The Violin Chronicles Podcast

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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Ep 5. Violin maker Andrea Amati Part 2 Amati and the Reformation, bring out the violins!

Explore the captivating story of Andrea Amati, the pioneering violin maker whose artistry revolutionized the world of music. Discover his iconic designs, unrivalled craftsmanship, and enduring influence on violin making. Join us on this enchanting journey through history and immerse yourself in the legacy of Andrea Amati. Subscribe now to "The Violin Chronicles" and delve into the extraordinary world of violin making.
In this second episode we look at Andrea Amati's life in Cremona and how church music and the reformation influenced the world of the artisans in this city.
The music you have heard in this podcast is as follows.
Bloom – Roo Walker
Mafioso – Theo Gerard
Casuarinas – Dan Barracuda
Danny Yeadon Gamba
Industrial music box – Kevin MacLeod
Budapest - Christian Larssen
Music of Cathedrals and forgotten temples
Kevin MacLeod – Brandenburg Concerto No 4
Josquin des Pres – Missa l’homme Arme – Tallis Scholars
Palestrina – Missa Papae Marcelli – Tallis Scholars
Spem in Alium – Tallis Scholars
ACO – Live in the studio Boccherini
Transcript
  Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicle. 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
Welcome back to Cremona, city of industry and war like inhabitants. In the last episode about Andrea Amati, we looked at the city and its population top heavy with artisans. and a booming textile industry. We also saw Andrea Amati growing up in a world disrupted by war, but also uplifted with the artists, thinkers, and musicians of the Renaissance.
When Andrea Amati was in his 30s, the city of Cremona becomes part of the Spanish Empire, heralding in a more peaceful, or at least less deadly, age for the people of Lombardy.  But as people were taking a short break from invading northern Italy, the printing presses were ramping up. And an altogether new revolution was about to take place.
The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts.  This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family.
And so it was into this bubble of peace and prosperity that the now married Andrea Amati welcomed his first son into the world. They called their son Antonio Amati and as time went on, and with the help of all that new Spanish silver, Italians would invest their money in art and beautiful objects of every kind, including instruments.
These would be handed down in women's dowries or inherited by family members.
Today, where we might invest in property, in a peaceful, non war ridden country, and economy, it seems a sure bet, but if you lived in a town that was regularly trampled by the passing armies,  it may be more prudent to spend your money on mobile objects.
Among the artisans, and artists, who profited by this spending were the instrument makers, and Andrea Amati was one of those.
Andrea Amati was good at what he did, and thanks to the savings he had been making over the years, was almost ready to head out and set up his own workshop. But what was it like for a violin maker living in Spanish Lombardy?  The Spanish presence was fairly light. The pre-existing magistrates were mostly maintained, as was the process of electing them.
There was a Castilian, appointed by the king, with a handful of men.  The council around which the city politics revolved had about 150 members, and they would meet in the ancient town hall.  It was a mixture of local and, at the top end, Spanish representatives, and was responsible for public order, supplies, the budget, customs duties, and heritage.
They had a sort of parliament where for two or three times a month, topics were addressed and debates and voting took place.  It was one guy's job to provide arguments contrary to every proposal put forward.
I spoke to Dr. John Gagne about how the city of Cremona functioned under Spanish rule.
Yes, so, in a nutshell, the entire duchy of Milan is ruled by, well, a governor. In the Spanish period, there's a Spanish governor who sits in Milan and basically rules the entire duchy. The body that works for the governor is the Senate. Which is appointed for life, mostly elite men, 15 20 men.
Are they Cremonese?
No, they're all Milanese or they're actually, they're representative of the Duchy. So the Milanese Senate is, you know, often aristocrats from around the duchy in some cases some Spaniards, but it's mostly Italians.
Oh, yeah, so you're talking about Milan
Oh, yeah, which I'm setting up the so that's the kind of state right but then at the local level you've got two main administrators there's the Podesta Which is a magistrate that's existed since the middle ages and that was kind of often a foreigner, even in the middle ages, from another city, even if he's Italian, brought in to be an impartial overlooker to judicial matters. So in other words, there was so much tumult in the middle ages that they wanted their chief magistrate to be. Not from the city, so that he wouldn't be partial.
In the Spanish period, the Podestà is selected by the Senate in Milan.  And so it could be a local Italian. It could be, you know, as they've done for centuries, someone from nearby. Who would be the, let's say, chief magistrate of the city. So that's number one. And then number two is a castellan, who is the sort of castle keeper of the city.
And the castellan is an appointee personally by the king.  And that's basically a military man who is essentially acting as governor in the city, who runs the, all the other aspects that are not judicial. Let's say they're, you know, administrative, military, to oversee the city. So, often the Castellan or the Podestá has a sort of group of advisors who work under him.
It's basically, let's say, a two pole system.  Speaking for, in terms of religion a bishop who will oversee the spiritual matters. The interesting thing about Cremona is that there is no bishop resident for almost a century, from the mid 15th century to the mid 16th century. And part of the effort of the Catholic Reformation in the mid 16th century was to make sure that Cremona had a bishop in place because as we discussed earlier, Cremona was a hotbed of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas.
So those are the sort of the three people who would be chief overseers of the city would be the castellan, the protesta, and then the bishop. But then they had a sort of a council of elected members as well. There was a city council they're often appointed ministers with certain portfolios and that would, yeah, so they, and that would be, that would report to the senate of Milan.
So you've got, let's say, a diffuse organizational system that runs the city that represents different interests. In terms of who wants to control what aspects of city's functioning. Mm-Hmm. So with the, the hotbed of Protestantism.
Yeah. Why do you think that? Cremona was one of the biggest it was the city with one of the biggest Protestant populations.
A very, in the statistics it had about 50% artisans.  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a big aspect to it. I mean, you, you might think maybe the university town would be a great place for Protestantism to erupt because Lutheranism and Calvinism were religions of text. They were about a return to biblical scripture and therefore the literate tends to go for Protestantism first.
