as mentioned.  It was built by Frederick Barbarossi  in the year 1184. There is a tradition that the Emperor Mondi and Pope John the 23rd went up this tower with a certain Lord of Cremona who repented afterwards as he several times declared that he did not throw him down from the top to bottom, merely for the rarity of the thing.  And perhaps it was this story that gave the first occasion to the reflections that had been made on the height of the tower. The inhabitants of Cremona boast much of the antiquity of their city, but they produced not any monuments to confirm it. The antiquity of Cremona has a very near resemblance to that of the Po. In the distance of 14 miles from Cremona to Mantua, we saw nothing but hamlets that deserved not to be named. Only Bozzolo is a sort of little city enclosed with certain works which pass for fortifications.  It gives title to a duke who, besides his place, is sovereign of a territory that extends four or five miles. We passed Oglio in a ferry boat, and great and rapid.  Apparently boring as it was.  The city was doing okay, but the effects of war were beginning to show. The walls might have been in a bad state, but in town there was a movement amongst the monasteries and local congregations towards creating new foundations. These included orphanages. There were colleges for youth education, boarding schools, a conservatory opened in  1587 to welcome young girls in danger, that is, who did not have a dowry and risked therefore to take a bad path. The Jesuits built a magnificent new church in 1602. The Church of St. Peter and Marcelino. For women, there were sisters who taught in the schools and boarding schools. They dedicated themselves to the education of young girls who belonged to the most distinguished and wealthy families of Cremona.  These nuns were not pushed into seclusion. They are interesting in that they were free to go to the local church, leave the buildings when they wanted to, and embark on charitable works in the community, such as looking after the poor schools. This gave a particular atmosphere to the city, with many in the religious orders out and about.  In the spring of 1584, Girolamo Amati married for a second time. His first wife, Lucrenzia, had died shortly after the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth. And now, Laura Medici Lazzarini, niece of a prominent nobleman, and a distant cousin to the famous Banking Medici's.
At the time of Girolamo Amati and Laura's wedding, the city of Cremona was thriving. The factories in town were working at full speed, especially in the textile sector, where wool and moleskin employed a large part of the population.  The city was growing as the factories were expanding, and the nobles and rich merchants were building palaces and stately homes. The Amatis were now a well respected family. Andrea Amati had finally been able to buy their house a few years before his death, and now his sons, the brothers, Antonio Amati and Girolamo Amati, had inherited both the house and a prosperous business.  They made instruments for important people, nobles and royal families.
Girolamo Amati’s marriage to a member of the lesser nobility shows an overlapping of the respected artisan class and the more wealthy noble class.  Laura's dowry would have helped as well, but as with his first wife Lucrenzia, Girolamo Amati had to share Laura's dowry with his brother Antonio Amati as he was now head of the family.
I spoke to Carlo Chiesa, researcher, author, and violin maker in Milan.
Why is he called Hieronymus sometimes, and it's a Latin name, Hieronymus is the Latin from Geronimo. So I use the Italian, but it's the same name. 
And on, on his labels it's, Hieronymus. He uses a Latin form, Hieronymus. Is it always Hieronymus?
No, sometimes it is Geronimo but the reason is that if you use the Latin name, it is Hieronymus. So for foreign, not Italian speaking people, I understand Geronimo is a bit difficult to remember and Hieronymus is much easier because it's also German and  the English form for Geronimo.
So I think that's it. It's just is Latin. 
No, come on. We are speaking of four generations, five makers, you know. We're set. We're the Brothers,  Amati. Why do you think there was such a large age gap between, between the two brothers?  Yeah, we don't know exactly. Apparently Antonio Amati, but we consider that is just a theory that  Antonio Amati was born much  Many years before Girolamo Amati.
So Gerolamo Amati was much younger.  Antonio Amati was apparently an old man, a middle aged man when Geronimo was a boy. So since this I supposed at some point that they were half brothers  because perhaps there was a second wife,  could they have had Antonio Amati and then had a bunch of girls, because I feel like sometimes they just don't say if they're girls.
There are three, three sisters.
Oh, in between?
 Yes.
Oh, I mean, so it's possible. I mean, if you're like 18,  when you have the first kid and then  28, 30, 38, 40. Yeah, you can do that. It's possible. 
Absolutely. Everything is possible. And I really, I also think it was not so important at that time, probably because the family was a  family in which if the head of the family was a strong man.
It was not possibly so important if he had a second wife and the sons were not sons but half-brothers.
I spoke to Benjamin Hebert, expert and instrument dealer in  Oxford. 
They overlap, like the fathers and sons, obviously. But as you were saying with the Amati brothers, their lives were quite different to Andrea Amati, I imagine, in that they were in Andrea, even though They were, my understanding is they were occupied by the Spanish, but it was quite peaceful and, and orderly life.
And then they go into this period of, like, like you're saying, like,  being basically trampled and then getting up and getting squashed and then getting up and getting trampled again, the city of Cremona.  Yeah, it’s, I mean, it's one of the things you go around. I mean, you obviously go around Florence and Pisa and places like that, and it's full of wonderful stuff.
And, gosh, I found  a mid 17th century account of Cremona by an English traveler, which is just where he basically says this is the most boring town in the country there is nothing to see here, there is nothing of note.  And he actually sort of gets a bit angry about it, and he says, you know, they boast that they've got the highest tower in the whole of Italy, but, you know, even that's not true. And, The poor guy really is beside himself that he's gone all the way to Cremona and there's just nothing to see. You know, they're even sort of famous for having a bridge, but they don't have a bridge. And  but  All of this was, you know, the relative poverty of the town and all of that kind of stuff, you know, is because it was changing hands so repeatedly and being, not just changing hands, but because it was having, you know, it was being garrisoned by people who would then be leaving and other people would be garrisoned and so forth.
It can't really develop economically.  So, so the, the investment in a better cathedral or whatever, I mean, the cathedral's great and but it's, it's really kind of interesting to hear in English. I mean, in the 1650s, really, really sort of giving a real one-star trip advisor.
As for the roulette of childbirth at the time, Laura was luckier than her predecessor and seemed to have no trouble having babies. One was probably on the way by the next year when things started to get a bit worrying.  The weather had been terrible not only around Cremona but in the whole region. News was trickling through that crops had been ruined yet again.
One year of spoiled harvest was bad enough but several years in a row spelled disaster.  Prices for bread and basic food items were rising in the marketplace. There was simply less and less to sell or buy.  It was now eleven years since Antonio Amati had passed away, and the workshop had been busy. One of the characteristics of the Amati brothers work was the variety and willingness to experiment.
At this point, instrument sizes were not standardized, and the workshop was exploring different possibilities, making varying sized violins, some very small, others larger. Cellos with four or five strings. Violas of differing dimensions. Sets of vials and other stringed instruments.  But living and working with a sibling can take its toll. The budget was strained at home and tensions were rising between the brothers. Antonio Amati was at least 13 years older than Girolamo Amati, and he had grown up working with their father, much longer than his little brother.  But differing characters, living in the same house, and working together was getting too much.
There were financial stresses, and Girolamo Amati had a family and children. He may have resented having to share both his wife's dowries with his older brother.  Four years after marrying Laura, and with famine looming over the region, the brothers were no longer speaking to each other.
Yeah, I find it, I find it hard to, there's not that much about the Amati brothers to go on.  Although, you know, they do have that fight, the famous fight,
the famous fight. They sort of know that the thing they're most well-known for is fighting.  Yeah. I mean, Antonio Amati is a lot, you know, his  21, you know,  We think he's born around 1540. Girolamo Amati, we think, is born in  1561. I mean, really, you know, they're well and truly old enough to be father and son.  And, they're having sort of, yeah, put up with each other that way. And, yeah, so, if Antonio's probably about You know, in his twenties, by the time that Andrea Amati, his father, is making these instruments for the French court, he must be complicit with him. And then this guy who's twenty years younger than him suddenly comes along and, you know, by 1600 we see the same, you know, we suddenly see the edge work that  We see right the way through the Amati   dynasty, we see, you know, even to Strad and so forth, and, you know, the, the birth of, you know, the final birth of the Cremonese violin as we know it is something that happens. I don't know when, I don't, I don't know what the earliest instrument I'm going to find with it, but it's closer to 1600 than it is to even  1591. It's, there's a lovely viola in the Ashmolean Brothers Amati and it's still, it's still a prototypical one as opposed to a typical kind of, kind of Amati. And so, between Andrea Amati and, you know, perhaps his son, maybe we should give him credit as part of it, you've got something where they've figured out the mathematical structure of the instrument. They've, they've actually done revolutionary things which differentiate these from, from other instruments. They've actually seen them as a, as a kind of architecture and, and they've got a model which they're happy to go on with for over 30 years. And then the other son that's 20 odd years, years, years junior, seems to rise up and says, No, that's, that's not good enough. We're going to do it differently. And actually it's Girolamo, Girolamo Amati, I think, this little son, who for whatever reason,  you can, I, I can see it as, is that breath of fresh air that figures things out. Or that little such and such, who's just, has no respect for tradition and makes a pain of himself in the workshop. 
Yeah, so Girolamo Amati’s instruments are quite, you see them as being quite different to the  Andrea Amati I think, I think the simplest thing is if you lie a violin, you know, imagine lying at the back of a violin, as flat,  and you take a marble and you let the marble roll off in any direction then the marble is going to just  carry on like a ski jump, straight out into everywhere. And it does that because for the whole of the surface area of the back or the front, everything is unrelentingly mathematical.  It's following a Curtate Cycloid, which is a fancy piece of mathematics, and there's nothing that's going to stop that. Girolamo Amati basically puts the edges on the tray.  And, but those are really interesting because they reinforce where the ribs meet.  Meet the back and the front, and they actually allow the whole thing to be a little bit more flexible just on, just on the inside. So if you take a Girolamo Amati and roll a marble down it, I'm not suggesting you do that with a real Amati. Then it won't fly straight off. It’ll It either skip over or it'll sort of fall, fall into that sort of trayishness of that nice round thing. And that's one of the things that makes an awful lot of difference. The instruments actually become far more unified at that point. You know, there’s far more predictability in how they look. There's just all sorts of refinements. He obviously loves what's been done before and it's very interesting. So the brothers Amati, their labels actually say Hieronymus and Antonius, they used the Latin. Their names are Antonio and Gerolamo.  Hieronymus and it then says that they're brothers. And then it also says that their father is Andrea.  And even despite all of these fights, Girolamo Amati, you know, Antonio dies in 1607. Girolamo Amati’s got another 23 years to go before he dies.  And he still labels his stuff, whether his, whether his brother's in the company or not, whether his company is dead. He, right up to 1630, he carries on labelling his instruments as the Brothers Amati, who are the sons of Andrea Amati.
And because of the plague, and everything that's going wrong, and the uncertainty of the market, when Niccolo Amati comes in, it's still the Brothers Amati, and even when Girolamo Amati is dead, and Niccolo Amati is the only one that's left, through the 1630s, there's instruments that he makes entirely, and he doesn't quite have the courage to put his own label on them, he just pretends that the Brothers Amati is still going.
So there's something there's something very human and touching about that. There's also something about the importance of brand, and how they wanted to be identified as this continuation. So when Girolamo Amati, and later Niccolo Amati, his son, are making things which are different from what Andrea Amati is, there's still every label that they write is communicating that they are part of that tradition which goes all the way back. I think musically speaking, Andrea Amati is looking for something which is loud and brash and harsh. Because of what he's been asked to do, even by the 1590s, the Amatis are trying to make something which is softer and more, more of a mixing, you know, instruments that mingle better.
In 1588, Girolamo Amati wanted out, and he demanded Antonio Amati return his share of both Lucrenzia's and Laura's dowries.  Probably knowing full well he was in no position to do such a thing.  They would split the workshop between them, and no longer live under the same roof.  As Antonio Amati could not afford to repay the dowries, he handed over his share of the family home and moved out. But not far, just down the road.  That was probably a bit awkward.  Anyway, they still had nothing to say to each other, and winter was coming on, so lawyers drew up a document on the 20th of December stating that Girolamo Amati had to divide up all the tools, instruments, moulds, and other items in the workshop and on the following Thursday, Antonio Amati would come and choose which pile he would take.  Antonio Amati could use the workshop for another two months, but then he would have to leave and never set foot in the building again. 
Carlo Chiesa.  And in fact we see that the brother Amati developed the outlines. Of the instruments by Andrea Amati, and then Nicolo Amati again developed the, the outline of the instruments by the brothers.  And then when we arrived to Antonio Stradivari at the end of the 17th century, that is more than a hundred years after the death of Andrea Amati. At that point, Antonio Stradivari goes back to make something that is much more similar to what Andrea Amati made as a start. That's my idea, at least. Maybe I'm, I'm wrong, but if you compare the instruments, our time of instruments from Andrea Amati made in the 1560s to the instruments made by Antonio Stradivari after 1705, that is after the period of the long pattern instruments, then they perfectly fit.
Through notarial documents, we know that the Amati ran an important workshop in which there were many people working, not just Andrea Amati first and then his two sons later, but  we know that at some point the two sons of  Andrea Amati, the so called brother of Amati, they split  in 1588.
And Antonio Amati went on working on his own, while Girolamo Amati went on working on his own. So, also when we say the production of the Brothers Amati, in truth, all of that comes from one or the other of the two brothers and then Antonio Amati died in 1607.  Meaning, before many of the instruments made by the brothers Amati were made.
They did work together at some point, didn't they? The brothers?
They worked together until 1588.
It was a bad, bad break up?
A bad break up, of course. And but, but  a bad break up, but Antonio Amati stayed to live in the same street, which is a street about 30 meters long. So it's and he should
That's awkward.
Yeah. I  don't know. Divorce are always sometimes. Painful. So, and then, then what happened, it was that the Girolamo Amati had a wife and son,  Nicolo. At that time, Nicolo Amati was just four years old.  But then Girolamo Amati went on working hard, and Nicolo Amati joined him at some point. And I'm sure that while Antonio's workshop was a small workshop. The important part of the Amati workshop was the Girolamo Amati workshop.  And at some point Girolamo needed also more people working with him. And since he had only one male son but he had daughters  he hired the husbands of his daughters.  Antonio Amati set up his workshop and from now on was known more as a lute maker than anything else but was still used from time to time the Amati Brothers label, as did Girolamo Amati.
The brand, Amati Brothers, was still lucrative, it seemed. And documents we have no documents speaking of his marriage and we just have his death record in which he's called Antonio Amati De Iliuti,  not De Violini, meaning that maybe he was going on making mainly plucked instruments and not  bowed instruments, because I'm sure they made also all, all of these makers.
Down to the  Guarneri's, at least,  we have documents in which, by which we know that they made also plucked instruments. All of them are lost.  Of course, they had workshops in which they did not make just violins.  So maybe, maybe, Antonio Amati specialized in plucked instruments and Girolamo Amati in bowed instruments. But that's a theory. And as for the other part, if I have no family records, but we have no, no records for  daughters or sons  for Antonio Amati, so maybe he never married. 
Okay. Was, would that have been unusual? 
Not particularly. It happened, so.  Don't ask me if there's  I don't know. Also, with Stradivari, that's much better. Think of Stradivari. He had many, many sons. He had many sons. He had at least four or six children, and just one of them got married when he was a boy of 30.  Francesco did not marry, Omobono did not marry, Giovanni Battista did not marry, and the two other, Alessandro and Giuseppe, both of them went to be priests.
So that's an interesting  In town there was a group Girolamo Amati would have definitely known about, called the Accademia degli Animosi.  In Cremona, there were not many places to perform music outside the church, and as there was no noble court, what they had was the animosi. It was a group of people who met in a nobleman's palace, the Marquis Camillo Estanga.
One of their purposes was to meet once a week and give a talk on moral or natural philosophy. All the important stuff.  Before or after which there would be a musical concert. They had a violinist, a lutist, and four singers they employed for the gathering held on a Thursday.  Monteverdi writes in a letter about the gatherings, as he has some of his compositions performed there. In a recount of one gathering, there was a rich reading of poems by some academics, followed by music with selected voices, turbos, violins, and bass vials, who entertained the whole audience very joyfully.  Vast amounts of music were composed for the Accademia Degli Animosi over the years, but none has survived. We do have descriptions of some events, such as the election of a cardinal, where the party was described as being lively, with lighting of fires, music for two choirs, drums, dances, and choreography of various kinds.
Back in the Amati house, Girolamo Amati and Laura's family was growing, which was nice, but actually not so great, it turns out, because it looked like the food shortages and famine were only getting worse as they had more and more mouths to feed. It was harder to buy basic provisions for the family. Prices for food were going up and up as supply was diminishing. The markets were emptying out of sellers simply because they had almost nothing to sell, and what they did have was costly.  During this time, Girolamo Amati made a violin that today is played in the Australian Chamber Orchestra here in Sydney.
I speak to Ilya Isakovich about what it's like to play on this Amati Brothers violin.