But yes, because Cremona was if not a university town, it was the hub of business aside from the metropole of  Milan. There's a lot of traffic of people, there's a lot of money, and there are lots of artisans who are making things, whether it's, you know, sort of merchants who oversee textile production, or often, you know, even music instrument makers.
Those are people who succeed in the business by being literate. So I think the theory is that basically it's a city with a high amount of connection to the outside world through motion traffic, and it also is predisposed to textual influence because of its literate population. And therefore, it becomes a kind of breeding ground for Protestant activity.
And, as I mentioned before, there's also no titular bishop who lives in the city for the first half of the 16th century, which is exactly the time when Protestantism is on the rise. That's frankly not uncommon around a lot of European cities that, you know, the bishop lives elsewhere and receives revenue from a town, but this may have been part of the reason why there was no one there to, let's say, squash initial growth of heterodox views, was because, yeah, he was living elsewhere.
The year after Andrea Amati’s first son Antonio Amati was born, 1537,  Andrea Amati opened his own workshop,  and a year after that, the family moved again into a house in the parish of San Fristino,  an area well known for its artisans.
Andrea Amati was now known as a master maker in the artisan class, and the new home he found for his family and workshop was on a small block consisting of a shop facing the street.  Towards the back of the building was a small courtyard with a well in the paved centre to collect water, and down a few stone steps beyond the well was a cellar.
Above the shop were comfortable rooms for the family to live in, and it was into this house that Andrea Amati moved his family.  Over the next 200 years, here would live his children, his grandchildren, and his great grandchildren. The Amatis parish had always been a place filled with artisans and artists.
Amongst their neighbours were famed woodcarvers, sculptors, painters and architects.  These people were a mostly educated literate class. Cremona, being proud of its tradition of schools and, and let's not forget that this was the renaissance, Cremona was a well connected city and up to date with all things renaissance y.
One of the movements in the renaissance was humanism, and I asked Jean Gagné to explain what it was all about.
It comes from a slang term for the teachers of letters called Umanisti, who taught sort of humanist subjects like philosophy, literature, poetry and that was distinct from most of the teaching that was going on in the universities, which was much more classic medieval philosophy. And so the humanists were interested in these subjects I just described. Inside the Curriculum of humanism was moral education, philosophy, history, all the things that were designed to improve your, you know, humanity, essentially, to make you a self-reflective person, to make you, you know, in touch with moral and ethical issues. And so, humanist education ideally produced that kind of person, but it also then became a kind of working method, which was an attention to good quality classical sources because bad quality classical sources often have errors in them and therefore would teach you the wrong things.
So, one of the programs of humanism was to find  good quality texts from antiquity, the best kind you could, or to build them yourselves through various different copies that then you would sort of collate and address and in doing that process, hundreds of texts from antiquity were recovered. And the recovery of those hundreds of texts often opened up new doors to all kinds of so far unknown aspects of ancient culture, which included things like treatises on, you know, physical education or on food or on money or on all varieties of life that had sort of been left in the dust for several centuries.
So the method of humanism was this sort of, let's call it textual criticism method, but it also then produced a whole bunch of new areas of learning in a variety of disciplines that, you know, were, were emergent in the Renaissance.
And is that sort of the science's? came from that as well?
Yeah. Yes. So there were, obviously that regime of textual study goes back to all of the ancient scientists, Pythagoras and others, who whose texts became increasingly interesting to the people of the, 15 and 16th centurys.
 There were schools, of course there were schools run by parishes usually. And so that's where they got their first teachings.  But I'm sure that they went to some kind of elementary school.  They all knew how to use it. They were not illiterate. Later makers such as Guadagnini was illiterate.
Not social status necessarily, but cultural status. Many of Cremona's artisans were educated and literate, having attended school, and the Renaissance principles of construction and measuring would not have been out of their reach. And so they had this tool to be able to experiment with and develop the violin and its form.
Andrea Amati was now established with his young family. The wars that had so disrupted their lives appeared to have resolved themselves. But was this just the calm before the storm?  Conversations and gossip among the artisans were in full swing. Dangerous ideas were spreading through the city. A movement that was quite sensational and that would have had a direct impact on the work artisans were commissioned to undertake was taking place, and care would have to be taken not to get themselves into trouble.
Accusation of heresy was a serious thing in the Spanish governed Cremona, so when the Reformation came to town, a lot of Andrea Amati’s artisan friends and neighbours would have been walking on eggshells.  It is difficult to emphasize just how far reaching the Reformation was and the sheer number of people it would have affected.
As the people of Cremona were finally coming out of years of war, they were now faced with a spiritual revolution that was challenging one of the most powerful structures in their culture and questioning not only how they lived their lives, but who had authority over their spiritual beings and immortal souls and this is important because in the world of the Amati family, life, religion, and the church were very much intertwined. Music and art were heavily influenced by religious structures, and for an artisan, one of their main clients, livelihoods, and sources of income came from the Roman Catholic Church. 
So what exactly was the Reformation, and why does it matter?
And how would it have affected Andrea Amati and the lives of his family? 
My name is Peter Jensen.  I'm a minister in the Anglican Church here in Sydney.  I've been a principal of a college and a bishop, but my study, which I did at Oxford, was on the Reformation in England. And I'm interested in lots of things, of course, not just the Reformation, but I have I teach what's called Christian Doctrine. I'm a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University. 
So I asked Peter Jensen to briefly tell us what the Reformation was about.
Yes. The Reformation is a a huge movement, which in some ways created the modern world.  It was  like all movements, it was sometime coming, you could see it coming. But there was a crucial moment in 1517, when a German monk by the name of Martin Luther,  who was an expert of the reading of the Bible,  became convinced by observing what the church was doing in those days.