My name is Ilya Isakovich  and I play in the violin in the Australian Chamber Orchestra  for nearly 19 years now. At the moment, I'm extremely lucky to be the custodian of this amazing brother's Amati violin.  It's kind of a dream come true. I think for every musician, especially violinist, you sort of grow up and hear the legends. About Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. Those three names mostly come up as  the greatest violin makers of all time from Cremona. So, I never actually imagined that. I will be playing one of those three makers violin. I was born in Ukraine, and of course those instruments are incredibly expensive and difficult to obtain, but I always dreamed about it, and I, I was kind of imagining what it could be like playing one of those.  Yeah, so it's very emotional.
And here you are.
Yes, here I am. Yes.  Well, there is in my mind, there is such a thing as the Italian colour of sound It's kind of like a pedigree a noble timbre to the sound, which you hear the violin, you know, and you say, oh, this is Italian.  Usually, I would associate it with kind of very deep, deep sound, and at the same time, very,  So usually you play those instruments and even not so much under your ear, but if you are in a larger space, they project incredibly well on the whole. But this instrument the Amati Brothers, you kind of play and people say, wow, it just, It just speaks. I think there was some kind of secret those makers possessed that allowed them to make instruments that, work incredibly well in large spaces. I'm not even sure what it is. Maybe something with the geometry or something with the timber.
Yeah. And how does it how does it blend with the other instruments in the orchestra? Oh, we, it blends incredibly well. The interesting thing about the ACO is as lots of people are saying, we are  essentially an orchestra of soloists.  So it does not only have to blend with the others, but everyone has got his own personal voice, which really matters in, in the complex sound that we produce. There are only 17 of us, so everyone matters a lot. And we're extremely lucky. I don't know of any other orchestra in the world at the moment that has access to such an incredible array of instruments that we, so we got a Guarneri del Gesu and at the moment three Stradivarius,  two Amatis, Guadagnini and also Joseph Guarneri.
So the, the best of the best. Da Salo.
Da Salo, exactly. Yeah, Vuillaume, you can tell, you can tell the whole history of the violin in this one orchestra.
Exactly, yeah. And it's quite incredible because It also makes such a substantial difference to, to the sound that the orchestra produces, that it makes us sound even more special.
You have incredible players and incredible instruments. Yes. You now have an incredible building. What else? We're looking, we're looking at the harbour bridge, out the window, the water. But yeah, do you, I know your other instrument is 17th century as well, but does it change anything playing on a, do you think playing on an instrument that has a history as rich as an Amati Brothers violin, for example?
Of course it does. Yes. This I think this violin is actually 16th century because it was made in 1590.  Yes. So it's it's the second oldest instrument in the orchestra after Max's Gasparo Da Salo and it's quite incredible to know that  some actually  pretty famous people have played on it.  I know there was a amateur violinist called Lady Cecil.
There's a Strad called the Cecil. Yes. Is that her as well, do you think?
It might be. I'm not 100 percent sure.  There was also some a Dutch writer.  Roon who also owned this instrument. So yes, you, you kind of, you played and you feel incredibly lucky to be  kind of connected to all those people as well,  lay their hands on this. It doesn't take much effort at all to make it speak, the instrument, you know, and I am hoping as I said, I'll play it for as long as, as possible.
Yeah, so in 1590, what's interesting is that there was a famine in Lombardy. Yes. In Cremona, and it was actually the worst famine that Italy ever had. It was very severe. And there was just torrential rain and it wiped out the crops and the farmers couldn't like several years in a row, so they just couldn't bounce back. And so it's interesting to think that. His wife, Nicola is not born yet, but like they've got other children and there's this.
It must have been quite a stressful situation.
There's no food and, and he's still.  Making, you know, beautiful instruments.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine, actually, what it was like living in those times with having  the, not having the basic things that we're used to so much now, like food and warms, electricity and, you know and still creating basically art you think of it's, it's kind of the same period as all the Italian Renaissance painters, you know, it's, for me, it's a piece of art. It's not just an instrument. to play and you think how much work goes to create such thing.
I mean, it's, it's not only  art, I suppose, but it's all mathematical, it's thought out, it's geometry, it's proportions, it's, and, and an artwork at the same time, it's a whole, and they were also, at that time, kind of the violin as an instrument wasn't really very much kind of set in stone in terms of what it is, you know, and how it should look. So the dimensions, for example, and all the proportions kept changing all the time.  And Andrea Amati, who was the father, is considered by many to be the kind of the father of the violin, as we know it.  It’s actually a pretty different instrument to what Stradivari later produced and Guarneri changed it a lot as well.
So it was all kind of experimental at the time. And yet it works. And it works amazingly well.  Yes, I think the, for example, this particular violin, the dimensions of it are quite small compared to, as I said, the more modern and larger models of  Stradivari and Guarneri and then all the makers who tried to copy them.
It's even more incredible that it produces this kind of sound of that magnitude that it does.  With a smaller body. Yeah. 
Can we  see it? Can I see it?
Yes, absolutely. I remember you brought it into the workshop a few months ago, didn't you? Yes, yes, yes.  I, I had Antoine replace the  bridge.  Yes. How is it? It's beautiful, yes, and no issues since then.
Yeah, it's very delicate looking, isn't it? Yes, exactly. It's almost like ladylike. Yeah, and the scroll is very, like, fine and, very quiet, like, Pronounced archings, but it's still got that that's the typical Amati Brother’s scoop. Yeah. And it's kind of very high arching.
Yeah. It'll do the scoop and the, the bulge. And what's the, is there like a pin in the back here?  That was, yeah, it looks like cause you know, they used to hang the violins  in the shop.  Ah, yes. And they would just drill a hole. Yes. Yeah. They would just drill a hole. 
Do you know when that was, when they, like, at what period they did that?
I don't know.  It's like, yeah, we know, we just drill a hole. Yeah, drill a hole, why not?
And it's also quite remarkable that you look at it and you think it was made in 1590. And it's in such amazing shape. Yeah. I mean, it's  And the varnish is Varnish is, most of the varnish, original varnish is still there  and no, no damage, no cracks, no.
You expect if you, yeah, so it's obviously been well looked after. Every owner has, exactly, every owner had the respect for the maker, which kind of leads to sort of a continuity of  the idea that Amati was a good maker don't,  like, don't, don't mess with it.
And here we leave the Amati brothers, each one going his own way. Their own way, but still staying in the same street nevertheless.  And it is understandable from this point on, on the majority of instruments in the violin family are by and large attributed to Giolamo Amati, the younger brother. Antonio Amati, as Carlo Chiesa mentioned, appears to have veered towards the plucked stringed instruments as a future record of him as a lute maker appears.
Their standing as luxury instrument makers does not appear to have been affected as they continue to undertake orders creating beautiful instruments for wealthy patrons. But life has a way of being unpredictable and surprising, as the two brothers will soon find out as the next century approaches. So at this stage we are at the second generation of the Amatis, and Girolamo Amati is about to have a son, Niccolo Amati, who will do something quite extraordinarily different to his father and grandfather, and change the history of violin making forever.
So do stay with me for the next instalment of the Violin Chronicles. But for now, I'd like to thank my lovely guests on this episode, Ilya Izakovich, Benjamin Hebert, and Carlo Chiesa.  If you would like to support the podcast, please head over to patreon. com forward slash the violin chronicles and do that.
It would be wonderful to have your support. And you will also have access to bonus episodes and the all you need to know podcast where we go through each maker and quickly detail their life and do a rundown of the characteristics in their instruments and how to recognize an instrument from each maker.
Do subscribe to the podcast or leave a review on Apple podcasts. And if you want to follow on Instagram, the handle At the Violin Chronicles. And what you're hearing right now is Timo-Veikko Valve play on a 1616 Amati Brothers cello.  Until next time, goodbye.
 
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Ep 9. The Amati Brothers, the extraordinary journey of two violin makers.

The sons of Andrea , "The Amati Brothers" took violas, violins and cellos to new heights with their incredible skill and innovation. Meet Antonio and Girolamo before things get complicated in this first episode.
This is the story of the Amati brothers, Antonio, and Girolamo. Join me as we explore the remarkable craftsmanship, profound influence, and indelible mark left by these legendary violin makers.
 Discover the distinctive characteristics of their creations, renowned for their elegance, exquisite sound, and unparalleled craftsmanship.
 Delve into the secrets of the Amati brothers' workshop, uncovering their innovative techniques, meticulous attention to detail, and the artistry that made their instruments treasures coveted by musicians and collectors worldwide.
In this episode I speak to Cellist James Beck and Violin maker and Expert Carlo Chiesa. 
 
Transcript of Episode 
Welcome back to Cremona, a city where you can find almost anything your everyday Renaissance citizen could desire.  Located on a bend of the impressively long Po River, bursting with artisans and commerce, we find ourselves in the mid-1500s, and more precisely in the home of Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati, otherwise known as the Amati brothers or the brothers Amati.
In these episodes, I'll be talking about Andrea Amati’s two sons, Antonio Amati and Girolamo Amati. Sometimes Girolamo Amati is also referred to as Hieronymus, the Latin version of his name.  Because I'm doing these podcasts chronologically, we heard about the early childhood of the brothers, in the Andrea Amati episodes.
As we heard in the previous episode, Antonio Amati, the elder brother, by quite some years, perhaps even 14 years older than Girolamo Amati, inherited his father's workshop with his little bro when their father died.  They grew up in Cremona during the mid-1500s, in a time that was relatively more peaceful than their father's childhood and would have attended the local school.
The local school was attended mainly by children of merchants and nobles. They would learn, in addition to the traditional subjects of geometry, arithmetic, and even astrology, subjects such as geography, architecture, algebra, and mechanics, both theoretical and applied. This created quite a well-educated middle class that the brothers would have been part of.
Like their father, they would go on to be quite successful in their business, adapting their products to the demands of the time. The brothers were growing up in post Reformation Cremona, and the instrumental music was bounding forward. Renaissance composers were fitting words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion.
Humanists were studying the ancient Greek treaties on music and the relationships between music and poetry and how it could.  This was displayed in Madrigals and later in opera and all the while the Amati workshop along with other instrument makers of course were toiling away making instruments so that all this could happen.
Now the eldest brother Antonio Amati never appears to marry or have a family but the younger brother Girolamo Amati apparently a ladies man, does and as you would have heard in the previous episodes, when he was 23, he married Lucrencia Cronetti, a local girl, and she comes to live in the Amati house, handing over her dowry to her new husband (Girolamo Amati) and father in law (Andrea Amati).
A few years later, Girolamo Amati’s father saved up enough money to buy the family home so that when he passes away in 1576. Girolamo Amati is in his mid-twenties and his older brother (Antonio Amati) is probably around his late thirties. They inherited a wealthy business, a house, and a workshop.  So here we find the Amati brothers living and working together in the house and workshop in San Faustino (Cremona).
Antonio Amati, the head of the household and Girolamo Amati with his young bride. Business is looking good, and life looks promising.
Antonio and Girolamo may have been some of the only violin makers in Cremona, but they were by far not lone artisans in the city. They were surrounded by merchants and tradespeople busy in industry. There were belt makers, embroiderers, blacksmiths, carpenters, boat builders, masons, terracotta artisans, weavers, textile merchants, and printers, just to name a few of the 400 trades listed in the city at this period.
Business was going well for our violin makers. There was a boom in the city. Many noble houses were being built amongst which the grand residences of merchants stood out, sanctioning their social ascent.  Charitable houses, monasteries and convents were popping up like mushrooms around town.  Ever since the Counter Reformation, the local impetus to help the poor and unfortunate had flourished.
Wondering what the Counter Reformation is? Then go back and listen to episode two of the Andrea Amati series. Where we talk about what the Reformation was, what the Counter Reformation was, and what its effects were on artisans in Cremona.  But nowhere said organized religion like the Cathedral. And entering the vast, echoey structure was something to behold, with its mysterious, awe-inspiring grandeur, the towering heights of the ceilings inspiring a sense of reverence and humility.
The vaulted arches and frescoed domes drawing the eye upwards, the kaleidoscope of colors entering the windows, and the glittering of precious metals illuminated by flickering candles, ornate furnishings, intricate artworks, sculptures, and base reliefs with depictions of saints, biblical stories, and the scenes from the life of Christ covering the walls, all created an otherworldly feeling and a sense of the divine.  And what would the Cathedral be without music? The glittering of gold, the fragrant smell of incense, and the heavenly sounds of music were an all-in-one package for the regular church attender in the Amati Brothers Day.
The Chapel House School of the Cathedral produced many talented composers, yet the church would only sponsor and permit sacred music. And even then, this music had to be in full compliance with the Council of Trent. This meant following a whole bunch of rules in composition. Wing clipping of aspiring young composers led to many of them moving away to other courts and cities who were looking for fresh, raw talent.
This may or may not have been the case for a musician and composer called Claudio Monteverdi. But what we do know is that he left Cremona to join the employ of the Mantuan court at the age of 23.  I spoke to cellist James Beck about Monteverdi, who was a Cremonese composer who left the city to work at the Gonzaga court during the Amati brother’s lifetime.
And so Monteverdi, for example, to take him as an example, he was employed in the court, in the Manchurian court, and he was just one of many musicians and  composers. And also I'm wondering about just, the everyday life, would they also,  were musicians expected to, to wear certain.  Clothes, like they were just told, look, this is what you're wearing.
James Beck
Livery is the term for the, the uniform of the house. And we know about that kind of stuff from, you know, Downton Abbey and all that kind of stuff so musicians were very much part of the servant class, a very intellectual servant class and a very trusted servant class, but Monteverdi arrived at that Gonzaga court in Mantua as a string instrument player of some kind. We don't really know if it was a gamba, you know, between the legs or brachio held like a violin. He was at the court for about, I think, 10 or 15 years as a string player before he became The Maestro de Capelle and of course that was a very trusted employee because he accompanied his employer, the Duke, on various war campaigns or social outings to other countries, as a musician and maybe as some kind of trusted part of the entourage. So, Monteverdi was picking up lots of ideas about things that could go on in music because he was witnessing different practices, he was in Flanders. He was in Hungary. He was in other parts of Italy seeing how they did music over there on the other side of the fence and I think that is what can never be underestimated, that communication was haphazard and accidental in previous times and there was no such thing as uniformity. So, to go to another country and to go to another court and to see musicians who had different training or had come into different spheres of influence to yourself would have been hugely, hugely exciting and influential and we think that Monteverdi picked up some of the ideas of what might be opera from these kind of trips.
Linda Lespets
It makes me think of when I was a student and I would do work experience in different workshops and they would, I had been taught in French school, it was a very specific way of doing things and I'd go to another workshop and I'd just be like, wow, it's like, what are you, what are you doing? How could this possibly work? And it does. And you're like, oh, and now I feel like I, the way I work, it's a mixture of all these different techniques. What works best for me. And it must've been magnified so much, to such a greater level for in that period for music and competition. Because of the, because of the social isolation and the geographic isolation of previous times.
James Beck
And I mean, just if we just talk about pitch, whole idea of what is An A was different in each town, and it might have sounded better on some instruments than not so good on others, and those instruments would have been, you know, crafted to sound good at those different pitches. And now we all play the same pitch, and we want every instrument to be the same.
What were some of the, if you could generalize, what were some of the differences for you? In the different Lutherie schools.
Linda Lespets
 So, in the French method, you basically hold everything in your hands or it's like wedged between you and the workbench and you don't use really, uh, vices. And I have quite small hands and  I did one work experience and the guy was like, just put it in a vice.
And I was like,  Ohhh, and I was getting a lot of RSI  and sore wrists and it kind of just, it was sort of practical as well.
James Beck
Wow. And is that for crafting? Individual elements or is that for working on complete instruments? 
Linda Lespets
Like in general, like you just, you can make a violin without using a vice and they, they won't use sandpaper or it's all done with, scrapers. So it's good. I know all the different techniques and I can, when there is a blackout or an electricity failure, we can just keep on going. Like, we can keep rolling, it doesn't stop us.  There was a thing with Monteverdi that, that you seem to know about how madrigals.
James Beck
I know about madrigals. I hope I do.
Linda Lespets
 In Mantua and the, this kind of trapezoidal room.
James Beck
 There's a very special room in the ducal court.  Ducal castle or Ducal palace in Mantua, and they call it the wedding room and it's a room that was, had existed for some time. I mean, it's a huge, huge palace, I think it's the sixth largest palace in Europe. So, it's 34, 000 square meters, 500 rooms.  And this is not, I mean, Mantua was not a big state.  You never know when you need 500 rooms.  It wasn't a big state, but it was a very aspirational state. And they really wanted to kind of prove themselves amongst these, the cultural elite of Northern Italy, because there were extraordinary things going on in Florence and Venice. So, you know, they were really, the Gonzaga's were really trying to hold their own. So, they had one of these 500 rooms slightly remodelled. So it was of cube proportions.  Right. So, you walk into a cube. You walk into a cube and then, they commissioned, a very, uh, distinguished painter to cover, everything within that room in very realistic, uh, lifelike portraits of, of the Gonzaga's going about their life. And this was the highest status room in the palace, and it was used for various purposes to impress. So, it could be used for ceremonies, or it could be used for, as a bedchamber for the Duke if he wanted to receive a guest of high status, and show that guest that he slept in this incredible room.
Linda Lespets
Slightly creepy.  All these people looking at you.
James Beck
 I know, and they're really, there's a lot of eyeballing in those portraits.  So it's like, you're outnumbered. Like when you go in there, like you're surrounded by people. You're surrounded by the Gonzaga’s. We're here.
That was not a very, uh, fertile or, healthy line. So, they were dying out fast, but there were lots of them painted on the walls.
Linda Lespets
Wasn't there one with mirrors?
James Beck
There was a hidden room, that they discovered in, I think 1998. ., which had mirrors.
Linda Lespets
 and I was wondering what the,  maybe it was polished metal, the mirrors.
James Beck
I'm not sure where they would, where they would sing madrigals. Well, they think it was specifically for, for performances of Monteverde, but I don't know. . Why a hidden room is needed. Yes. And how, how do you hide a room for 500, or, sorry, for 200 years, maybe it was walled up.
Linda Lespets
Well, I mean, if you're in a palace with 500 rooms, you might miss one, you know, if it's walled up.
James Beck
 And also there was a big, there were quite a lot of, traumatic experiences in the Mantuan court. Not long after Monteverde left there, there was a siege and a war and then a lot of plague. So you can see how knowledge could dissipate and everyone could die that knew about it , exactly absolutely.  When the Gonzagas were running out of heirs, their neighbours and, and particularly the Hapsburgs, were like, Hmm, we might take that little gem of a dutchie. So they, they laid siege to it for two summers. War was a summer sport at those days. 'cause you know, no one wanted to do it in winter 'cause it was just too much. And Mantua is at that stage was completely surrounded by water. It was very cleverly conceived and beautifully conceived too because the water reflects the beautiful buildings.
And so they, the Mantuan’s stockpiled food and drew up the bridges. And, and for two years they were, no one came in or out of the city whilst the Habsburgs laid siege. And actually the Habsburgs didn't really get through those defences, but at the, in the second summer, in the second siege, a cannonball did get through and then the whole, the cannonball made some rats got through and those dirty soldiers who'd been on campaign for two summers were riddled with plague and the plague got into the town and that was actually undoing of the Gonzaga dynasty.
Linda Lespets
A rat brought them down.
James Beck
A rat brought them down. And so, the plague weakened the city. The city fell. And then that plague was taken by those refugees from Antwerp down into Venice. And Venice was absolutely devastated by plague for something like 10 years. And the city's population plummeted to its lowest in 150 years.
Linda Lespets
Wow. . And it's true that war was like a summer sport. And I'm wondering if nowadays, we, you know... That's, we play sport instead. Well, I hope, I think that's why we do play organized sport. I think that's, you know, it's... Take the World Cup or something.  Well although that's, not... To get that aggression, to get all that aggression out of our system in a nicely controlled manner.
James Beck
It is like countries like against each other. Totally is.
Linda Lespets
The Cremona City Municipality had at its disposal a group of wind players, mostly made up of brass instruments, trombones, bombards, bagpipes, and sometimes a cornet. This ensemble was particularly suited for outdoor performances.  Or at least I hope it was. I don't know if you've ever heard a bombard being played inside. I have.  Anyway, the viola da braccia players and viola or violin players were also employed by the town hall and given a uniform made of red and white cloth.  This was the instrumental group in the church, and it doubled up for civic occasions as well.  I speak to Carlo Chiesa, violin maker and expert in Milan.
Carlo Chiesa
And the other way by which Cremonese makers got their success is musicians, because in the 16th century, there are a few important Cremonese musicians moving from Cremona and going to northern cities to play for the emperor, for the king, or to Venice. I think the most important supplier of instruments at some point out of Cremona was the Monteverdi Circle.
 
Linda Lespets
This orchestra employed by the city of Cremona played both for the council and in the church on all public holidays and in processions.  One of their members, a cornet player called Ariodante Radiani,  who was paid the considerable sum of 100 lira. When the maestro di cappella was paid 124 lira, ended up having to be let go.
It turned out he was a little bit laissez faire with his responsibilities as a musician, and a lawsuit was brought against him for neglecting his duties as a musician. To add to this, he was also found guilty of murder.  So, in the end, their homicidal cornet player was replaced. 
Linda Lespets
 You know, you've got the scientists and human thought and philosophy and looking back to Greek and Roman antiquity. So, I feel like that's, that's like the idea in art, in literature. And what do you, how do you see that happening?  in music.
James Beck
We as musicians had really practical roles to fulfill as well and sometimes that was expressing the will of the church through music and of course you know that’s kind of self-explanatory and then we've got this really practical role to entertain and how we go about doing that with the materials we have. So the renaissance as an idealistic expression, I think, you know, as a practical musician, we were always doing others bidding out unless we were church musicians, we were there to entertain and to, excite and to distract and act as an instrument of sometimes of state policy or, or, you know, kind of  showing off the power or opulence of a state.  Maybe it was through, opera. Where are you?  You're getting like human emotion. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. But also, the subject of all those early operas is usually, ancient material from ancient Greece or Rome, so, you know, clearly Renaissance in its ideals of looking back.
Othello.  Of course. Poppea, Ulysses. I mean, the operas were definitely, drawing into ancient literature and myth, which was bypassing Christianity in many ways. 
Linda Lespets
 It's strange because it was an era where it didn't really contradict the other. People were cool with it. Like they were very devoted churchgoers and at the same time they were very into all this Greek and Roman mythology. It was interesting. And then all this humanist thinking and invention I mean, Monteverde was a priest as well, right?
James Beck
 Towards the end of his life.
Linda Lespets
Instruments are starting to play a bigger role in the music, in the church in Cremona. In 1573, the Maestro de Capella, the Chapel Master at the cathedral, wrote a piece of music for five voices, consorted with all sorts of musical instruments.  The words and text are completely clear in accordance with the Council of Trent, he points out.
The Amati brothers’ father, Andrea Amati, would have witnessed this musical tradition in his lifetime as he attended church, where the music sung would have gone from something that had been unrecognizable in, or in any case very difficult to understand, to music that had identifiable text that could possibly be understood and sung with.
They were not hymns like the Lutherans were singing in a congregational style, but there was a marked change in the music being played in the churches. And these were the effects of the counter reformation trickling into everyday life of the people.  The workshop continued to be a success. Both the brothers Amati were able to earn a living and to provide a generous dowry for their sister, who had just recently married a man from Casal Maggiore. In town, the cathedral looked like it was finally going to have the interior finished. This had been going on ever since their father was a little boy. And now it looked like all the frescoes and paintings were to be completed. And most amazing of all was an enormous astronomical clock that was being mounted on the terrazzo, the giant bell tower next to the cathedral.
Sadly, Girolamo Amati’s pregnant wife would never see the clock that would amaze the citizens of Cremona, as shortly after giving birth to their daughter, Elizabeth, Lucrenzia ( Girolamo Amati’s wife) died. The fragility of life and uncertainty that Girolamo Amati had to deal with is quite removed from our lives today, and a man in his situation would certainly be looking to marry again, if for nothing else than to have a mother for his young daughter.
And as he was contemplating remarrying, finding a new wife and mother for his child, over in Paris, one of the biggest celebrity weddings of the decade was taking place. And the music for the closing spectacle was being played in part on the instruments his father (Andrea Amati) and brother (Antonio Amati) had made for the Valois royal family all those years ago.

Ep.8 Andrea Amati part 5 Is this the end of the violin?

Andreas life is coming to an end, war is raging in France and fashion is dictating how you can hold your violin! Check it all out in this new episode.
As the violin making workshop of the Amatis in Cremona was in full swing, different members of the French royal family were trying not to get murdered as Henry of Navarre soon to be King Henry IV of France married Catherine de Medici’s daughter. In the City of Cremona already renowned for its violin makers we take a look at the different musicians and composers coming out of the cathedral school, Monteverdi being one of them, who would go to work at the famed Mantuan court, and the Amati Brothers taking on a pivotal role in the family violin workshop as Andrea enters old age continuing the family tradition.
Transcript
  It is said that many years ago, the king Agilulf destroyed the city of Cremona, and that for the longest time it remained a pile of ruins, destined to be forgotten with the memory of its people crumbling to dust.  But then one spring morning, a war weary Gaelic prince, encamped on the banks of the Po, with his army, near a pile of crumbling stone buildings. And it was there, as he was resting, that he saw an extraordinary sight.  A lion, but this was no ordinary lion. It was limping and appeared to be in pain, unable to walk on one of its paws. The gallant and fearless prince approached the animal, and the beast, upon remarking the prince, showed him his injured paw, cut and bleeding, with a thorn sticking out of the wound.
The young man, showing not an inkling of fear, removed the thorn and healed the lion's soft paw. Just imagine the prince's surprise when a few hours later, the lion reappeared with a deer in his jaws.  Padding forward, he offered his gift to the young man, laying his catch at the prince's feet as a gift.
The mysterious prince left with his army the very next morning, but as they were setting off, who should appear but the faithful lion, who would go on and follow him wherever he would go.  When they reached Rome, the prince realized that the ruined city where he had encamped and met his beloved lion was the city of Cremona.
And so, as he made his way once again through the countryside, he headed for the ruins of this city.  But tragically, on the way, his trusty lion died. And so, upon reaching the city, the Gaelic prince decided to rebuild Cremona.  Firstly, he buried the lion, and on that spot, he built an incredibly tall tower, called the Torazzo.
This is the bell tower of the cathedral in Cremona.  And on top of this tower, for a very long time, was a majestic bronze statue of a lion in the act of raising his paw towards the prince.  A few centuries after the lion was placed on the tower, the bronze animal was melted down and fashioned into a large bell that was placed in the tower.
And as the bell rings, the memory of the faithful lion lives on.  Today, there are at least 13 lions dotted along the facade of the baptistery, and more in front of the cathedral.  Perhaps one of these fierce felines was the prince's faithful friend. 
And this is the legend of the Lion of Cremona.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker.
In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Andrea Amati perfecting the outline of the modern day violin and the French court under King Charles IX, Catherine de Medici's heavy influence as regent on her young son, and the significance of the images painted on the instruments ordered for the king, who was indeed a music loving monarch. And finally, the Amatis working methods that led in part to their success as instrument makers. 
Almost five years after the royal tour, Andrea Amati is now 65. His place as a master instrument maker is undisputed. He has received orders from the King of France, no less.  His production would have been different to that of violin makers today, in that he would have had to have been more flexible, making different sized and shaped instruments of the Renaissance era. He would have simply been following the fashion and client demand of the time.
I talked to fashion historian Dr. Emily Brayshaw about what people would have looked like back then and what musicians in particular would have worn. 
So you've got farthingale sleeves on the men even, but and what it would do though is if you sort of look at these portraits of musicians and portraits of them playing instruments too, you can sort of get an idea of how they moved with that. So, you know, if you've got a massive ruff which is, you know, your 1580s fashion, you're not going to be sticking your instrument under your chin.
You know, there's too much ruff, there's too much lace, there's too much collar. So you might be holding it lower down, perhaps against your upper pecs.  If it's a violin you'll be like playing it gamba style on, your lap, you know, or if they're bigger, got variations of them resting on the floor, these kinds of things.
So yeah, it's definitely going to be influencing how you're playing your instruments too. And then, the elbows as well, to be able to move your elbows. That's always an issue.
It is an issue.
Yeah, absolutely. It is an issue. And if you can, you sort of see photos of like these big farthingale sleeves, these slashed sleeves you know, big puffed sleeves, these kinds of things. You're not going to be raising your arms too high above your head. And certainly there would be outfits that they required movement in, you know, like if you're going into battle, you want full mobility or you're training for fighting or these sorts of things. So what's interesting in a lot of these illustrations is they're very idealized bodies coming from the art conventions of the Renaissance that were looking to classical Greek and Roman statues.  And in portraits of the era, these shoulders are, we can see in these portraits, the neckline sits right down around the upper forearms particularly over the shoulder.  Dress. Yeah, here we've got this here in a Mary Princess Royal portrait and we've got like this really low down cut down and it would have been very very difficult to raise your arms and your elbow, elbows would have been set right down and we see this a lot in like the Peter Lely portraits.
Yes, so there's a lovely portrait of a woman playing a gamba that we sort of see with that and she's got one of these gowns on and we see the shoulders sloping and falling again with menswear of the 1650s too.  But yeah, these sloping shoulders that we're seeing in the 1650s would have contributed to that.
You know, the elbows being kept closer to the body, keeping your body front on, the instrument being held lower against the layers of fabric, and then playing like that, being everything being held close in. Yeah, yeah.
So the, the classic gamba playing posture would have worked.
Oh, would have worked perfectly.
Having to stick your elbows out or lift an instrument high just wouldn't have worked.
No, no, so that's why they're instruments. You know, we do still have pictures of violins being played quite low and held quite low.
And then there was often you would accompany yourself by singing and playing the violin.
Yeah, and you could do that because it's not tucked under your chin. So that's our 1605 kind of look there.  Wow, I mean you've got a platform that you could rest your scones on.
Yeah, I mean I'd feel like if I was a man with all that fabric on, I would just feel like putting the instrument next to me, like it would just feel like a stretch holding it the way we do now?
Yeah, I think so, given that there were lots and lots of layers under these too, so you know, again, it's all part of the layering. And also, even though you don't have, like in the 1600s now, you don't have these massive, ruffs in most of Europe. The Dutch held on to the ruffs and these big sort of cartwheel collars for a lot longer than the rest of Europe.
You know, you've got what's known as a falling band, so the lace collars are coming down. You still do have a little bit of a rise on the collars as well. So you've still got, you know, like these collars would not have been necessarily ideal for holding your instrument against it so it's probably going to be held a bit lower, further down the, further down the shoulder.
And we see that in images too, you know, the images slung under the shoulder.  All of this stuff was just mind bogglingly expensive. So not only would you have your portrait painted and that cost an absolute motza, you'd be wearing your absolute finest clothes for it.
Were you saying it was like half a million?
Like Oh, and the rest, like in today's money, in today's outfit would, yeah, just one outfit for the portrait that you're wearing would be half a million dollars plus all the other things that were often in your portrait as well. So they're kind of a bit like a selfie filter where you are. You know, flexing, showing your cash.
So, for example, you know, if you were there playing a gamba in a portrait or playing an instrument in a portrait you'd be showing that yes, you're musical, you're cultured, you're, you know, you're part of this, you know, this ideal humanistic world that values the humanities, but also you can afford One of these really expensive instruments too.
It's another layer of wealth.
It is another layer of wealth, yeah, and there's a lot of layers of wealth in these portraits that get built up. Even things like oriental carpets, they're extremely expensive, so some people would have them on a table. Because they're so expensive that you wouldn't have them on the ground. But then you get like the next level nobility who have them on the ground and it's like I'm so rich I can walk on my carpet.
I'm walking on the money.
Yeah, I'm walking on the money. I'm wearing the money I'm walking on the money and you do like, you've got the jewellery embroidered on your clothing and into your clothing.
You've got this fine handmade lace. You've got everything's embroidered, embroidered with gold. The very finest leathers, everything's like just money, you know, even your wigs are money. Increasingly, we see the rise of wigs.
In the 17th century, the French and German and Dutch painters, they would sort of link the violin to like  booze and gluttony and  stupidity, dishonesty. When you see it in painting, whereas the Italians, it was, it was like a respectable instrument of the court and the theatre. I find it interesting that there was this instrumental competition going on.
There was a tension between the viols and the violins. Yes. Yeah. I talked to cellist James Beck about the tensions between the violin and the viol family. And for people who are listening to this, the viol family is older than the violin family and it's more delicately built and you might say it's maybe got more in common with the lute family in terms of the lightness of the build and so think of it more as a bowed lute.
Whereas the violin is a stronger build. 
More sturdy.
More sturdy, yeah. So the violin family was the, at one stage, the new kid in town. And I think there was, there's always that tension between the old and the new. And I think because the violin came out of Italy and was of Italy and just was such an expression of Italian culture, the Italians were a bit more into it.
And whereas the viol family was utterly dominant in France and in England and in Germany right up until the end of the 18th century and it was really considered to be much more refined and much more aristocratic and much more exclusive  than the violins and the violins were considered to be crass and strident, maybe a bit too loud and maybe only good for kind of crowd entertainments and not for kind of refined family life.
So all the ruling classes and royal houses gravitated towards the viols. So if you look at all the great portraits at Versailles of the royal family, all the, if the women were playing instruments, they were playing keyboard instruments or viols. No one's playing a cello. No one is playing a violin.  Even though they possess these instruments, they were in the vicinity, they weren't for that class of person.
Yeah, whereas if you look at tavern scenes, these street scenes that are a bit more course, that's where the violin is hanging out. And yet it seems to have been embraced from the beginning in, in Italy.
It was,  it was an acceptable instrument.
Yeah. Because, well, it, it evolved, well it sort of went to finishing school in Italy, the violin, and So it must have been, sort of, refined that way for the particular Need.
A need  that they had. Yeah, yeah. And so, there's  a Frenchman called Hubert Leblanc, and he argued in length for the vial which the French did. Like he said, and he wrote this big long treatise called the Défense de la Basse de Viol Contre les Entreprises Violonciel. So it's the defense of the vial, the bass vial, against the enterprises of the violin and the pretences of the cello.
Oh yes, the pretentious cello. 
So he was really like, oh,  we're in danger so, so they didn't want like, you know, the foul violin flooding the musical scene, and that was in 1740. So it was actually quite late, like that's, you know, Strad's, like at the end of Strad, so it was still this thing that was, that was holding on.