And saying in those days that the church had got the Bible wrong.  And so he put up on a church door, which is one way of communicating in those days, something called the 95 Theses.  And these were his opinions about what the church should believe as opposed to what it did believe. And that really sparked this thing called the Protestant Reformation. The big thing was the Bible.  Was the church really teaching what the Bible said? That was really important. It was to do with how one gets to be saved.  Was the church really teaching the right way for people to be saved?  And Martin Luther and the other Protestants said no. And then so there was the Bible and there was salvation.
And then, of course, was the Church right to have the Pope as its head? Is that true to the Bible?  And there are a whole range of other issues which arose. The more they thought about it, the more they were saying no.  The church has got the Bible wrong and we have to reform the church, a reformation.  Or if the church won't have us, we will have to leave the church. And basically that's what happened right across Europe.
So here's how things were set up in Cremona from a religious point of view. During Andrea Amati’s lifetime, there was a bishop appointed by the Pope. He was the bishop of a number of cities and so did not live in Cremona. He controlled the diocese through a vicar who lived in the bishop's palace and his job was to deal with important things such as rent revenue, supervision of tenants, and finally, if he really had to, pastoral care.
The vicar spent a lot of time trying to keep the bishop's palace to himself, not letting other high ranking members of the church move in.  His duties were to make sure the books were being kept well, the relics were being preserved, the oils used and incense were in stock. He kept an eye on the church's income and that the births, deaths and marriages registries were being kept.
We can thank the vicar for this because historians are able to use a lot of information about our violin makers from these registries.  Finally, his job was to look after the souls of his parish. He had to record the number of inhabitants.  And the possible presence of heretics and concubines, or unconfessed. How he went about doing this, I'm not quite sure, but he also had to handle complaints.  So in effect, he was doing stock, inventories, and was the complete human resources department all rolled into one.  Some complaints to come his way were things such as; There was a priest in one of the parishes, in Bordolano for example, a certain Don Alessandro “He does not wear the clerical habit and plays dice”.  In another, the complaints are that the priest is ignorant and illiterate. In another, the priest was living with a woman and they had four children, and so on and so forth.  The bishop in all this was a distant figure, and it was a source of constant complaints from the Cremonese who thought they deserved an in house papal rep of their own.  The organisation of the priests in the parishes was a bit sloppy, and they themselves felt they were not being supported. Faith in the system was wearing thin. So when Luther's ideas and thinking arrived in Lombardy, most likely merchants coming from the north, many people in Cremona embraced them and from there, the city had one of the largest Protestant populations in Northern Italy.  I spoke to John Gagne about the connection between the Protestant and artisanal classes in Europe during the Reformation. 
A large Protestant population were the artisanal class as well. That's definitely, I mean, Lyon is a huge city for the growth of Protestantism and What do we have in Lyon? We've got a huge printing industry, a lot of manual merchants who are making all kinds of goods. Obviously the printing industry is a major pusher of Protestantism because it’s a business that deals with text. There is a big printing industry in Cremona too, which is also not irrelevant. For instance, Cremona was also the first place where The first Italian pamphlet against Luther was printed. So as much as it was a hotbed, it was also a site where they could print responses to Lutheran ideas.
And in the cathedral, sort of  in the main  nave, the dome on the inside, there's this painting and on the painting you have, you have Jesus sitting on his throne in heaven with a book and on one side you have, I think it's on his right, you've got the Pope and the Roman Catholic  bishop and on his left is a Jew and a Lutheran the're going to hell and that's on this, this huge, like in the cathedral  in Cremona. Yeah. Well, you know, it tells us something about the points of view that are, you know, most in people's minds when that painting was made. Yeah. And so they probably wouldn't have needed to do that if they didn't have such a strong Protestant population to  sort of say this to.
No, it's true. I mean, it's actually quite unusual to see Lutherans depicted in Catholic art in Italy in the 16th century. It's kind of, yeah, it's rare. So yes, you're right. I mean, the fact that they exist means that they were, you know, on people's minds,  for sure.
It's not very subtle.
No, but you know 16th century Catholicism is on one hand, you know, highly refined and very subtle, but also in terms of popular teaching, quite clear that, you know, either you believe orthodoxy or, you know, it's, it's, you're damned.
So this is why Europe of the 16th and 17th century are so tumultuous. I mean, they're, Europe is fighting, would fight 150 years or more over a political settlement for the fracture of Catholicism  that came in 1517. And  it took, you know, generations in which people needed to work through the  social challenges of more than one kind of Christianity in Europe.
So, you know it's sort of tragic to think of the way in which Europe broke down according to this irresolvable problem of religion because it really did take centuries. It led to a diaspora in the 17th and 18th centuries. You know, it was a story of decay and, you know, in terms of an imagined prior unity of Catholicism.
Yeah, I feel like you had this well for Cremona, for example, you had all these wars, and that just as they're coming out of all this war and into a sort of peaceful era of under the Spanish rule, then they have this war of like it was like a revolution really, because it's one aspect of Christianity trying to overthrow  the other, because the Catholic Church had a lot of power and the Lutheran ideas are kind of taking away all that power.  So you had this big war of ideas after the physical wars
Yes and maybe the other thing to say about that is that, you know, all the monarchs of Europe had nicknames. And the French monarch was known as the most Christian king. And the Spanish was known as the Catholic Majesty and the Spaniards were particularly, as they grew in power over the 16th century, they saw themselves as the defenders of the Catholic faith in Europe and abroad. Maybe that's one of the other aspects of what you're describing is that the Spanish were the Catholic hardliners in Europe. They really saw themselves as holding the line against the potential dissolution of Catholicism in the continent.
And so that's another aspect of the tensions in Cremona is that not only does a Bishop finally return to, to Cremona in the 1550s,  and this would be largely thanks to the impulse of reformists in Milan, who were keen to make sure that Rome.  sending bishops back to Cremona, but also the secular overseers of the city of Cremona were representatives of, you know the Catholic majesties.