But you can see if you were, if you were running a theatre.  And you wanted to give your, be popular, and give a good experience to your audience. You wouldn't be employing the old players because they're too quiet.  Go out of tune. And you'd have to have more of them which would be expensive. Yeah. And so you'd definitely be gravitating towards violins because you just get, you know, more sound for your buck.
And so those orchestras are being populated by violin and cello and viola players. Yeah. And, and the double base, which is the, the, the weird compromise between the, the viola and the, the violin family.
Yeah. It is a bit, I think it's technically, well some of them are made like a vial. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what's interesting is there's another, there's an Englishman John Lenton in 1693. So quite early. But, and he wrote a book called The Gentleman's Diversion or The Violin Explained. So it was, you know, you had people sort of for it as well. And Queen Elizabeth had violins. Elizabeth I.
Yes. Yeah, right. For dancing, possibly.
Yeah. Because she was a big dancer. Yes. Yeah. There's a fantastic portrait of her and she's mid-air.
The toes.
Yeah, you can see the toes hanging out at the bottom of her dress and she's maybe a foot off the ground.
Right, yeah, so yeah, they are, they're the dancing ones. They're not really for sitting around listening to quiet music, which would be a gamber.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And of course, you know, it was a big thing in England to have a consort of gambers. You'd have a, like a large coffer or chest made  and within that would sit, you know, maybe four to six different sized viols. And as a refined family, you would sit around and have a little consort moment, which is the collective noun for viols, a consort of viols.
Oh yeah, yeah. Look, look at that consort of viols arriving.
I think that that 1690s treatise that you were mentioning about basically kind of introducing the violin. The Gentleman's Diversion or the Violin Explained. Yes, I think that's because, I mean there were violins, there were violin makers, there's an early English school of violin making and we know that there were violin makers on Old London bridge prior to The Great Fire. But we also know that when the first Stradivari instruments started arriving in London, that they did, they were passed around and were seen to be quite strange and new. And so maybe there was a renewed taste for these kind of things when the next phase of innovation was coming out of Italy.
And maybe if you're an Italian violinist, that was sort of an exception as well, because you know, you're from Italy, you're playing the violin.
Yeah. Yeah. The Italian thing. Yeah. 
And that's the great thing about Cremona because it was producing violins and violinists right back to the early 1500s. There were Cremonese violin players living in Germany and France and London and it was a, seemed to be a real kind of boasting point of like, yes, here's my Cremonese violinist.
Yeah, it's interesting, you've got this, it was a city and it had the cathedral and it had a cathedral school and they were quite proud that they were very, they were very literate  city. A lot of the children would go, would learn to read and write and, and then you had this. Cathedral School, which seemed to spit out all these good musicians and composers, but because there was just the cathedral, they couldn't really go, there was a ceiling.
There weren't employment opportunities.
No, but even for playing and composing, if you were a composer, you were limited to the constraints of the Council of Trent. You couldn't, compose everything you wanted to. So they had this, they were producing all these. Musicians and composers, but they weren't staying. They had to leave to do anything other than church music, which was quite a limited repertoire. Yeah. So in one way,  it was good. They were making these musicians. And in the other way, by being, by having these constraints, they didn't have a court. So they couldn't, they didn't have anywhere to play secular music.
Yeah. Yeah. And so they had to leave. So you had this, you had the fertile ground, but you also had the conditions that forced those people to, to disperse. Yeah, so, so they were, like if, it was interesting enough to stay, maybe Cremona wouldn't have been as known as it is today because they would have all just stayed there.
So you've got, like the Mantuan Court, they were all there. Yeah, well that's why Monteverde left Cremona.  He went to, he went there, and he ended up replacing another guy who'd come from Cremona. So they were producing them and sending them.
It's like when, you know, the dandelions, you know, dandelions with a big fluffy head, and when you blow on them, the  seeds go over it.
Maybe it's like a blessing in disguise, the fact that it was a little bit boring musical life there, even though they were being well trained.  And to what degree do you think the, the geographical element is like Cremona, it's positioned near forests or near water or near trade routes. So it's a major north south trade route and it's on the Po River and it has, it was a constant point of crossing of armies.
They would all come through there. They were all funnel through. And so, and, and we were talking trade, we're talking no, like wars as well. Like armies. Yes. Lots of armies and trade. And from the trade point of view, you had the river and in that time, moving goods by water was 20 times cheaper than over land because it was just so difficult to, like, roads are not like they are today. Like a road in summer could disappear because it could just be overgrown. Yes. And, or you just couldn't find it or you'd get.  It was just really hard getting things somewhere overland. And that's not just, you know, Cremona in the 1500s.
In the mid 1800s in Sydney, it was cheaper to get wheat from South America  than it was to get it from Goulburn. Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause you've got to.  You had to doing overland and horse and cart and all that. And from Goulburn was more expensive. Than getting it off a ship. Yeah. because you could from South America.
Oh wow. Yeah because you'd get like a really huge ship. You get a huge quantity. Yeah. Oh wow. Isn't that crazy? So even then, yeah. What, 1850s? Yeah. It was like, buy local must buy local water was cheaper than Yeah, maybe that's why we put a jail there. That's the really, that's the really high security jail in Golburn.  It's like, try and get out of here. Oh my god. Go to South America first and then come back.
Yet despite Andrea Amati’s success as an artisan, he is still renting his house, unable to buy a property outright. According to the census of that year, there are four people living in his house. This is probably Andrea Amati, his wife, and the two boys, Antonio Amati and Girolamo Amati. The girl's being married off by now.  The phrase, ‘who had to buy his own bread’, was used in the census to describe Andrea Amati and his family. This meant that he did not own his own house.  Despite this, his workshop was a busy place, with himself and his sons’ producing instruments. One of them for the French king's sister, Marguerite de Valois, no less.  The large tenor viola was made then decorated with gold leaf and a painted monogram on the back with golden fleur de lis in the corners and running the length of the ribs in Latin the phrase by this bulwark or fortification, we stand, religion stands and will stand.
A number of similar instruments like this one were made by Andrea Amati and we could imagine that they were played in the royal courts. Especially at this time in Paris, something quite new at court was happening that necessitated more instruments and musicians,  despite the wars of religion going on in the background and the ever present intrigue and plotting at court. As in Italy, the Renaissance thinkers and artists were creating academies of poetry and music.  The idea was to revive the arts of the ancient world in order to harmonize dance, music, and language. In a way that could result in a higher level of morality, and so was born the court ballet.
Despite universal harmony, music, dance, and the attaining of a higher level of morality, business for Andrea Amati was about to start slowing down, as the tensions in the French court rose.  Marguerite de Valois was not going to be ordering more instruments anytime soon.  She had a lot of other things on her plate. Being the king's sister and the daughter of Catherine de Medici, she didn't really get to choose who she married. So on the 18th of August, 1572, a spring wedding, she married the very protestant Henry of Navarre. There were not the best love vibes, and it ended in the famed Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre. Her mum just absolutely ruined her wedding night.  But what were they thinking? 
So, Catherine the King's mother had a brilliant idea. To calm down the tensions in France between the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots, she would marry her daughter Marguerite to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The very Catholic Parisians at court were horrified that the Protestants were coming back into the royal circle. Catherine's son in law, King Philip of Spain, and the Pope were not happy about the situation. She had not listened to King Philip's advisers to just kill the Huguenots to solve the problem. And so here we are.  Things were getting tense. The court did not attend the wedding. It was a tricky situation. You didn't want to be caught in the crossfire here.
And to add to the soup, Harvests had been poor and taxes had risen. The people of France were not in the mood for an extravagant royal celebration.
I spoke to Dr. John Gagne, Senior Lecturer in History at Sydney University. 
I was reading the different like the spectacles and things and the pantomime for Henry of Neva Neva or Nevaire? Henry of Nevaire's wedding.  He had to do this, like, play where he was which was very sort of  which they were doing a lot, do the sort of play acting type things. And it was for his wedding where he was in a group of Huguenots and they were sent to hell and his brother in law, the king, would come and rescue him and take him out of hell.  And because he's the king and like, restore them, and it was, like, the ultimate humiliation, and then,then, and the next night, he has all these friends murdered, so,  it's like, fantastic mother in law there.
Well, yeah, I mean, so you're talking about the, the Night of St. Bartholomew, which is 1572, when, yeah, the idea is that Henri de Navarre, who was, you know, a Protestant prince, would marry the Margot of France, who was  Catherine's daughter, and that, yes, I mean, that's, That didn't go well because then the Protestant leadership was murdered.
Dr. John Gagne, Senior History Lecturer at the University of Sydney. That, you know, so 1572. Interestingly, the, the columns on the violins Also appear on a medal stamped for King Charles IX right after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. Which, you know, the, the motto around the edge of the medal says  Pietas excitavit justitiam, which is  piety, aroused justice, meaning that, you know,  the Protestants had it coming because true Catholic faith was angered by their existence. And so they were so it's interesting and I think, you know, that I think the columns in that case could be piety and justice. They could, you know, bring in this idea we were talking about earlier of the strength of the monarch in a sort of Herculean fashion, or that, you know, The stability of the, of the nation or the kingdom was strong under him because he had quashed the Protestant rulers,  but, or you know, at least their leadership, not rulers. But yes, I mean that, that began what ended up being a 40  year odyssey for Henri Navarre, who became King Henry IV, in which, you know, he was pulled both ways in both directions. He was, you know, he must have converted three times between Catholicism and Protestantism in an effort to soothe angers on both, anger on both sides and to, frankly, find his way to power as well.
You know, famously, although probably Incorrectly or you know,  mythically, he said Paris is worth a mass. So yes, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of festivities at the wedding would have involved maybe things that might have angered the Protestant, or used, used the Protestant leadership in a way that made them look like they were damned.
Yeah, I was feeling sorry for him. I'm like, he's getting married, and he has to do this, like, humiliating thing where, like, everyone knows he's Protestant, like, you know, and then.  Don't know how he did it. Well, he was just trying to stay alive. Yeah, yeah.
And yet Catherine ploughed on with the wedding festivities, one of them being a pantomime the night after the wedding, organized by herself.  A magnificent, masked ball was held at the Petit Bourbon.  It included the performance of a pantomime tournoi called the Paradise of Love.  King Charles and his two brothers defended 12 angelic nymphs against the Huguenots. They dispatched the Huguenots. Led by Henry of Navarre into hell where, according to an observer, a great number of devils and imps were making infinite foolery and noise.  The nymphs then danced a ballet. There followed a combat between knights accompanied by explosions of gunpowder. The king and his brothers climaxed proceedings by rescuing the Huguenots from hell, which was separated from paradise by a river on which floated the ferryman Sharon in his boat. If that wasn't bad enough, after this cringeworthy and awkward piece of theatre, the remaining festivities had to be called off after an assassination attempt on the Huguenot leader, Admiral Colligny, who was shot from a house by an arquebusier. Married at first sight has nothing on these frolicking wedding celebrations.
So here's what was going on.  To solve the problem of the pesky Protestants, a hit list to remove a few of the key leading nobles of that persuasion, who had come to Paris for the wedding, had been dispatched. And here is where the events took on a life of their own. Instead of killing the 20 odd leaders to make a point, the instigators of this subtle plan may have accidentally ended up putting into motion an event that killed between 5 to 30, 000 people. As the mania spread over the countryside, it ended in a free for all and a full scale massacre.  This may or may not have been the original plan, but at the end of the day it was a disaster for many involved, the effects being felt throughout the country and down into Italy. All the way to the Amati workshop, as the French market would dry up and fizzle out until the country could work itself out.
My name is Susan Broomhall, and I'm the director of the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I'm a historian by training, and I work on women and gender ideologies and assumptions in the early modern period in Europe. I don't believe there's any evidence. I certainly couldn't find any myself of, of Catherine sort of writing to the Amati workshop saying, I'd like to make an order of several, you know, string instruments, and I'd like them to look like this.
Susan Broomhall. 
And I, and I'm sort of saying that laughingly and yet. We actually do have accounts from Catherine where we literally have a letter where she's writing, in one case, to a jeweller and saying, I would like you to make this jewel. And I'm going to draw on the side of the letter, a little picture of what I want the jewel to look like and this is what you should put in it. And these are the stones I want you to use. And this is what it means. It's the most helpful letter ever because it sets out exactly the level of detail she is interested in her artistic work. She absolutely knows what she wants. She knows how to spell it out. She knows how to Draw it, and she basically says, go to make it and we know who it's for. So everything about, you know, that particular commission is watertight. So it wouldn't, it wouldn't be impossible to think that she could order this and clearly her Italian connections, not necessarily to Cremona, but to a network of people who could direct her to the right, you know, string makers, instrument makers is entirely plausible, and it's much more likely in 15, in the early 1560s, if that's when these are commissioned, that it's Catherine who's basically holding the purse strings and not her son 13 year old son, who's, who's making this commission. And yet it would make sense that everything on that commission will be representing Charles because that's the person in whose interests Catherine was trying to make political messages at that point in time.
Yeah, I find it interesting I feel like she, she got a lot of things from Florence  and at that time there was just one violin maker in Cremona and that was Andrea Amati and it, I find it interesting that  she gets these instruments from Cremona and not, not from Florence. And would that have changed the sort of the trajectory of violin making had she got them from  Florence?
Yeah, an interesting question. I mean, we do have letters again from her and letters are such a great source for Catherine where she's writing to her cousin Cosimo who becomes the Duke of Florence. And she writes to him saying, can you find me a good artist?  I'm looking for an artist to do Y. And she's not always saying necessarily, you know, to bring them to France, sometimes she wants to, but often she's saying, I've got this commission and I think somebody over there would be best for it. So depending on the reputation of the Amati, you know, if, if her task is find me the best then perhaps he did. And you know, unless Cosimo has a relationship with the Florentine violin makers and he wants to support them, then I guess he'd write back and say, well, they were the best. But in this case, it looks like that. That didn't happen. But she doesn't have to work through her cousin. She also just, you know, she writes to ambassadors with these kinds of requests. I've seen that too. It's not just, you know, royal friends and family members. She's writing to everyone all the time saying, find me the best person. So she's also cross referencing the information she gets back before she makes a decision. So, This is somebody who's really active in, in sourcing, yeah, sourcing her commissions. She sounds so, she sounds so efficient.  You know, I sometimes look at these letters and think she must've done nothing else all day. Cause I mean, not all of them, they're not all handwritten, but a lot of them are. And when you read into them, the, the level of detail of the sort of issue she's carrying in her head at once just seems phenomenal.
I don't know how she does it.  You know, she did. And I think this, I think that probably tells us too, that this is a real interest for her. She was engaged by the arts and so therefore, you know, it kept her, it kept her attention.
So what does this have to do with violins? Well, war, again. It's bad for business, disturbing trade routes and the economy.  Fortunately, in Cremona, under the Spanish administration, things were relatively calm. But the French market was important, and civil war was not going to help increase business.  So how did Catherine deal with this conflict that was draining the country of even more money that they didn't have to begin with? Well, she organized court festivities.  At Fontainebleau, one of the royal residences, Catherine arranged entertainments that lasted for days. These included fancy dress, jousting, and chivalrous events in allegorical settings.  I'm sure Henry was just having a grand old time with that mother in law of his, and after only just surviving his killer wedding by the skin of his teeth, there were knights dressed as Greeks and Trojans fighting over scantily clad Demoiselles trapped by a giant and a dwarf in a tower on an enchanted island.
The whole thing would end in drama as the tower, losing its magical properties, burst into flames.  In another spectacle, singing sirens swam past the king and Neptune floated by in a chariot drawn by seahorses.
While opera was all the thing in Italy, in France, it was the court ballet.  Susan Broomhall talks to us about these spectacles. 
A line of sight of the viewer looking at them is a kind of, it’s not quite bird's eye, but it's certainly looking down on a diagonal, let's say so you can see the kinds of arrangements that are being made.
And yes, these, these all have meaning. I mean, these have, unfortunately, incredibly complex kinds of meaning that scholars are still debating exactly what the reference points are. This is a culture where people at court are really steeped in classical traditions, quite often esoteric kinds of material. If you think of Nostradamus is a contemporary to this culture, he's part of this culture in fact. And you think about the endless  reinterpretation of the lines of his different works and what they might mean. You might get a, it gives you a little bit of a feel for the kind of complexity of what might be embedded behind both the ballets and the poetry and the arts of the time.
That they have really complex kinds of meanings that aren't. Exactly straightforward to untangle. So they're often classically, they're referencing classical themes. You know, and certainly that's true in the mythology, but they are also referencing things like mathematics at the time early understandings of science. All of this is kind of blended together in a, in a cultural performance that's also trying to do political work. So it's a, lot going on at once. So, yeah.
So if I'm like a courtier and I, like, would I, I would understand all this and go, Oh, look at that. Look at that triangle. Wow. Pythagorean theorem.