And so they wanted to make sure that resistance to Catholicism would be quashed. So I think, you know, that you can understand the sort of social tensions that would have existed in that environment where it wasn't just, let's say, Italians dealing with Italians, it was Spaniards who were real orthodox Catholics making sure that the city of Cremona would follow Rome.
In 1545, Andrea Amati is in his early 40s. He has a well established workshop and family. Hints and influences of the Reformation were showing in town. A priest was questioned because he was reading from an Italian translation of the Bible and not a Latin one. In the streets of Cremona, where the people were talking in town squares, there was a great fear amongst the religious institutions as the Lutheran tendencies of the priests were anti clerical and had a clearly anti institutional attitude.
People were clearly unhappy about how the shop was being run. The Protestant numbers in Cremona were on the rise, and this was representative of many parts of northern Italy. And so the church had to respond in some way. 
Peter Jensen. 
In those days, the mass was the chief service of the church was in Latin so that people didn't really understand,  the ordinary person,  mainly illiterate,  didn't really understand church, it was all rather mysterious. There were also many statues, of Jesus, and of the Virgin Mary.  There were prayers to the saint.  There was a whole system where if you had sinned, you went to the priest and confessed your sin, and you may also pray to the saints.
It was a very different setup, if I can put it like that. But the church really was really central to the lives of people. The Reformation, of course swept through Europe. In some places protestantism became the dominant religion, as in Scotland, as in England. In other places, it became very strong but didn't become dominant, as in France, for example. In Germany, it became very strong as well. And so nations were divided. Very often, the question as to whether a nation would be Protestant or not depended upon the ruling family, the king or the queen.  So in England, the Protestant Reformation really became successful. in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who was a Protestant queen.
It had been there before, but it became really successful then.  So two things were happening. First, there was the spread of the Reformation amongst scholars, amongst ordinary people,  and that was made possible particularly by printing. The printed book became a wonderful thing in the, what was it, the 1460s,  if I remember correctly and by the time you got to the 16th century, the Reformation, it meant that many more people were reading, illiteracy had begun to decline, but also books were being written in the language of the people, not just in Latin, for example, so that people were reading. So it just depended which part of Europe you were in as to what happened.
So there were people in Italy who became Protestant but it didn't have as big an effect on Italy. As it did say on England, where the king and the queen went that way, or in France even.  Where it looked at one stage as though Protestantism would really become the dominant religion, but then the king changed.
People are grumbling about their absent bishop. There is also tension between the church, the local ruling class, and the city council. Add to this the threat of Protestantism. There was a form of moral instability and disunity within the city. Compounding this all were cases of heresy. There are documents in which priests complain about having to deal with so many prisoners and heretics, it feels like a burden upon them, that they are weak and an ununited city because of it.
There is an interesting interaction between local priest and a shoemaker in the town square in which the shoemaker, Giuseppe is making a comment about the extravagant cost of building the cathedral. After having asked the parishioners for money to do so, the priest is telling him to stick to shoemaking and leave the affairs of the church to those who are in the clergy.
At this point, another priest, the shoemaker's friend, joins the argument. Stating that we're all priests and should have a say in the matter, revealing his Lutheran ideologies.  This was quite dangerous, and he ended up being thrown into prison.
By the 1540s, it's perfectly obvious that there's a major revolution going on all around Europe.  And obviously the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church becomes very, very anxious about this. And so in what is the date? I think it's  1547, I think it is. Begins a council that lasts all 1563, on and off. Not the whole time, you'll be glad to hear. In Trent, which I think is northern  Italy, isn't it? At any rate, and that's the place where it was held, and it was held, in a sense, sporadically. But the whole point of the Council of Trent was to, to look again at the Church's teachings, at practices, to reform them where they needed to be reformed.
And music came into that, so the Council of Trent also had a view on music. And I think both it and the Protestant Reformation thought music had become too complicated.  During the Renaissance period, more and more people were playing music. This was partly due to the advent of the printing press making music more widely available, and at the same time, instruments were evolving.
Music was a more popular form of entertainment in wealthy circles, and indeed on a popular level, folk music had always had a place. But here I will be concentrating on sacred music. that for many musicians and composers who wanted to make something of themselves would have to have concentrated on.  And yet during a seven year period from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent would start a change in this circumstance and sacred music would start to lose its dominance as secular music started its ascent.
Two areas of music were addressed during the Council of Trent. Firstly, music should promote a greater sense of worship in the congregation. Practically, this meant that they should cut back on polyphony, the layering of voices.  At that time, religious music was predominantly vocal and in Latin. The use of polyphony, the multi layering of voices, created a beautiful yet almost impossible to understand text.
So the Council of Trent stipulated that the music must be easily understandable. People would at least know what they were singing. This was more or less successful, depending on composers and provinces. Two great composers of the time were Josquin Des Prez and Palestrina.  Secondly was performance.  It was decided that only the organ would be used in accompanying voices or playing solos, and that virtuoso or theatrical, vocal or instrumental displays were prohibited.
So leading up to the Reformation and the Council of Trent, sacred composition used a lot of polyphony, the layering of voices. Here is an example of a work by Josquin des Prez, pre Reformation, first published in 1505.
And now a work by Palestrina, another mass written in 1562, after the Council of Trent.
So there you go.  Personally, I can't understand either, but that second one obviously got a tick from the Council of Trent.  And finally, a motet by Thomas Tallis written in 1570. So this is also post Council of Trent. It's a 40 part Renaissance motet for eight choirs of five voices each. So who knows what was going on in the it has to be understandable department.
In any case, I think it's just so beautiful no one really cared.
These three excerpts are performed by the very talented Tallis scholars. You can look them up if you want to hear the rest of the pieces.
The Council of Trent then lays the foundation. It's not medieval Catholicism. It's the cleaning up of a house of medieval Catholicism. It's modern, modern in the sense of, it's just modern in its day and it sets out Catholic teaching and has become a standard of Catholic teaching right down to the 20th century and of course it’s Roman Catholic thinking, it still stands, but other things have happened since then. So one of the teachings, for example, is that you can't have assurance of salvation.