And, Oh, did you get that political message? So, I mean, this is kind of what you meant to think, I think. But the fact that you're, I mean, something like this, this, this Ballet Comique publication. Suggest to me that perhaps everyone didn't quite get it and maybe you need it explained to you. Like sometimes we do find kind of explanation books of various ceremonies or let's say an entry to a town that often some of these big big ceremonial moments are accompanied by almost like a handbook and you know sure it's a record of the event but it's also a kind of unpacking of what on earth was being explained in that event. And you know we kind of do it now I'm thinking about recent. Very large ceremonial occasions like the funeral of the, of Queen Elizabeth II or a royal wedding, for example. Often, you know, you might watch that on television and you, and clearly the, the commentators have been kind of given a script to say, Oh, this is what's happening now. And here are the guards coming in and they're going to do this. You know, we have it kind of narrated to us in a certain way to make sense of the different elements. And I think the same thing would have been happening there too. Certainly, sure, the courtiers have a high level of education in things that we now perhaps don't quite know and see straight away. But I think there's also an audience of people who would really like a handbook to help them understand what it was they just saw. And then obviously there's a whole other audience of people beyond the court who would never be able to see this at court. You know, it has a limited audience of prestigious people at court. But some publisher and printer can make an awful lot of money selling the story of it to everybody else who couldn't be there. So, you know, I think people are understanding these things at very different levels.  And so Charles IX, he's, he's died by this stage.
Is that it?
Certainly if we're talking about the 1581 ballet, yes, he's passed away. Yeah. So he's, was he king number two out of the three? Yes. So she has three sons who become kings. The first one is Francois II, and he really only lasts about a year. And perhaps he's most famous for being married to Mary, Queen of Scots. So after he passes away as a teenager, he must only be about 16 when he dies. And I think she would be about the same age. She then returns to Scotland, having grown up at the French court and, you know, various disasters unfold for her on her return to Scotland. So then Francois II, then the king who follows him is Charles IX.
In 1574, as the Civil War rages in France, money is a bit tight. And Andrea Amati has to borrow 90 Lira from a neighbour.  He is able to pay him back over the next five months. But the same year, their youngest son, Girolamo Amati, gets married to Lucrenzia Cornetti, she comes to live in the family home with them.  Andrea Amati, as the head of the family, also receives part of her dowry.
In the next few years, Andrea Amati is finally able to buy the family home, so that in the following census, he is noted as a landowner.  The Amati brothers had a pivotal role in the workshop, helping their father, who was entering his seventies. They were all living and working in the same household, spending a lot of family time together.
Then one cold winter's night on Christmas eve of 1577,  at the age of 72, Andrea Amati died, leaving his sons, the brothers, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati to carry on the family legacy and his business.  Without their father's presence, things would never be quite the same. Antonio Amati, the older brother, was now legally head of the family unit, and would have to deal with the responsibilities that entailed.  It would not always be smooth sailing for the brothers, and they would surprisingly survive incredible odds to keep plying their trade.  But this is a story for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.
Thank you so much for listening. And if you like what you hear and would be into supporting the podcast so I can make even more episodes, please sign up to Patreon. You can find that on patreon. com forward slash the Violin Chronicle.
This brings us to the end of the series on Andrea Amati, but never fear. In the next episode, I'll be looking at his two sons known as the Amati brothers.  I would like to thank my wonderful guests, James Beck, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Dr. John Gagne, and Dr. Emily Brayshaw. I would also like to thank the Australian Chamber Orchestra for their cooperation and permission to play some of their live tracks, and also to the ABC for permission to play Daniel Yeadon's recording of the Telemann Sonata in D major on his viola da gamba.
 
It's always great to hear from listeners and if you would like to contact me, you can do so via email on the violin chronicles@gmail.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast at the violin chronicles.podbean.com, and I also have an Instagram with the handle at the Violin Chronicles.  Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I'll catch you next time.
 
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Music Heard in this episode is as follows.
Industrial music box – Kevin Macleod
Bloom – Roo Walker
Danny Yeadon – Telemann Sonata in D Major for viola da Gamba
Aura Classica – Spring the four seasons Vivaldi
Harpsichord Fugue – Copyright free music
Ambush – Brandon Hopkins

Ep 7. Andrea Amati Part 4, Don’t mention the war, sending threats on violins now are we?

We look at how the French Monarchs used music as a political tool and the symbols on the instruments Andrea Amati made were not just a pretty decorations but part of court intrigue and a declaration of war.
If you're captivated by the allure of Renaissance courts, the artistry of violin making, and the power of music as a symbol of prestige, the musical court of Catherine de Medici is a good place to start.
The French wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants were in full swing, this is even witnessed in the choice of instruments made by Italian violin makers and the symbols painted on them by renaissance artisans, in this episode we let these historical instruments tell their story.
In this episode I speak to Expert Benjamin Hebbert, Violin maker Carlo Chiesa, Historian Dr Susan Broomhall, Fashion Historian Dr Emily Brayshaw and Historian Dr John Gagne.
The Music you have heard in this podcast is as follows.
Café Chianti – Jonny Boyle
Bloom – Roo Walker
The retirement of major Edward – Jacob Taylor Armerding
Ambush – Brandon Hopkins
Unfamiliar faces – All good Folks
Harpsichord Fugue – No Copyright music
A Peasant’s Sonnet – Jonny Easton
Banquet of Squires – Jonny Easton
ACO Home to Home - Liisa Palallandi and Timo-Veikko Valve
Transcript
  During the Middle Ages, Cremona was under the dominion of the Holy Roman Empire.  At that time, the people of the city were forced to pay an oppressive tax of three kilograms of gold every year to the emperor, which for convenience was melted into a sphere.  One day, fed up with paying this tax, the people of Cremona decided it was time to break away from imperial rule. And so the Mayor Giovanni Baldessio was challenged by the Emperor King Henry IV to a duel in order to settle the tax dispute.  Mayor Baldessio was able to knock the king from his horse, thus sparing Cremona from its annual three kilogram golden ball tax, which was instead issued to the Mayor's fiancee for her dowry.  Back in the city, Giovanni began to be called Zaden de la Bala by all, and he married Berta de Zori, a beautiful girl of noble origins, who brought him many landed properties as a dowry and a big ball of gold. In another version, which is probably more plausible for a civil servant, is that the duel that took place between Cremona's mayor and the emperor was not a sparring match, but a tournament of bowls, or bocce, and Giovanni came out the victor.  In memory of that heroic enterprise, an arm with a ball in hand was added to the city coat of arms with the inscription meaning “my strength is in the arm”.
And this is why the Cremonese coat of arms has a hand holding a ball of gold.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie in Mirecourt.  As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.
So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship. Determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to Cremona, a city you can find in Northern Italy on one of the bends of the impressively long Po River.  Bursting with artisans and commerce in the mid-1500s, we return to our story of instrument maker Andrea Amati and his workshop.
Andrea Amati was not a lone artisan in this city, he was surrounded by merchants and trades people, busy in industry. There were belt makers, embroiderers, blacksmiths, carpenters, boat builders, masons, terracotta artisans, weavers, textile merchants, and printers. Just to name a few of the 400 trades listed in the city at this period.
I speak to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, and author about Andrea Amati's making methods. 
It's really difficult to know. I mean, so Andrea Amati, you've spoken about Brescia before and, what I imagine your listeners will have heard of is that Gasparo Da Salo is very much the established figure in Brescia.
Before, they're kind of the same age, but Gasparo Da Salo actually comes out of a tradition which goes back centuries, and Andrea Amati turns up out of absolutely nowhere, and it's Andrea Amati who makes the violin as we know it. It's the thing that we're familiar with, it's the, it's a design which repeats itself throughout his family in Stradivari. Even to the point, there's a, there's a really interesting observation that although the Brescians were making viols and citterns and all sorts of things beforehand, when it comes to the violinists, the violins that survived, they're all copies in one way or another of what they were observing from Cremona.
So this late starter, Andrea Amati, actually seems to be the starting point, even for Brescian violins, even though they come from a longer tradition.
By this time, Andrea Amati had perfected the outline of the modern-day violin. He and his eldest son, Antonio Amati, were working on patterns and jigs to make the instruments for a royal order for the King of France. The order was for 12 large sized violins, 12 small sized violins, 6 violas, and 8 bassoons. Bass, violins, or cellos.
Each instrument was to be decorated with specific symbols and motifs, representing the royal house and portraying an image of how they wanted to be perceived.  When Andrea Amati received the commission for these instruments, things were really starting to kick off at the French court. Civil war was brewing and no amount of entertainments by Catherine, the Queen Regent, was going to put out this particular flame.
In the Kingdom of France, a great conflict arose between two groups of people. The Catholics and the Huguenots, the French Protestants.  This conflict became known as the French Wars of Religion. It all started when the Huguenots, who included not only peasants and the artisan class, but nobles as well,  demanded more religious freedom and equal treatment under the law.  This did not sit well with the Catholic majority, who saw the Protestants belief as a threat to their own faith.  As tensions rose, violence erupted in the form of sporadic attacks on Huguenot communities by Catholic mobs. The French monarchy, looking to maintain control, attempted to suppress the Huguenots by force.  However, the Huguenots, under the leadership of figures such as Admiral Gaspar de Colligny, organized and fought back. Several wars broke out, with battles being fought across the country. The conflict raged on for over 30 years, causing immense destruction and loss of life.
The French court was filled to the brim with intrigue and power struggles.  Tensions between the Catholic majority and the Huguenot minority was only increasing.  At the centre of it all was the French royal family, trying to maintain control over a divided country. The king and queen, surrounded by their advisors and courtiers, were grappling with finding a solution to this conflict. Meanwhile, in the shadows, whispers of conspiracy and betrayal echoed through the halls. Allies became enemies, and trust was a rare commodity.  The court was full of ambitious individuals, each seeking to advance their own interests and increase their power.  One day, rumours spread of a Huguenot plot to assassinate the king. The court was thrown into a frenzy, with spies and informers working overtime. It was a dangerous time to be a Huguenot at the French court, and even the slightest suspicion could lead to an arrest or execution.
The Amati instruments destined for the French royal court were part of this much bigger story that was unfolding and would involve many of the contemporary superpowers of the day.  Not only did the royal house have to navigate internal court intrigues, there were also the neighbours, Europe’s other powerhouses, all looking to France in its weakened state. Like vultures contemplating a wooden wildebeest on the Serengeti.
To understand where Andrea Amati’s instruments were headed, we will first take a look at the woman who may possibly have been responsible for ordering them in the first place.  Catherine de Medici, the original Black Widow.  I spoke to Susan Brimhall about this fascinating woman.  I know we've already spoken about her, but we're gonna talk about her again.
I got the feeling, sort of looking at Catherine, that she arrives in France and the king that, the prince that, what, was he a prince when she married him? He wasn't king. Yeah, he's a duke. Yeah.  So she, she marries him, and I feel like from the Duke, he was a little bit nonplussed about it. And then, she loses her dowry at some point. Is that right?
Well, so there's a bit of a story here that, um. The Medici house, when she is a, is a girl, a young girl, is ducal. So they're a set of dukes.  And when she marries into the French royal family, she's marrying very much up into a royal family. So a ducal house is moving up the ranks to have a marriage with a royal house, and the reason that, I mean, normally a royal house will be looking for other royal houses to keep the bloodline at the royal level, if you like. But in this case, the French have been at war, uh, they've been at war trying to claim pieces of Italy which has exposed them to a whole lot of culture in Italy that they bring back to France, and that's an important part of this story. But they've also bankrupted much of the state. And so the French king, at the time, Francois I, he’s also looking for something to fill the coffers. And the Medici family is very, very wealthy at this time. It always creates a kind of a black mark on Catherine that she's never really quite of the bloodline. They didn't have children for a very long time. After a time, well, they basically used the money that Catherine had brought to the marriage, but her marriage negotiations had been made by the Pope, who had since died, and you know, the money the French expected wasn't quite forthcoming, let's say.  I'm not sure it ever quite pans out the way the contract said. They were going to be, but in this case it certainly didn't. So, you know, black mark that she comes from a ducal family, not a royal family. Black mark that it's kind of new mercantile money rather than any kind of old money from an impoverished house, let's say and then further black mark that the money isn't actually being delivered as expected, at least by the French. And then fourth black mark, she's not delivering children. So for a whole lot of reasons, things look pretty bleak for Catherine very early on in that marriage. 
So Catherine, she doesn't have much going for her, and would I be correct in thinking that she sort of uses the arts to endear people to her?
So most of Catherine's known artistic patronage is in the second half of her life. But we do know that from the time she married, most sort of, most royal marriages, people adopt a kind of an emblem or a symbol. Sometimes it will be a bit like a motto, and sometimes it will have a visual component part. And when Catherine marries, she adopts Iris, which is, um, a bringer of, she's a bringer of peace in mythology and her symbol is the rainbow. And so on early, some early structures where Catherine has an opportunity to impose herself, if you like, in the design, we see some small elements where she uses the rainbow symbol as a sign of her as somebody who's bringing peace and prosperity to France,  but really mostly when her sons are in power, because as I said earlier, three of her sons become king and they all become king relatively young and her second son, Charles the Ninth, I think he's about 10 when he, when he arrives on the throne. She is, more or less the regent for him for the first three or four years of his reign and at that time she really has a great deal of power. I don't think we should ever think that Catherine, her motivations might be to, to explain a version of herself that makes sense to the public in certain contexts. But they're also always about her children and about the dynasty that she's married into and about the longevity of that dynasty and the work that they've done for France. So that dynasty is called the Valois. The Valois family are the family that she's married into and much more than she's ever celebrating the Medici, that doesn't really make sense in France. What she's doing is celebrating the dynasty that she's married into and the future that her children represent for that dynasty in France.
Back in the Amati workshop, the instruments would have been made in a series so that they would all be identical. And this would also make the whole process faster. A few extra hands would have to be hired to help out with such a large order if they were to get them all finished on time, but they could definitely achieve this.
Violin maker, expert, author and researcher in Milan, Carlo Chiesa.
It is also worth noting that the Amatis at that point, they were wealthy enough people. This is very important because, uh, it means they, the kids had an education.  Uh, they were able to, go to school, uh, to be trained properly, not just in the workshop. And they were artisans of a high level anyway. So the daughters of Andrea Amati who got married, they usually got married with the people who were from the same social status and that is also worth noting, it means that they were not working for low class musicians, but usually their commission went to noblemen or high class customers which they were able to deal with.  That is also another of the reasons for the success of cremonese making, because the artisans were able to deal with the high-class customers. The greatness of the Amatis was that they, uh, set up a method for making instruments, which is basically the same as we do today with an internal mould and blocks glued to that mould. So that you can repeat time after time, the same outline. Bressian makers did not have the same. That is, I'm quite sure. 
This would not be the only time Andrea Amati would fulfill a royal order for the House of Valois.  A set of five instruments also decorated with Royal Insignia and with the motto. By this bulwark, religion stands, printed on the sides, had been delivered to the French monarchs, who were making a point about their religious conflicts, even on the instruments to be played at court. The French royal family felt the threat of the Protestants at court to the extent of having reminders in a somewhat passive aggressive form painted on the orchestra even.
So the whole idea of symbolism, do you think it was kind of stronger during that time? And I'm thinking of the, the Charles IX instruments in all the decorative paintings they have on that, because they're symbolic as well. Would they have had sort of a more profound meaning than like, we would go, Oh, isn't that nice? It's a painting. But for them, would they have seen it? 
I spoke to Dr. John Gagne, Senior Lecturer in History at Sydney University. 
Maybe the first thing to say is that this is, it's common for rulers to put their, uh, heraldic mottos on everything. Actually, I just read a PhD dissertation about, uh, the court of Ferrara and the banqueting apparatus at the court of Ferrara. And part of the theory was perhaps that  rulers feared that their own Employees would steal things and so they tended to mark everything with, you know, their, their, labels so that they wouldn't be stolen. That may just be actually kind of, uh, bad vibes against lower class people. But I think maybe more than that, it intends to extend the image of the ruler into as many places as possible. It's like a radiating sun. I mean, that, that is actually the metaphor that's often used for  pre modern rulers is that they're, they're like a star and that the rays of the star goes out in all directions and what better way to sort of send out your rays than actually physically to implant your, your motto or your heraldic crest on things that then travel around the world and represent you. So this seems to me to be exactly what's going on both in terms of banqueting plates, but also musical instruments, because they're probably actually not so different in value actually. Sort of fine plateware and musical instruments. They're things that would, were at the pleasure of the ruler and that were seen as belonging to him or her more broadly So with the so called Amati violins, you’ve got the sort of template seems to be the crest of the king in the centre, surrounded by two pillars, which are then flanked by two women, which are then flanked by two Ks.
The Ks are for Carolus, which is the Latin for Charles, which is Charles IX, the king of who supposedly commissioned these violins.  The figures are piety and justice, we think and then the pillars were very commonly used in the rule of Charles IX. It seems as though the most common mythological figure that Charles IX was associated with during his tour of France in the 1560s was Hercules.
And Hercules, you know, one of his labours was to sort of crack through this mountain.  The ruins of which left, you know, these two pillars, which became the sort of entrance to the Mediterranean or the exit into the Atlantic. So they're known as the Pillars of Hercules, uh, and they today, of course, separate, um, southern Spain from North Africa. And so I think the pillars may refer to the idea that the king is like a Hercules. He is this sort of, you know, even though he's a child, a teenager, he's an invincible king. Uh, and the crest in the centre sort of reminds you of who that Hercules is. It's Charles. Well, yeah, because Catherine, she had as her symbol, Isis? Iris? Iris or Isis? Um, the one and it was the rainbow. And she had the rainbow. Maybe it is Iris, you're right.  Yeah, Iris is the goddess of messengers. Iris, Isis is an even more ancient Egyptian goddess. The problem is Catherine is also associated with a number of classical figures, I mean as is Charles. Occasion determines what classical figure best represents the spirit you want to.
Yeah, so I think the rainbow thing was for harmony. We thought her peace and harmony vibes.  And I thought it was funny because, um, I think it's, is it Mary, Queen of Scots, the Scottish.  I don't know if it was her motto, but the Scottish one is a unicorn. And so they literally, there's like
rainbows and unicorns,  um,  yeah.
So she would be like harmony. And then I'm imagining that Catherine probably would have had a hand in the decision of,  we'll go with Hercules maybe, like, cause, to show the strength, the whole idea was trying to, wasn't it like, she was worried, she had a child king, it was,  uh, to have a weak political situation she needed to, like, bolster things up and make it stronger.
And, you know, I mean, uh, you know, obviously in 1559, Henry II dies dramatically in a terrible way. He is, gets basically splinters in the eye to kill him because they puncture his brain and, and all she has is basically children. I mean, they're not adults. Um, her first child, the second dies within a year. Charles the ninth is the second one to take over. But you know, he, he's in his teens. He dies before he is 25. Doesn't one of them die after playing tennis?  Like he played a game of tennis?  Well, that's probably Francois, actually. Caught a cold and died.
Yeah. It's like 1560 You just can't count on these kids dying after a game of tennis.
And 1560 is also the year when the first religious war breaks out in France. So that's the real, so this is Catherine's real challenge, is that, you know, she's a new widow. All she has is underage children. She's got a kingdom that's breaking apart in religious war, and her job is to bring it back together.
And so the, you know, the reason for this tour in 1564- 65 is to unify the kingdom. Rainbow style with by parading this, the new king, even though he's in his teens around the country so that he's able to, you know, make relationships basically with all the major cities.
But if he's Hercules, that's cool. Hercules was quite young, right? When he was doing all these things. So right. She's harmony. She's got Hercules.
Yes. The other thing too, that, I mean, there are some, we, you know, there's no, one of the interesting things about, um, monarchical symbolism is that they're often. Multivalent. They can be read in multi different ways, many different ways. And so, the pillar, the columns might mean Hercules. There's also, uh, a theory that they could refer to, um, the twins, Castor and Pollux from antiquity, who were sons of Leda. One was immortal and one was mortal. And it may be that that was a way of referring to her two children, the sort of children who are closest in age, uh, Charles and his, his brother, um, who became Henry III. That, you know, they're two strong brothers side by side, and so there's, there's force in unity, let's say. And that the column, you know, you can't hold up a building with one column, you need two columns. So there may have been, uh, further, uh, reinforcement of the idea of strength through the columns as well.
So both, it both invokes Hercules, but it also invokes, uh,  Stable. Stableness, basically. Yeah, and once again, um,
It's funny that they keep choosing figures from antiquity and not sort of, like, Biblical figures that they could possibly have done, but because  it's the Renaissance.
Yes, I mean, it's true. They often, both are in the mix. Um, and there are all kinds of, you know, most, if you went to, let's say, one of the entries at these, as the Charles IX entered a city, you'd see both. I mean, there would be religious music, there would be psalms that would be sung or spoken. But yes, it's leavened and intermixed with classical culture as well. And they were seen as mutually reinforcing, right? That often a classical king was a, let's say, a typology that meshed with a religious figure as well. So that was part of the deep layers of Renaissance culture was the overlapping of the classical and the biblical. So, just because you may invoke Hercules doesn't mean you can also not, um, invoke a religious figure who sort of resembles Hercules. Whether it's, you know, David and Goliath or something like that, you know. Uh, so there would be, let's say, layers as well. But you're right. The, the classical was the, was the, say, the cover of the book, let's say. Um, and it's so, and it was kind of around this time that, uh, the, the Charles IX instruments  are made.
So, so the idea is, yeah, it's around when she's doing that, they're doing that, the tour of France and there are these  decorated instruments,  but also, um,  there are other decorated instruments.  There's one  for  Marguerite de Valois,  and then Henry the fourth,  he has one  after all his problems,  and then he has an instrument, an Amati instrument that has, um,  Le roi de France par la grâce de Dieu, and you're like, you know, the king of France by  the grace of God, or  something to that effect, and you're like, well, yeah.
It was like, it wasn't easy for him to be, to remain king and not get killed.
When Catherine de Medici arrived at the French court at the age of 14, no one expected that one day she would be more or less ruling the country through her children.  When she was doing this, her main preoccupation was to ultimately keep the peace and promote the House of Valois, into which she had married. And when you're strapped for cash, war is never a good idea, economically speaking. The intrigue and plotting at court made it a precarious place to be. War was not good. Besides the fact that if you weren't careful you could easily get yourself topped off.  Conflict was dreadful for the economy. And the state of the royal coffers was definitely not good. But Catherine had a plan, and it was this.  Distract the nobles with spectacular events and they might be too preoccupied to kill each other. A key element to these events was music, music and theatre, where she would have Catholic and Protestant nobles at the court play act that they were living in harmony rather than scheming to kill one another. Which is what they were most probably doing, straight after coming home from one of Catherine's magnificences  where they would have been fighting side by side with their rivals, liberating a skimpily clad damsel from the clutches of a paper mache dragon on a lake in the castle grounds.
They had a lot of structure, structures in their, in their clothing.
Yeah, they did. They did.
So, um, what's happening, uh, something that came in the  1570s was the French Farthingale.
Dr. Emily Brayshaw is an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney School of Design.
And that kind of popped up around then and it's the new silhouette really. And this is women's fashion. And it's like a stuffed roll around the hips, known as a bum roll, and a hoop with horizontal stiffeners tied around the waist. And it made the skirt stick out from the body. And this is the French farthingale. So you can kind of think of it like a tabletop and then the fabric. Falling from the bottom. And this is kind of different from the, um, Spanish farthingales, which were more cone shapes. And what they're really doing is essentially hiding the body through tailoring and creating a completely new body, which we're seeing and, and different, different silhouettes. Italian dressing is kind of a lot softer and not as structured as like English or French or Spanish, which is very highly structured as well.
It sounds incredibly uncomfortable and heavy.
It was very heavy, but some of these devices like the farthingale are actually built to support the weight of these fabrics. Okay. As well.
It's like a whole, like a little building you're walking around with.
Yeah, yeah, you are. But, and then you've got sort of, um, heavily woven gold fabrics, velvet woven with gold. You've got your jewelry embroidered in over the top.  Um, this is, uh, Catherine de Medici here. She has like this bodice with just pearls and jewels. Lots of different parts coming together. Yeah, she has this like really delicate lace collar and then these pearls and jewels sort of making like a diamond shape on the corset.
And then these furry Yep, the big ermine fur sleeves. Pearl necklace. We've got the high forehead and pale skin that was very popular throughout Europe. Lots of pearls. Pearls were very, very expensive at the time and showed access to trading routes as well that she would have had. But also, um, all of these layers, we need to remember that it was actually really kind of cold.
Yeah. And these drafty big old castles were not, like, the heating was not great.  And so all of these layers would also keep you quite snug. Right.
But for Catherine, keeping those scheming courtiers occupied was a full time job. And one of her right hand men to help her with all this was a fellow Italian, of course, called Balthazar de Beau joyeaux.  He would help Catherine stage her productions. Keeping the nobility from their fiefdoms. So the queen mother could keep an eye on those volatile nobles and constantly bedazzling them at her, sorry, the King's court. Along with her entertainments, she also embarked on an extensive building program, enlarging the Louvre and landscaping its majestic gardens. She surrounded herself with painters, sculptors, astronomers, poets, architects, philosophers, and musicians.  The constant arranging of banquets and entertainments meant music was an integral part of life at court and its presence was everywhere. From intimate chamber music for the royal family, to banquets, and more lavish entertainments,  music accompanied everyday life, as it does in some ways today.  So, music, musicians, their instruments, and by extension, those who made them, were hugely important.  And a major component to her toolkit for success and or survival. If she had had an operations manual, it may have looked a bit like this. 1.  Try not to get self and children murdered by scheming factions at court. Music as a magical force on our souls and a harmony keeping element in the universe must be used. 2.  Distract above mentioned scheming factions by keeping them occupied with a packed program of activities and throw beautiful women in their paths that they will have liaisons with and extract any useful information via pillow talk back to the Queen Mother. Strategically placed lute players around the court could help with the atmosphere.  Now, this team of charming damoiselles Catherine used to glean information about any plots afoot were called her Flying Squadron, and for all intents and purposes, appeared to do the job, supplying the Queen with constant information and, at least on one occasion, uncovering an assassination attempt on the Royals. Number 3.  Hide the fact that the Royal coffers are empty.  Thanks to wars both abroad and now between the Catholics and the Huguenots at home, they had sucked the bank dry.  So the best solution here would be to carry on in an extravagant fashion as per usual so no other power can see their weakness. Music and merrymaking shall be had at all times. 4. Strengthen the royal house of Valois.  Show the world its greatness, order an orchestra of stringed instruments with beautiful painted decorations  so everyone can witness their place appointed by God on violins that hold a connection between this world and the divine. Keep in mind that music represented the harmony of the universe. And according to some Neoplatonic thinkers, possessed magical and therapeutic properties as it activated the benign influence of the planets and healed the body by reviving the soul. The thinkers of the Renaissance saw music as a medicine, an elixir for your being. The instruments as a powerful intermediary between the terrestrial, heavenly and super heavenly world.  Both the violin and the lute were tangible links to higher forces and were thought to have a magical, mystical effect on our spirit.  How important, then, is the luthier who makes these instruments that have such an effect on our immortal body and soul? The symbol of a broken lute string in paintings of the period represented a rupture of the heavenly harmony. Perhaps there was hushed silence lute player snapped one. I mean, today you're just peeved because let's face it, strings are expensive, but at least we don't have to worry about disrupting heavenly spheres every time we snap a chord.
Susan Broomhall.
So, when we look at those instruments that, you know, are typically clustered together called kind of the Charles IX set of instruments, they very clearly have markings on them that one would associate immediately with Charles IX. So, you know, we've been talking a little bit about a set of symbols that each royal individual has that kind of marks them out and separates them from some, somebody else, and usually they try to signal something about that person and what identity they want to bring and Charles the Ninth, I mean, his most simple symbol is a K for Carolus so that's just a Latin version of Charles it's usually a K with a crown on top. So if you see that symbol, that's usually a first you know, guess that this instrument is, or this thing, whatever it might be, because they're often on buildings as well. It will tell you that the building is made for him in his reign, something around that. So it's a good dating mechanism. So we see that immediately on a number of these instruments, but it's also combined with a number of other things that we associate with him.
So I said also, sometimes it's pictures, sometimes it's words, mottos. And on these instruments we're either seeing the words, um, in English, piety and justice. Those two words are often associated with Charles IX, not because he necessarily was wonderfully pious or just, but this was very much part of the identity of what kind of a king he was going to claim to be and it's often combined with, say, an image of a woman who represents justice, so she might have the scales in her hand, and there is one of the instruments in that collection. Well, I think she's been sliced in half now, but, you know, you can clearly see she's lost her scales, I think, and she's lost her stomach.
That one, that's really interesting. So off the top of my head, I can't remember which image it is, but the one that has been, It's a cello, yeah.  And so you can look at one and kind of take a pretty good stab at what was represented on some of the others. So some of them are a bit faded, but they mostly share a set of symbols that we would expect, so fleur de lis as a sign of France, the crown, the initial and the crown together, so the K for Charles. If that makes Latin, you know, for Charles. The columns with ribbons, garlands around them, the image of justice. But I mean, some of them also have the heraldic symbols of, um, his arms and the, the, the chain of St Michael's, which is the, you know, in England, um, One might hear about the Order of the Garter, which is a particular order that only a certain number of people, it's usually about 24, people are ever allowed in at any one moment, and it's a kind of sign of those who have, you know, most proximity and prestige near the king. France has the same thing with the Order of St Michael, and you can see the chain of St Michael on, um, surrounding a number of the heraldic arms symbol on some of those instruments. So, my understanding is one of the instruments looks like it may have a date of 1564 in Roman numerals.  And that would be completely consistent with obviously the timeline of Charles IX.
But for Catherine, she really does have a lot of money at her disposal in her later life, and so what she is doing is investing in whole palaces, whole garden complexes, and all the things that go with that. So, you know, all the interior artwork. Um, all the sculptures and these gardens that she's laying out, as well as the interior space of these palaces, often have very, very large rooms that are suitable for big performances. So indoors and outdoors performances that often involve performances of dance. They'll almost, you know, they'll certainly have musical components. They look a bit like theatre. They look a bit like ballet.  Sometimes they'll have horses, um, and so there's kind of like a staged horse equestrian performance in the middle of it. They can sometimes look like kind of mock jousting, mock battles. Sometimes they'll have mythological themes. It's a really kind of complex art form. So when you say performance, it's not quite theatre, it's a bit of everything. And perhaps, um, what's significant or particularly significant, apart from the fact they cost an awful lot of money. There's a strange combination where these things are being designed by people who work for Catherine, but they often involve the royal family and all the  courtiers actually performing in these things. So it's not like, uh, the royal court sits back in a theatre environment and watches something on a stage. The king and the queen will be dancing in the middle of the performance and they'll of course be in leading roles. Um, you know, so the whole structure of the performance is.  Also a kind of political, of course, it's political messaging, but they're right in the middle of it. Um, so it's perhaps quite unusual to think about. It's not just, oh, we're putting on a theatre piece, but these people are in the middle of it. And this is something very much associated with Catherine de Medici. So these things are, uh, you know, yes, they might be pretty and they're certainly extremely expensive, but by getting the courtiers to act in them, uh, she's also trying to kind of, I guess, model certain kinds of behaviour amongst them and to, and I think this is where music and dance are really important about establishing a kind of tone at the court, which is about harmony, always about harmony. Um, sure control by the royal family over the court here. So there's a bit of establishing of hierarchy, but it's always about trying to bring the French court together and find common interests against external enemies.
Oh, it's kind of like, um,  17th century team building. 
Indeed, indeed. Yeah, so she has three sons who become kings. The first one is Francois II, and he really only lasts about a year, um, and perhaps he's most famous for being married to Mary, Queen of Scots. Um, so then Francois II, then the king who follows him is Charles IX. He comes to the throne, I think he must be about 10 at the time he comes to the throne. Um, so he requires a regent, um, and Catherine. I should also add at this point, France is fracturing very clearly into two large factions of Protestants and Catholics would dominate, but Protestants are quite a powerful and politically  well set up force who have a great deal of power and because of the competing factions at court, I think in the end, a decision is made that, well, Catherine de Medici, she's his mother, she might be the best person to kind of protect him and steer him through  this really fractious moment. Because if you appointed anyone else, you know, they would represent one side or the other. But the assumption is, and again, this is a kind of emotional way of thinking, is that the mother only has his best interests at heart and therefore will, you know,  guide him down the middle of this. And then when he's about 13, he announces his majority, as it's called and then in 1564, she and Charles participate in what's called the Grand Tour of France. And for two years, they basically travel around the country, sort of saying, Hey, here's Charles, this is your king. 
On this infamous Tour de France, the court made its way south to Bayonne, where the Queen Consort would see for the first time after years, her teenage daughter, who had married the King of Spain Philip II.  Diplomatic talks would take place and everyone knowing that the young French king did not wield the power, it was his mother Catherine who had to be told by the Spanish that she was being far too lenient with the dangerous Protestants in her court and why hadn't she killed them all yet? 
So yeah, there are a series of perhaps Really famous extravaganza and, um, one of those, the one you're referring to happens when she, so her daughter, Elizabeth becomes the Queen of Spain. They spend a long time writing letters to each other and then she wants to meet her daughter again. So they arranged this meeting at the border between France and Spain and everybody cries when they catch up. It's, you know, all the eyewitness ambassadors talk about how everybody cried, including the king. And then one of his courtiers told him off that it wasn't appropriate for a king to cry. It's the first time they've seen each other since Elizabeth got married and went off to live in Spain. So they're kind of, it's a big catch up for the family, the Valois family, if you like.
So that's the king who cries at the ceremony? Okay. Not, not Philip.
No, not Philip. Philip doesn't attend. Um, there's some discussion about whether or not he should attend or whether, uh, Catherine might be too beguiling.  A series of these  magnificences or extravaganzas not only took place and were written about by ambassadors and then sometimes had printed accounts with some illustrations showing what happened at them, but they are also turned into a set of tapestries. And I wonder if that's why you picked it, because, you know, in this kind of. multimodal milking of the event, and I guess you may as well, if you spent lots and lots of money on it, get every possible use out of it. A series of the biggest kind of extravagances during her time in power, Catherine's time in power, are then translated into tapestries.
So they're displayed in their own right, right? So they're pieces of art, but they're art that's telling you about other art that Catherine has done, if that makes sense.