In Protestant theology, when properly understood, because there’s nothing we bring,  we are simply relying on the cross of Christ as our salvation and our faith in the cross of Christ.  You may have assurance, but you're not depending on yourself, you're depending on the Lord.  In Catholic teaching, while yes, the cross is important, while yes, God's grace is important, it nonetheless is an element of your own good works.
You're not justified once and for all, you're justified over a period through your life. And therefore, rightly, the Council of Trent, rightly from their point of view says, You can't have assurance, because you can't yet be sure that you have enough  for salvation and of course they have the doctrine of purgatory,  going to purgatory after you die.
Whereas the Protestants said, no, there's no such thing as purgatory, it's never mentioned in the Bible, and once you've been saved by the Lord Jesus, through his death for you on the cross, you are saved.  Your sins have been washed away, you don't need to purge them in purgatory.  They're a big difference.
The Council of Churches is very intellectually important, by the way. Never underestimate the intellectual and, if you like, the spiritual power of a Catholic church. We must respect that.  And I would say for the next 100, 150 years, you are in a period of counter reformation.  We're in a period of counter reformation where the church is making some big changes.
We could ask the question, was Andrea Amati a Protestant? I think no. As we will see in future episodes, the Amati family would have several commissions from staunchly Catholic royal courts. And I don't think that the family would have lasted very long in Cremona if they had been of the Lutheran persuasion.
As much of its Protestant population left for Geneva.  But in 1549, Cremona finally gets a local bishop from a Cremonese family. He would be a fellow citizen linked to this city and would understand the sensitive needs and interests of the people. By the time the new bishop arrived, there were Lutheran heretics, the dodgy priests, dubious convent inhabitants, and all these evils were put down to the fact that they didn't have a resident bishop.
So with him came new decrees for the clergy. They were things such as, and including, but not limited to,  1. The clergy must wear ecclesiastical habit. 2. They must carry no weapons.  3. Does not keep mistresses at home or the children he has with them. 4. Does not swear. 5. Does not go to taverns. 6. Does not go dancing or play cards or dice. 7. Does not exercise worldly professions. 8. Recites the divine office regularly. And 9. If ordered, celebrates Holy Mass. 
Cremona had become the centre of Lombard Lutherism. There was even a reformed church now set up in Cremona.  To deal with this, the Roman Catholic Church ordered severe sentences, exiled Lutherans, and even sentenced them to death.
So there were quite a few Protestants, and then what would happen is they would often with the head of Inquisition.  And so often they would leave and go to Geneva. So there was a big Cremonese population in Geneva. And there was one Cremonese noble and he left and a few years later he was tried and he had his, all his property and assets seized, and then he was burnt at the stake in absentia. 
Yeah. So, I mean, the way that often worked, I mean, in terms of, I suppose the first thing to say is that there were distinct secular and, and religious judicial systems. So if you were, although they became a little messy, you know, when often what happened was. If you were a heretic, you would be tried by the church tribunal, and then if they were, you were found guilty, the church would hand you over to the secular authorities for punishment. So because the church didn't want to be responsible for killing people, that was often the sort of pathway in which people were punished was a religious trial and then a secular execution.
But yes, often people, let's say, were Not around for their execution. And so, but the point could still be made by burning them in effigy or something like that, which was to show that even though you may be lacking, let's say, the physical substance of the person, their place in your society was essentially being rejected. You know, that they were being extinguished from society, even if it meant, you know, burning them in straw or something like that. Yeah, so this often happened that you could be punished. Even when you weren't there by finding some representation of you and destroying it.  Like, they would do the same for kings.
Like, the whole symbolism of being able to  do something to a person through an effigy. Like, the power of that for them. Yeah, I mean, the most famous case is the French kings who Well, this happened in England too.  Often for funerals. The body was armed, but then an effigy would be paraded for a sort of serious Festival funeral and the effigy would be treated as you would treat the monarch. I mean they would be often they'd be given food or they might be put on you know up on a throne and the idea was to let's say separate the living tissue of the dead monarch from the idea of the monarch as a sovereign. So the effigy actually acted in place as they sort of universal and never ending life of the king or queen.
Whereas the body of every king and queen comes and goes, the idea of monarchy lives on and that's what the effigy would help to sustain is the idea of the of rulership not dying. And that's probably, you know, in reverse what's happening with punishments of heretics and absentia is that your you know, the flesh is kind of irrelevant.
What you're doing is making a point about their eternal being. Being extinguished from society. Which, which, like, from a Catholic point of view would have been quite severe. They're like, we've got what we've done.
But if they'd become Protestant anyway, they probably didn't care. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's They didn't hold to the, yeah.
Yes, I mean, yeah, it's true. If you don't believe in the, in the religious system, then maybe it doesn't matter as much, but it's still, let's say it's, it's a serious move in any culture to expunge someone. Yeah, I would like to be expunged.
The way different areas implemented these reforms differed, and we can see in Cremona that the cathedral still had musicians playing. But now, given these constraints and the tendency to be accused of heresy, secular music started doing its own thing.  There were noble courts around where exactly this type of musical ability was nurtured, but something bigger was happening, and as we will see, ballet and opera were about to literally burst onto the scene.
We saw in this episode how the Reformation would have disrupted Andrea Amati's life. Church music would start to change and the influence of the Renaissance will nudge music into new art forms that we will encounter in upcoming episodes.  The good news for Andrea Amati is that a powerful royal court is about to make an order from our Cremonese artisan and these instruments he is about to make will become the stuff of legends and much speculation.
This brings us to the end of this episode. I would like to thank my guests, Dr. Peter Jensen, Dr. John Gagne, and Carlo Chiesa. 