The Amati set of instruments may have travelled with them, being played by the court musicians to add an extra layer of bling to the affair. In any case, it would be unthinkable for the royals to set off without their musicians, and the Valois musicians would play on nothing but the best.
John Gagne
Yes, so this is maybe, of all the French kings who loved music, maybe Charles IX is not top of our list. We think of other kings from later periods. But there's been a lot of research done recently on King Charles IX, who, you know, died when he was 25, so he didn't have a lot of time to become a music lover, but it seems like he was really interested. A lot of  members of the court testified to his love of singing, the fact that he would, like his father, often leave his pew in church and go join the choir to sing. When a mass was being performed, both Tai and Dessus, so that's the lower voice and the higher voice, seem to be capable of both. And there are some drawings by Antoine Caron, who was one of the court artists, showing him seated at a table with a bunch of, with a score and surrounded by musicians. With all the instruments sitting in repose, the idea being that the focus here is on  Reading of the score and sort of, you know, musical literacy rather than, let's say, instrumental literacy. So this is about, you know, learning your notes and how to sing. But in addition, maybe three things to mention.
First is his foundation of an academy, l'Académie Royale de Musique which was quite early 16th century academy for the arts that he founded, including members of his, like, friends of his, like, Baille and Ronsard, poets, and then his composer servants, including Guillaume Cotelet, who was his organist, and left a number of published songs, both religious and secular that I listened to the other day, they're quite lovely.  And maybe most famous is, uh, Orlando di Lasso, uh, Italian composer who served the King of France, and who we have records of several letters being sent to him saying the King is basically willing to pay him anything for him to come into his service, to join him on his tour of France, to, uh, be there when he wants to, you know, wants his services. The letter, in fact, stipulates he'll be paid on sort of like three levels, like he'll get a base salary, he'll get a salary as the First composer of the King, and then he'll get a supplementary salary. So he was being loaded with cash. So it tells us something about even before he reached the age of 25 that Charles IX was, you know, soaking himself in a highly literate, musically literate environment, which makes the acquisition of Amati instruments more compelling, let's say, because he would have been looped into, through the composers probably, and some of the servants who  brought their musical skills from Italy to networks of knowledge where he might have been able to trace some of the finest Italian makers and really learn  he should have as a king of France to embellish his court.
The Amati set of instruments were sent to the French court and would provide entertainment for both the royal family and the nobles at court.  In the previous episodes, we saw how Catherine de Medici used spectacle and entertainment as a political message when she toured the French kingdom with her son. Back in the capital, she would do the same using court festivities as a means to this end.  At this point, you may notice that Charles IX is no more. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 23, and it is now his brother, King Henry III, Not to be confused with his brother in law, Henry, who was mixed up in the St Bartholomew Day's massacre, who would eventually become Henry IV.  Are you following? There are a lot of Henry's, it's really confusing.  In this episode, we have seen how the French wars of religion caused economic hardships for artisans and tradespeople as far away even as Cremona. These problems caused by the religious conflicts were the same that Gasparo Da Salo in Brescia was facing when he too had to borrow money just to make ends meet.
We also see how the painted instruments of Charles IX made sense in the French court, where symbolism and extravagance played a political role at court, and the messages the monarchy were trying to convey were printed on multiple platforms.  Charles IX is a music loving king in a court filled with theatre and drama.
Andrea Amati's instruments were accompanying the court intrigues, balls and spectacles with their musical accompaniments, used for both pleasure and strategic plays at court.  So here we have what is perhaps the oldest set of violins placed in their historical context. These violins would not be disposed after the Valois royal house stopped ruling, but would be used with others to entertain the court for many years to come.
 
I would like to thank my delightful guests, Dr. John Gagne, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Carlo Chiesa, and Benjamin Hebbert.  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. You can subscribe to the podcast at theviolinchronicles. podbean. com to know when new episodes are posted, and you can write a comment or question if you want there.
So join me as we wrap up the life of the Baroque master, Andrea Amati, and head towards some cool new designs by the brothers Amati amid a smattering of wars, invasions, pestilence, and disease thrown in.  Thank you so much for listening, and if you like what you hear and would be into supporting the podcast so I can make even more episodes, please sign up to Patreon.
 
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Ep 6. Andrea Amati Part 3 The painted Violins of Charles IX

Artificial Dolphins, heavenly spheres and Catherine de Medici taking her tween King son on a royal tour of the land to the sounds of Amati violins, this episode has it all.
 Step into the opulent world of 16th-century France as we uncover the captivating story of the court of Catherine de Medici and a set of royal violins commissioned for her son, Charles IX by the violin maker Andrea Amati.
In this podcast, we embark on a journey through the rich cultural tapestry of the Medici dynasty and their influence on the arts. Delve into the fascinating intersection of music, power, and intrigue within the court, where the resplendent sounds of violins played a pivotal role in shaping the Renaissance era.
Music heard in this podcast is as follows.
Aco home casts -  Timo-Veikko Valve
Bloom – Roo Walker
Make believe – Giulio Fazio
Banquet of Squires – Jonny Easton
ACO Home the Home – Liisa Pallandi and Timo- Viekko Valve Sonata representative
Unfamiliar faces – All good folks
Industrial music box – Kevin Macleod
Transcript
  After the demigod Hercules had accomplished his eleventh labour, giving himself a five-finger discount to Zeus golden apples, he stopped to rest on the banks of the Po River.  In those times, however, the area was overridden with thieving giants who plundered the small villages in the surrounding countryside.
Learning of the hero's mini break in the area, the elders of the villages approached Hercules and implored him to help rid them of the giants.  When they said help, they really meant, you know, if he could do it.  Ever ready for a bout of fisticuffs, in no time at all, our demigod was able to kill all the offending giants and free the region from their reign of terror.
The overjoyed inhabitants wanted to reward Hercules by giving him their most precious possessions. However, Hercules decided that what these people needed was a place where they could protect themselves in case new brigands arrived.  He couldn't stick around, he had heroing to do.  So he founded a fortified city and gave it the name of his mother, El Camino, which later turned into Cremona, meaning mighty. And this is the Renaissance take on why the city is called Cremona.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history
In the previous episodes of the Violin Chronicles, we saw Andrea Amati setting up his workshop, the life of the city, how it was run, and the movement of humanism, its effects on education, and finally the reformation, the influence the church had on people's lives, especially those of the artisan class.
Andrea Amati's workshop had been up and running for about 10 years when news came that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, would be visiting the city in August.  It was all anyone could talk about. They were going to erect a triumphal arch, there would be celebrations, feasting, and of course, music. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the ruler.
The excitement was palpable.  Andrea Amati, his wife, and their son, the little five year old Antonio Amati, would have been in the crowd that came out to catch a glimpse of the emperor passing through Cremona.  But now Andrea is fulfilling a royal order. The violin is having a coming-of-age moment and starting to be fashionable to the point that the trend setting French royal court is making orders for Cremonese violins.
And so it begins. What violin maker out there is unfamiliar with the phrase I'm looking for a cremonese instrument.  Join me as we look at the fashionistas who set the ball rolling.
Every city wants to look their best if the Holy Roman Emperor passes through. They were still working on containing heretics, and questions still abounded on how the church would approach things such as music.  Groups of thinkers or academies were popping up all over Renaissance Italy and ideas about the nature of music, its purpose and power were being discussed.
So I was, there was sort of like scientific things happening, right? You had Galileo and everything. And, and my, my thought processes, the music, I felt like they.  There were like music texts where they say, you know, it's, it kind of moves your soul. It has this physical impact. And I was thinking, it's not so strange that they would approach music in the scientific way, but in the same way as like, Oh, well, you've got gravity, you've got the stars and music.
We can feel, we can actually physically feel something when we hear music. So we may as well treat it almost like a science. It's, they're doing all these sciences, like why not music? And it's overlapped into the religious sphere as well because it had to do with your, your soul and  your inner being sort of thing.
I'm John Gagné. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the university of Sydney and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries. So I suppose the first thing to say about that is that the ancients had a strong mathematical sense of music. You know, Pythagoras's theory was that, you know, you remember that the parable of the reeds and you cut reeds to a certain length and they make a certain tone if you blow through the top of the reed and I think the mathematical, I forget the mathematical, formula, but it's sort of like the length of a, of a string is inversely proportional to the sound that it makes. And so that was established in antiquity, but became increasingly of interest. I mean, people had known about that for centuries through the Middle Ages, but you know, with the advancement of certain techniques, interest returns to let's say the mathematical qualities of music.
There was a huge tradition to draw upon. I mean, one of the examples is something like St. Augustine, who was writing in late antiquity, who wrote a treatise on mathematics, but it was all about music. So they were always kind of intertwined. Maybe the best case study to think about is the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who lived around the same time as Galileo, slightly earlier, and was very interested in this Pythagorean theory of music and arithmetic, he was one of the proponents of the idea of the music of the spheres.  Which has an interesting core idea, which is that if we think of proportion of distance, it can be the string of an instrument, but it could also be the distance between two planets, or three planets, or four planets. And so the idea was that we could, if we could imagine reeds and strings having a relationship of mathematical sound to you know, within the mathematical system, then why could we not also imagine the distance between the planets having the same kind of relationship, and that was an elaboration of a pre-existing idea that the spheres, that there were spheres in which all of the planets of the galaxy moved, and that they produced, therefore, a sound, which was not, let's say, a real sound, but resonated with your soul. So that the music of the universe was a kind of naturally God established harmony in which proportion, mathematical proportions from the minuscule to the galactic made sense and resonated with the natural proportions of, you know, our soul.
And that's universal harmony?
Yep, and then of course, then as you said, it becomes kind of it becomes a cultural trope. People begin to play with the idea of the music of the spheres. It becomes a poetic inspiration in the 16th and 17th centuries when poets begin to use the idea of the universal harmony, the music of the spheres to write poetry about, you know, concord in general between humans, between God and man, between you know, all living beings. And so it was a very powerful idea, which I think it remains a powerful idea to think that there's something rational and proportional in the universe and that it works on, let's say, scale of sizes from the, the minuscule to the, to the most enormous.  And so when you see like those Renaissance.
because the violin is drawn in a very sort of Renaissance mathematical type way, would they have been sort of inspired by that idea of, is that, was that all  one big thing?
Definitely in terms of the mathematics, I think, you know, that's part of the, you know, when you go back to the 15th century and you look at some of the most successful artists of that period, you know, just in terms of religious art most of them, I'm thinking here of artists like the 15th century artist Piero della Francesca, Or Leonardo da Vinci who was a contemporary.
They all leave sketchbooks where, you know, they've got measurements of man down to the, you know, we all know the, so-called the Trivian Man of Leonardo, which is the man with his arms outstretched his legs wide and using a circle in a square. But artists had much more complex methods. Showing the proportionality of the human body about, you know, let's say the size of the, the hand to the height of a man, or you know, the span of arms to the height.
So this is basically a workshop method for most art working artists was to understand proportionality of the body, which would then could be broadcast into other media. So, for instance, what made a building pleasurable to be inside? was the fact that it corresponded to a natural portion of the human body.
And so you would build buildings in, you know scales that were scaled up or down from the size of a human. You know, it's either, it's like 15 men high or something like that.  So I imagine that probably when it comes to the design, the increasing complexity of the design of violins, this, there's something similar at work there, which is that artists and mathematicians already know how to think proportionally and to work out in sort of grids. I think that's the best proportion for whatever they're constructing, whether it be a building or an instrument. And I think that's probably what we see in development over the course of the 16th and 17th century, is the kind of mathematical perfection of an instrument according to those rules of proportion.
Yeah.  Okay. Thanks. Thanks for the universal harmony thing.  I was wondering about that.
Andrea Amati is now working in a time of counter reformation in Cremona. We spoke about this in the last episode. And although church music was predominantly vocal, there was also the organ and a few musicians. When voices were lacking, they would begin to replace a voice with a viola, and the strings would often double or replace a vocal part accompanying the mass.
These musicians would also work for the local council, playing music for outdoor processions, where louder wind or brass instruments would be needed to carry the tune. I spoke to Peter Jensen about the 16th century attitude to music and the differing views reformers and churches had to musical expression.
And so yeah, it's interesting that this is the time they were living in and what they would have  seen and done was directly a result of this  counter reformation. Indeed, it was the intellectual and spiritual world in which people were living. And they're working for musicians who, who are playing in the church and composers at the time, they would compose and they would write and they were saying, “According to the Council of Trent”, I have written this composition.
Ah, well how interesting.
So they would quote it just to be like, because at the same time, around then, there was a little bit of an inquisition going on, so you wanted to be Yes. It was actually quite risky to be an artist or a musician in that world because you could easily be accused of heresy. I'm sure.
Now, amongst the reformers Luther was, he loved music. He thought that if you're going to be in the ministry, you will need to be a musician as well. Or you know, you need to love music. And he wrote these hymns and so forth and so on. Other people in the, of the reformers took slightly different views. A man called Zwingli in Switzerland was I believe a good musician, but he wasn't in favour of music in church.
He thought it would be too sensuous, you needed to hear the word of God. And having music in church was a bit like having statues in church. That was visual, the other was aural. But that was not the majority view. The majority view by the great John Calvin, for example, the Frenchman in Geneva, the majority view was that we needed music in church, and in particular,  They looked at the Bible and they saw the book of Psalms was there.
So, they were particularly interested in the Psalms and in some places,
Sorry, can I just say, Psalms are actually songs. There's actually musical directions.
Exactly. Yes. It's in the Bible.  What they did was, they would in some places have the Psalms just as they were written in the vernacular language.
In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, for example, the Psalms are set for the day. They change depending which Sunday it is. There are also some songs sung by the Virgin Mary, for example,  called the Magnificat, and other songs in the, in the prayer book. And you would either say them or sing them.
Well, you can, people get really passionate about music, and in that era, in the Renaissance, when You've noticed, have you?
Yes! Well, in the, in the Renaissance, they were kind of, they were  They were talking about, you had the science and the spheres and there was this one, there was this idea that, that music was so powerful and it moves your soul and because people, they, everyone knows you're moved by music and they're saying if this thing that can move our souls and our souls,  our eternal souls are in danger if we do it wrong.
Yes. And then, and you can see why they were really a little bit worried about it. There was hesitation as well as.
That's right.
And today I feel like we'll go, oh, music, yeah, it's good for you and this, but there, they were like, it is so, it's such this this force that can really, has a power to, to send you to hell.
For good or for bad. It could be demonic.
So, I mean, and that's why in church, I think.  Church music was such a thing that was spoken about and debated about and can we do this or not because you're, you're, you're killing people if you're doing it wrong or you're saving them if you do it right.
And some would say don't do it at all but most said yes let's do it.
Oh yeah to be on the safe side.  Zwingli. And he actually went around destroying instruments.
Did he?
Yeah. So,  burning things. 
He was, he was a little bit strong.  He was a good man in many ways, but he had his.
He had his Had his moments.
Had his moments. It was a tough one.  Yeah, it certainly caused conflict.
Yeah, well, I was reading different documents and a lot of it was often like a kid you didn't really know what to do with.  You send them to a monastery or there was one of the Amatis. They're living in this house and there's all these kids and the 16 year old he's a priest You know, and he's still living at home and I was like that's an interesting dynamic and then some of them you read accounts of things like complaints and things and You see their ages, and they're like, they're teenagers.
Yes. And they've just been sent to these monasteries, and they're bored. 
Yes. Bearing in mind that people didn't live as long in any case, so a 16 year old
Except these guys. Well, some of them did, of course.
But one of the things the Reformation did convents and so forth, it changed the attitude, I believe it changed the attitude to work. An ordinary person's work was just as important as People in the monastery and so forth and so on.
Now, the Italian wars that we spoke about in the first episode of The Violent Chronicles were ending, and Italy was entering into a period of prosperity and economic boom. Cremona has a population of 36,000 people. There are 40 music and dance teachers and one instrument maker on the.  And this, my friends, was our star Andrea Amati.
Cremona had made its mark as a musical centre of the region.  Andrea Amati was receiving important commissions, and in 1566  a new choir master was appointed to the cathedral. His name was Marc Antonio Ingegneri.  This was good news for the Amatis, as not only was the new choir master a composer, he was also a violinist, and this could only be good for business. What's more, he was talking about creating a group of musicians in the church, a type of orchestra.  Amongst his students was a young man called Claudio Monteverdi. We shall get to him soon.
Around 1560, the ten year old Girolamo Amati, Andrea Amati’s second son, after coming back from school, would have helped in the workshop where his father and older brother were busy. Ever since the exciting news of the Royal Order for Charles IX, King of France, this order would also have been a sign to any inquiring inquisitors that the Amati Family were above suspicion of heresy as this order was destined for the very Catholic court of France.
John Dilworth is a violin maker, restorer, and prolific writer and researcher. He's been a regular contributor to the Strad magazine and published numerous papers about instruments and violin makers, contributing to many specialized books on the subject. He's been a teacher, lecturer and judge in competitions. And now he'll tell us his thoughts on Andrea Amati.  John Dilworth tells us about Andrea Amati's working style and the interesting fact of labelling and dating his instruments, something we don't think too much about these days, but was in fact a novel move on his part.
In Cremona, right from the get go, Andrea Amati was always very careful to  sign and date his labels. So we know where we are with those. And it's very significant, I think, that in Cremona He was very conscious. He was making for austerity, really, you know, when you even when you look at paintings and other Artifacts from the time it wasn't common to put the date on you. You would sign, you know, I Michelangelo made this or whatever, you know, but you don't often get a date. But it's I think it's significant that in Cremona they well Andrea Amati to begin with did, and he was getting  commissions from, well the most notable thing, from the court of Charles the Ninth in, in France. So it was clear he was, he was already famous.  So he was getting from, you know, the most powerful court in Europe at the time. He was being asked to make a celebratory set of instruments.  So he was, He was clearly aware of his position and prominence and his skill. So he signed it and dated it and all his successors in Cremona, because he is the fountainhead of all the Cremonese tradition.
It's his sons and his grandson, his great grandson who right at the heart of everything and everyone  who subsequently worked in Cremona learnt directly or indirectly from them. Girolamo Amati would no doubt wonder about the young king of France who was the same age as himself as he helped out with this impressive order for instruments being constructed for a boy king.  They had to make 12 large sized violins, 12 small sized violins, six violas, and eight Bass violins or cellos.  But that wasn't all, they had detailed instructions on how the instruments were to be decorated with the royal coat of arms, symbols of the king, justice and the house of valour.
These instruments would become known as the Charles IX instruments and are perhaps the most well known work of Andrea Amati.  The painted instruments of Andrea Amati have been the stuff of legends over the years and there has been much speculation over the images and who the instruments were really made for.
But what we do know for certain is that the artworks on the instruments were by Cremonese artists, and that the town had an established school of painting and produced many fine craftsmen in this domain.
John Dilworth Extrapolates.  A big question about the Andrea Amati Instruments that the, the ones that were made for Charles the ninth. that have all this decorative painting on the, on the backs, um,  and all sorts of people have tried to point, make a case that this was, these paintings were made by Leonardo or something, you know, something ridiculous. My feeling is that he did get a local painter to do that. I did quite a lot of research into that showing pictures of. The back and close ups and everything around museums and galleries and they said, oh this, yes, this fits in perfectly with the, the Cremonese school of painting, which I didn't really know was such a thing, but there were every town in Italy seems to have had a  school of painting and they bandy around a few names that I'd never heard of before, but you know, are known to experts.
So there is that, that you can, I can well imagine that Andrea Amati got the thing finished and then went to a chap next door who happened to have the local Artist, you know, and said, I want St Catherine on the back of this violin and he paints it in and goes back to Amati's workshop to be varnished over.
It is also probable that Catherine de Medici, the king's mother, also had a hand in obtaining this set of instruments.  The Cremonese were immensely proud of the skill of their painters and indeed had a thriving community of artists. So that when Andrea Amati and his sons were making this set of instruments for Charles IX, there would have been little doubt that they would call upon one of the many talented local painters to decorate the instruments.
And so, knowing Catherine's taste of all things luxurious, violins were ordered from Cremona.
I spoke to Dr. Susan Broomhall about Catherine, who is more or less supposed to be the person responsible for ordering this large set of instruments from the Amati family.  The existence of these violins would have played a role in a far larger story of what was going on in the Valois court, and were not simply musical instruments, but statements, in part, and amongst many other objects, describing who these people were and what they wanted others to think of them.
My name is Susan Broomhall, and I'm the Director of the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I'm a historian by training and I work on women and gender ideologies and assumptions in the early modern period in Europe.
Yes. So Catherine is, a very unusual individual because she spends almost all her life in the spotlight, in the centre of political intrigue in Europe.  She spends most of her, her life in France, where she is both the queen of France and in the French context, to be the queen is always to be a consort of a king. There's no option to be queen in your own right, the ruler in your own right, then she's the mother of three successive kings who are her sons, which is quite a remarkable innings, I guess, of somebody in the public eye where she spent most of her life from. Early teen years, right through until she dies, and very much influential at the French court.
Because of her name, Catherine de Medici, most people will  link her to the Medici family in Italy. They are of course very prominent in Florence, and she is indeed part of that family. But her mother was French, so very often people think of her as an Italian. She is part Italian and also partly French. That's quite important because when she went to France often people would see her as a foreigner. Most of the people who are critical of her and most of the propaganda about her tags her as, as a foreigner. But in fact, her, her mother was French.  That said, she grew up in Florence and in Rome, and I think she always carried with her the imprint of Italian design, Italian culture, the way that the Italian courts at that time in the early Renaissance were using fashion and art. For political purpose, she carried a lot of those ideas with her to France. And I think she very often looked back to Italy as a source of inspiration for artistic plans. 
And do you, sorry, do you think that’s from her, her upbringing that she had this love of the arts and it's, yeah, is that about how she was brought up?
I think it's very much part of the style of the Italian Renaissance courts at this time. That People understood then in a way that perhaps we don't always connect together now, that cultural, cultural forms were forms of politics that you told messages about your political situation, about your context, about your identity and certainly propaganda.
You did that through cultural means. That's how you showed prestige. So I think it's a normal kind of process for those courts at the time to think of arts as a way to demonstrate power. So that, that kind of connection is one I think we might have lost as we think about power now. We think of it in a kind of parliamentary setting.
For, for the leaders of that period, culture is power. And so this kind of artistic display, and I mean artistic in the broader sense of architecture, music, arts was always a demonstration of power and a way that you told stories about yourself. And of course, the stories that you want to have represented about yourself. And they're often the stories that have lasted. That's how we understand a lot of what we do about the Renaissance is looking to the buildings and the art to try to make sense of these people and what they were trying to put across politically. 
Yeah. So like today, would that be like?  The Prime Minister just having,  just going somewhere and getting, having a commission of a giant painting.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's hard to translate into today because we have forms where, let's say in the Australian environment, or even actually in the British or the American environment, When, when somebody is elected to high power, they move into a house that represents that high power.
So that there's often a kind of residence that you move to that that's very different to the sort of environment of the Renaissance where you build your own personal manor house to demonstrate your power. And so each of the different. Dynasties that are vying for power in the Renaissance are each building their own magnificent mansion. Perhaps Trump is a better example of that kind of way of thinking, of the cultural politics of say Mar a Lago, is more akin to the Renaissance style than say  say 10 Downing Street or, you know, Kirribilli House in Australia, which, which, it goes with the person.
Trump is a Renaissance man.  Yes, Extravagance.  Never heard of him described like that.
Yes. Well I think he thinks through the cultural politics of power in that way. He's got an eye for the visuals and, and for the kind of cultural forms in which you can convey it. And so he, and, and, and I guess actually he is a very good example of somebody who communicates through cultural media.
So maybe those media have changed and now we think about social media, but his messaging is very visual. It's very, it's very simple. And that is. That is not dissimilar to these Renaissance princes who have emblems that they plaster on every building so you know immediately the minute you see the Medici balls, okay, it's a Medici house, or you see somebody's kind of symbol and you know exactly who it belongs to in a very Like the Trump Tower. Exactly. So I don't think this is unusual, yeah, I don't think this is unusual to Catherine, it's exactly the model of the time. What is unusual for Catherine is that most of the elite women are never in a position to have access to the purse strings, to make the story about them. And to some extent, although Catherine is never the person directly in power, she has a lot of influence. She's able to control funding, to put forward political messages. They're not exclusively about her, they're very often about her dynasty, about her sons, but nonetheless, she's one of a fairly small number of women who are able to create political stories from that era.
In the mid-16th century, Catherine de Medici and her son, the king, went on a grand tour of France.  The purpose of this tour was to strengthen the bond between the French court and the various regions of the kingdom.  It would also demonstrate the power and wealth of the monarchy.  During the tour, Catherine and Charles visited many cities and towns all over France, including Lyon, Tours, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille. They were welcomed with great fanfare everywhere they went, with parades, feasts and other public events organized in their honour. Cities would be decorated with elaborate arches and other adornments symbolizing the monarchy.  The streets lined with cheering crowd.  In the larger cities such as Lyon, Catherine and Charles were greeted by the city's mayor and other dignitaries. They were treated to a series of festivities including jousting tournaments. Musical performances and banquets. The Grand Tour was also an opportunity for Catherine and Charles to meet with local officials, nobles and other influential people and to hear their concerns and grievances. This helped Catherine to better understand the needs of the various regions of France to govern the kingdom more effectively.
It was during this tour that the Royal Court also went to Bayonne, where the Queen Mother would see her daughter, who had married the King of Spain, Philip II.
Hi, yeah, I'm Dr. Emily Brasher. I'm an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, in the School of Design. I'm a fashion and costume historian and costume designer, but I also play viola, so I've definitely got an interest in the intersection of performance costume and theatrical costume.
The queen mother Catherine de Medici and took her thirteen year old son on a tour de France, basically to say, look, look at us, we're your royal family. And in doing so, she did it in an extravagant way and they were called the magnificences, I think, which she would.  Do, and the, some of the symbols for the royal family that they would use, we can see on the this set of instruments that are called the Charles the Ninth instruments that Andrea Amati made.
What we do know is that she was like going all out. With these court festivals at the time to  really impress people and it was also like, people are saying, you know, it's to impress everyone with their wealth and divert attention to the fact that there was like this civil war between Catholics and Protestants that, you know, ended up with this really brutal St Bartholomew Day's Massacre in was it 1572,  I think?
Yeah, another royal wedding. Yeah, 1572, the marriage of Margaret Valois to Henry of Navarre. So what she's also doing though, is really cementing her son's legitimacy to be the king.  You know, it's like, she's trotting him round, basically, and it's like, nah, this is your king. This is what we're going on and you know, using this, this spectacle to do it.
And she goes all out with it as evinced by these incredible instruments, you know, these Amati instruments. And when she finally gets to Spain she put on huge spectacles as well and her daughter had married King Philip II. So she's really cementing alliances with the Catholic world as well.
Because we've got the English Protestants, of course, at the time, you know, stirring things up that the Dutch are Protestant. So she's kind of trying to use spectacle to, you know, establish this legitimacy of Catholicism across Europe in this band across Europe that also I think perhaps they're Catholic as well, and sort of across Italy and Spain and this band, so that's really important.
But also French rule as well, versus these other Catholic empires, so she's really solidifying that.
I spoke to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, author. 
The first instruments that survive are for the French court, so Catherine de Medici  seems to have ordered them for Charles IX of France, and we were talking.  Privately about the Valois Tapestries, which the amazing tapestries in the Vatican, which celebrate how great Catherine de Medici and Charles IX was.
But, you know, it's a political smokescreen. It's an absolute disaster, but they put all their money into showing how wonderful they are. And we see that there's these incredible There's this, there's this incredible sort of set campaign trail around, around France, rather like Trump.  If I'm allowed to say that.
Doing  It's like  Trump meets the Tour de France.
I think so. I mean, you know, going to different cities, having their rallies, showing how great they are. Showing off with these incredible festivals of culture, where they, and at every single one, they take something from Ovid's Metamorphosis and they create, they recreate it on a huge theatrical scale. And this is actually before the ballet, it's before the opera, it's before orchestral music as we think of it, and you've got a band of maybe 12 Amati violins providing the music for things which are so dramatic that in one case  They put  some of the musicians in an artificial dolphin and sail the artificial dolphin around a flooded  artificial lake in order to in, in order to, and you know, that just gives you the epic, epic size of, of these happenings.
And, and at the same time, you've got the.  The Spanish representative trying to talk politics and war and, and you've got Catherine going, look at that scantily clad nymph on a, on a shell coming by on a dolphin. 
It's I mean, it's, everything is about distraction.
I mean, I think it's amazing because in the background, you've got the, you've got the, the wars of religion in France on one level. And then you've got this other level of these amazing festivities that Catherine's putting on with their court, which are all about harmony  and, and getting along with each other and justice and  how amazing the, the royal family are.
It's, it's absolutely amazing. I mean, at one, at one level, it seems to be the prototype for a Trump campaign rally. On the other. This is the thing which then leads to, yeah, out of this comes the skills of the dancers, which by the 1580s becomes ballet.  Out of this comes the idea of orchestral music. Out of this directly comes the English court mask, which is sort of a reduced, a reduced set of players. We actually know this dolphin and artificial thing.
When Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester in. 1572 wants to impress Queen Elizabeth. There's sort of a will he won't he marry her kind of thing, and to sort of his penance is to put something on and it's a smaller version of what happens at Bayonne. So it's a smaller dolphin.
Ah, he whips out the dolphin.
He whips out the dolphin, yeah. And, and does that at  Kenilworth Castle with an artificial lake and all of that. And then we see from that the English court masquerade. So, you know, ballet, opera, Monteverde's Orfeo is exactly. One of these again. And, you know, everything comes back to this thing. And the prototype of the Trump rally.
Yeah, but where, where's his dolphin?
I think that's, that's what'll prevent him from becoming president again.
It was during this tour that the Royal Court also went to Bayonne, where the Queen Mother would see her daughter, who had married the King of Spain, Philip II.  You have the Charles IX instruments that are painted by Andrea Amati, but there's also a one that's decorated for the King Philip of Spain. One of the ideas is that these are for Philip II of Spain, in which case the likely time is during the time of Elisabeth de Valois.
If so, they are probably earlier because the need for them has got more to do with Elizabeth de Valois marriage than  anything else.  Now the fly in the ointment is that when we look at all the violins which went to France, which have got the French paintings on them, now we've  we actually happened to know from engravings that the performance position of these, of these musicians was really shoulder to shoulder and  at some point, I think someone must have dropped one of them.  And the, whoever the luthier was, sometime around the 1580s or something like that. Decided that what they needed to do was take the corners off and sand them down.  And if you look at any of the Andrea Amati’s that are painted, you see these really worn down, sanded down corners. Not just shortened, but rounded off, so that they're almost sort of like a chisel edge where they meet the rim. And we see those on the Philip II of Spain ones as well.  So that suggests that the same Luthier had the same way with these after they were made. And we don't see them on ones which we don't think ever went to it to France.
So the other possibility with the Philip the second. It’s actually that these may have, in order for the great festivity at Bayonne, which is the, the peace between, it's, it's designed to celebrate the peace between France  and Spain. It's actually the only time that poor Elizabeth got to see her mother again, and Philip II threw a hissy fit and refused to go and sent his wife as an emissary because he felt it was a bit of a,  you know, he'd been suckered into a piece that he didn't want.  But everything there's about harmony. And a lot, when you look at a lot of the other things that happen at Bayon, it's, it's about the, the, the union between Mars and Venus, which is the creation of harmony and you know, all of these things through, mythology.
So the idea that the band, the music is made half of Spanish,  half of French, representative instruments.  Would actually, you know, that would be so central to what, to what the festivity of Bayonne is, that I rather suspect that these things were entirely created by the French for a propaganda of harmony.
So they're saying, we're so,  we're so close that, look, we're playing on instruments that, that are representing the Spanish court because we're just  in such harmony with that country. 
And actually, one, the one instrument, the one Andrea Amati, which for years was unrecognized in the Musée in Paris.  Is a, is a chopped down viola from the Philip, the second set.
So whilst all the other ones are spread around the world, the one, the one French Andrea Amati is a, it's a Spanish one,  which, which is. Evidence of nothing and evidence of everything at the same time.
Why are we talking about this trip to Bayonne? What does it have to do with the Amati family?  Well, things are heating up in France. There is a civil war happening between the Catholics and the Protestants. The instruments the Andrea Amati has made to deliver to the French court have messages on them indicating where their loyalties lie.
Catherine would have undoubtedly realized the precarious position of being in power and good relations with the Spanish was a must. They were an immense superpower at the time.  Her daughter was the wife of the King of Spain. That was a good start. But her son was still dangerously young and factions at court would always be at work trying to take power.
Besides the Charles IX instruments, The Amati workshop also produced similar instruments with the Spanish royal insignias. Were these commissions from the Habsburgs, or were they used as a political message ordered by someone else completely?  There are several ideas surrounding this second set of decorated instruments.
Firstly, they were ordered by the Spanish court, perhaps to celebrate the wedding of Elisabeth de Valois, Catherine de Medici's daughter, to King Philip of Spain. The second hypothesis is that they were ordered by the French court to demonstrate the strong relationship between the two countries, and the extent of the harmony that existed between them.  Look, we're playing on instruments with your coat of arms on them, we have to be friends.  These are just two of many ideas surrounding the set of instruments bearing the same name.
Spanish heraldic symbols.  France is literally in between the Protestant northern countries and the Catholic southern countries of Europe.  The French royal family were walking on a tightrope of diplomacy. There were both very powerful Catholics and Protestants at the French court as the violins fiddled away.
In the next episode, we will see how Catherine de Medici handles this situation and the repercussions the tensions in France will have on all of Europe and inevitably reaching Cremona and the Amati family.
I would like to thank my lovely guests, Dr. John Gagne, Dr. Peter Jensen, John Dilworth, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, and Benjamin Hebert.  You can leave a comment and follow the podcast at the violin chronicles dot bean doc.  I have an Instagram and even an email at the at the violin chronicles@gmail.com.
You're listening to a live recording of Timo Vico of the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing on an Amati Brothers cello.  Thank you so much for listening and I hope to catch you next time.
 
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