 
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Ep 4. Unveiling the Secrets of Andrea Amati and his violins: Part 1

 The Amati family; in this Series we explore the life and legacy of Andrea Amati, the masterful craftsman behind some of the world's most revered violins. In these episodes we delve into the fascinating history of Amati's life, his revolutionary techniques, innovations, and the enduring impact of his work on the world of music.
Through interviews with experts in the field of history, instrument-making, and performance, we uncover the secrets of Amati's unique approach to violin-making, from his choice of materials to the meticulous attention to detail that went into each instrument. We also explore the rich cultural and historical context that shaped Amati's work, and the role that his violins played in shaping the sound of the Renaissance and beyond.
 
Transcript
Andrea Amati Part I
 
A traveller passing through northern Italy's Lombardy in the 16th century would be struck by its beautiful plains, fertile meadows and abundance of grains and livestock. Large fields planted with wheat, alternated with meadows crossed with an intelligent system of irrigation ditches, and long rows of trees growing around the edges of the fields gave it that typical Po Valley plantation look.
In the distance, on the northern bank of Italy's longest river, the Po, lay the bustling city of Cremona. East of Milan, on the flat Padana plains, it was described as being “rich in men and traffic”, an important commercial hub, and here you would find a strategic river crossing.
In this city lived a handful of noble Cremonese families, owners of almost all the land in the surrounding countryside’s, cultivated by peasants still living under a feudal system.  The crops they grew, of flax, wheat, millet, rye, and rice, would be transported into the city to feed its citizens. After Milan, Cremona was the largest and most important city in the state, bursting with tradespeople and merchants.
Almost 50 percent of its inhabitants are artisans, and the wealth of the city is substantial. In the Duchy of Milan, Cremona contributes as many taxes to the Duke's coffers as the rest of the provinces combined, making it a noteworthy place indeed.
This was an era in which transport via water was 20 times cheaper than overland. Goods and people were frequently passing through the city on barges, often coming from Venice, then on to the markets of all of Europe with their wares.  It was a transient place, an inland port even, where many people would pass through, stop and stay a while, then move on.
But for those who stayed there, life was never dull.  In the year 1505, a Cremonese artisan called Gottardo Amati and his wife welcomed a little baby boy into the world. They named him Andrea Amati.  As was often the custom, their son would one day learn a trade similar to that of his father. Of this his parents were fairly certain.
What they couldn't have known was that this child would grow up to be the first in a great dynasty of violin makers, whose instruments would grace the salons of royalty and become proud acquisitions of noble families across Europe, influencing every violin maker that would come after him. Whether they realized it or not.
The Amatis. 
You may or may not have heard of this violin maker. But hopefully by the end of this series you will be like, Amati, yeah sure. Which one? The father, the son, the brothers, the grandfather? Because yes, there were a bunch, five to be precise, spanning four generations and they all lived in the northern Italian city of Cremona.
 
In these episodes I'll be looking at the Amati family of Violin Makers, their extraordinary story that spans almost 200 years and the world changing events that moved their lives.  I started by talking to someone who knows a whole lot about this family. Violin maker, expert, author, and researcher in Milan, Carlo Chiesa.
Carlo Chiesa
I'm a violin maker and a restorer and the researcher on the history of violin making.
To find the Amati workshop, first we must go to the city of Cremona.  The Amatis are all connected and if you look at the history of the Amati family of violin makers, that's the history of the Cremonese making for about two centuries because the Amati workshop was the  only serious workshop in Cremona for about 200 years.
When you speak of Cremonese making,  of course you must start with the Amati workshop.
Linda Lespets
In the 1500s, Cremona was a city full of life, its streets filled with the sounds of clanging hammers and the buzz of conversation. It was home to a thriving community of artisans, each with their own unique skills and talents.  Half the population found themselves in trade, but the other half worked and survived by supplying manual labour for the domestic market.
There were servants, shopkeepers, coachmen, navigators, bankers, blacksmiths, carpenters, woodsellers, farriers, instrument makers, the list goes on. 
I spoke to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, author, and international man of mystery. 
Benjamin Hebbert
So, Cremona's actually a very interesting city, if you think of Italy and, you know,  Italy's got the sort of long boot kind of going down into the Mediterranean and then you've got the sort of, the top of Italy is sort of, kind of oval shaped, like the socks sticking out of the top of the boot.
And if you take that area, the great landmass of Northern Italy, at the top and at the west, it's lined by mountains.  And then you've got the Adriatic Ocean with Venice on the other side. And right going through the middle is the River Po.  And that really connects everything. The Po becomes, by the time you get to the middle of Italy, it's a very wide river.
So your last stone bridge is at Piacenza.  It starts at Trieste, goes to Piacenza.  And then when you get to around about Cremona, there's a number of islands, very swampy islands. And the river kind of kinks a little bit so it slows and it becomes a little bit narrower because of the swamps and that's not good enough to put a bridge on it but it's controllable so that you can put a pontoon bridge over the river so at certain times of the year you've got a huge bridge for trade for taking armies over and that's really the history of northern Italy is armies going one way or another.
Cremona is that point right in the middle of Italy where you can get huge amounts of trade, commerce, anything can travel through and get over the pontoon bridge and of course that pontoon bridge doesn't exist anymore it's even difficult to see on maps because in maps people draw land features and stone buildings they don't  do disposable bridges.
So right away from the Roman times, that's what Cremona stands for. If you go to Cremona, you'll see that there's all sorts of arguments, whether it's the highest tower in Italy, the highest tower in Europe, but the cathedral has this enormously high tower. And that's because actually from the top of the tower, people wanted to be able to see over the river to whatever was coming from the other side. There was a massive fortress in Cremona, towards the western edge. And one thing that you'll miss when you go there is that because of the way that the river's silted up, it's now about a mile.  Maybe two miles from the city walls.
Linda Lespets
Carlo Chiesa talks about cultural life in Cremona and how it was placed in the dutchy of Milan. 
Carlo Chiesa
Cremona was a large town in northern Italy in the plain, so in a very quiet and rich environment. But the problem was that, Cremona was never, the main center of a state. It was a large city in a rich area without a court  and without a university. So it was a quiet place, so to say. The noble families from Cremona, had a, usually a palace, a building in Milano.  So Milano was the important city and Cremona was just, an outskirt, so to say, there was no high cultural life in Cremona for many years, and at that time, that was the situation.
So it was, I would say, a quiet place to live, but for the fact that sometimes it happened that armies arrived from one place to going to another and there were wars and riots and things like that. So, I think life was quite, easy in Cremona, but not, we must not, consider that as we see today, it was not safe. There was never a safe idea of life. That is the main difference in my opinion.  It was the seat of rich families, very rich families. It was a very rich environment, but since there was no court the cultural life was never as important as it was in  even smaller towns which had rulers and small courts, let's say Parma or Mantua or Piacenza  even. These are cities smaller, much smaller than Cremona and less rich than Cremona but situated just 40, 60, 80 kilometers away of  Cremona. But they had a richer  cultural life because there were kings or princes or  counts or some people who  took care of the court.
Linda Lespets
Cremona was a booming city on the rise. Around 35, 000 people lived there.  The size of it meant that merchants would not accumulate fortunes like those in Florence or Venice.  But what we do find is a healthy middle class. earning a good living for themselves.  To get an idea of the atmosphere, in the mid 1500s, 50 percent of people living in Cremona were artisans, 10 percent nobility, 20 percent were classed as just poor, and the rest worked for the others.
Zooming into the artisan class of Cremona, we find that sixty percent of them worked in the thriving textile industry.  Cremona was known for its fustian, that's a heavy cotton fabric often used for men's clothing and padding.  The Cremonese fustian had dazzling colors and beautiful designs.  Cremona was making 100, 000 pieces of this fustian that was exported to Venice and beyond the Alps.
This well connected city thrived through its manufacturing industry. Their success was an availability of raw materials and their ability to be able to process them. As in the textile industry, there was a sort of funnel of goods arriving from Venice, from the east and the rest of the known world. They would be shipped along the Po River in barges to Cremona where they would either be processed or go on to be sold in the rest of Europe.
There were products arriving from the north, Germany and from the south, from Naples.  Merchandiser materials coming from all directions, converging on this one town, which made it a fantastic place to be an artisan.  All you desired was at your fingertips.
The time we find ourselves in is the Renaissance.  Cremona is an intersection of trade, had not only physical goods, but ideas, and it is into this world we find our first violin maker. Andrea Amati,  a Renaissance man. Carlo  Chiesa. 
Carlo Chiesa
When Andrea Amati was born and when he grew up, he was working and he was an apprenticeship in a Renaissance workshop, meaning that his training  was as an artisan who was intended to be an artisan artist.
Linda Lespets
So the Renaissance, what was it exactly? I spoke to Dr. John Gagnier
Dr John Gagne
I'm John Gagne. 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.  What is the Renaissance?  Oh, right. Okay. Just in a nutshell. Yeah.  So the Renaissance, largely speaking, is an intellectual cultural movement. Based upon, well, you know, as you know, it's a French word, meaning the rebirth refers to any flourishing of some previously existing culture. I say this generally because, you know, there were renaissances before the, the famous one, the Italian renaissance, there was a Carolingian renaissance, there was a 12th century renaissance. But the one we're most familiar with is the, let's say the 15th century renaissance, which really got its start in the. 13th century, grew in the 14th century, maybe made most famous by Petrarch, who was a scholar and poet.  And then sort of exploded across Italy in the 15th century,  when  many culture makers and princes began to return to the inheritance of classical Roman antiquity to try to suck out of it the, you know, a platform for moving ahead in European history because they saw, they thought that the past had been so rich and so much had been lost that only by going back, could you find something to build the future with and what's maybe most notable about the 15th century renaissance is They really scraped all aspects of the, barrel, let's say, of ancient culture, so it was, intellectual, moral, philosophical, cartographic, scientific, musical, arithmetic, it was everything that the classical world had left. They really wanted to absorb and internalize. So in the 15th century in Lombardy, which is where Cremona is, there is a  court in Milan which also has a sort of satellite in the city of Pavia, the  second city of the duchy. The duchy of Lombardy is, you know, probably a few million people, one of the most industrious in northern Italy.
The courts at Milan, the Ancestral Castle is at Pavia, that's also the university town. And then, the third city, let's say, although Pavia is very large, Cremona is often referred to as the second city of Lombardy, because it's also a city of industry. And so, The world in which Andrea Amati would have grown up.
So there were maybe two aspects to that world. And one is the one I just described, which is a world of antique rebirth, which by the 16th century was in very full swing and had been internalized, even at levels below elite levels, thanks to things like the printing press, which had made access to knowledge more accessible.
And then there's the political environment, which was more tumultuous because, the Duchy of Milan, or Lombardy was, contested territory for the first half of the century. So it was a war torn part of Italy. And so the world he would have grown up in would have been, extremely tumultuous because of shifting political regimes, especially in Cremona.
Linda Lespets
All the income taxes, I think it's income taxes, in Cremona just as a city, had as much income tax as all the other, towns. in the Milanese state combined, so economically it was quite important.
John Gagne
Yeah, and it sounds like one of their biggest industries was, textiles. It looks like mostly Fustian, which is a kind of cotton velvet, let's say. And a few other sort of middle range textiles. So they're not, what Cremona produces is not  fine textiles like silks and silk velvets and that kind of thing. Those are still produced elsewhere. In fact, in Milan, the city, put up regulations that prevented other cities, even within its own duchy, from, let's say, getting into the silk trade or silk production, which would have meant planting lots of mulberry trees that the silkworms could grow.
That was not Cremona's specialty. They never really got into that. What they were surrounded by was flax and cotton. They had rich territory to grow that kind of crop and so they produced a kind of like hard wearing, sometimes called German style cloth, which they exported, very successfully into northern parts of Europe.
Linda Lespets
Basically it was a town that made a lot of its money through the textile trade. And they also talk a lot about the Moleskine, and I thought they were like... Actual little mole skins and I was imagining all these like farms with tiny little moles  and Emily the Fashion historian. She said no, it's a soft cotton. It's not actually a mole  So I'm like, where are they getting all these moles from? Because  it was a lot.
John Gagne
 Yeah, the renaissance mole farming was an intense industry. We won't get into right now, but no I'm joking yes, I mean, It's a city that, it sounds like, you know, Cremona's merchants were, very active on the regional and international scale.
So it seems like more even than the Germans, there were Cremonese merchants active in Venice. So if you're thinking about like the, who would you, whose faces would you see most around Venice, which was of course like an international hub. The Cremonese community was extremely active in Venice, which gave them access to all kinds of, shipments coming from all over the world, really. And then there was an access because the city sits on a pilgrimage route known as the Via Franchesa, which runs from England down to Rome, there would have been a kind of like cross European access, route for traders, travellers, merchants to pass through the city as well. And, uh, so there's a constant passage of merchants from Cremona up into, you know, the Alps, then over into France and through, diagonally through France towards England.
Linda Lespets
In the center of the city of Cremona is the Piazza del Comune, or Town Square. A bustling hub of activity, this grand square was surrounded by some of the city's most impressive buildings, including the Palazzo Comunale, or Town Hall, with its tall arches and elegant columns. It was a symbol of the city's power and wealth, its political center.
It's Loggia De Militi, it's military headquarters, and the cathedral, the religious heart of Cremona, with its impressive terrazzo bell tower standing proudly next to it.  Our violin maker Andrea Amati was born in 1505 and as a boy the cathedral was already almost 400 years old.  Rising up from the stone paved square, it is one of the most beautiful Romanesque cathedrals in Lombardy.
On its white marble facade is a magnificent central rose window with a two story loggia adorned with stately statues. The sound of bells echoing through the city was a constant reminder of its importance, and at the moment it was undergoing a transformation.
If the young Andrea Amati had wandered into the cathedral, he would have seen walls rising up held by giant stone pillars capped with gilded gold and intricate carvings. Weaving its way around all this was scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding. The painter Boccaccio Boccacino is painting colourful frescoes of the Epiphany and a cycle of the life of Mary in Christ.
These paintings in the cathedral would continue throughout Andrea Amati's lifetime by a variety of artisans, and as the years passed he would see the church filled with vivid artworks bursting with life.  Sometimes even seemingly to spill out of the paintings themselves and into the church, thanks to the artist's use of trompe l'oeil and life sized paintings depicting biblical scenes. It is a truly impressive structure. Coming out of the cathedral and walking along a decorative portico, you cannot miss the Torazzo,  the highest tower in Italy, made of brick and rising well above the city. Its size and beauty were a source of pride for the people of Cremona.  From this tower, which is in fact the bell tower of the cathedral, a lookout could spot  approaching armed forces, and the people of the city were not being overcautious.
Cremona had an unfortunate habit of being trampled by invading armies on a regular basis.  And yet, it was an exciting time to be alive. The world was changing in unstoppable ways. This was the modern era,  John Gagne.
John Gagne
 Okay, so, you know, obviously the modern era is contested and many people, accept that it's a  fiction of history, you know, when we become modern, but there are some compelling things that we recognize in terms of the transition from what we call the medieval to the modern.
And one of the, say, most, enjoyable ones is a print. Made in the 16th century by the Dutch Flemish artist Jan Straat who went by Jan Stradanus, Johannes Stradanus in Latin, who's worked for the Venetian court.  And he produces a print called Nova Ruperta, which means New Discoveries. And it's nine items that he thought represented the modern world.
And they were the Americas,  the magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press,  clockwork,  guayac wood, which was wood from Brazil that was used against syphilis,  distillation technology.  Silk cultivation and the stirrup and saddle  and those were some of these of course are not new to the 16th century Some of the like stirrups have been around since the deep Middle Ages and some of these of course were Asian technologies They were brought to Europe, you know, like printing or silk making and that kind of thing  Actually printing was individually  established in Europe, but all the rest of it gives you a sense of what people in 16th century thought made their age a new age So syphilis was a big thing  Yes, syphilis was completely contemporaneous with the Italian wars that we discussed earlier in terms of the breaking apart of local rule in Cremona.
Syphilis, it's still disputed about whether syphilis was an ancient disease that had recurred,  or whether it was a completely new disease that Europeans pinned on the Americans. But, one of the first successful cures after mercury, which is of course a terrible cure because it also kills.  Even though it may feel like it's fixing the syphilis, was the guaiac wood from Brazil, which had curative properties.
But maybe the overarching story is one about, an opening up of Europe to things that suggest going places or opening up to ideas whether it's about the magnetic compass and the discovery of the Americas or Travel learning new things to the printing press so it's let's say broadening of the mind of Americans of Europeans I'm sorry,  and that I think is a nice distillation Let's say of the idea of modernity in the 16th century is that these things are new discoveries that set Europe on a new path  And this modern era with all its new or revised discoveries and ideas would have influenced or been a part of Andrea Amati's life in Northern Italy.
Linda Lespets
Stories of strange and distant lands, cures of diseases, printing, the spread of learning, and music. Incredible clockwork mechanics and more give us a taste of the world he came from.
Looking onto the Piazza del Comune, the centre square of Cremona, on a busy market day. You could run into locals and foreigners alike. Farmers, clergy, members of the civic community, artisans, nobility, peasants, and soldiers. There were always soldiers from somewhere. On campaign passing through the city.
And of course merchants. Merchants of anything and everything, selling all sorts of goods imported into the city from one of the many trading routes leading there.  There were spices, herring, honey, oysters, fine wines, pepper, clothes, dyes, cloth, fake gold, iron, leather, paper, soap, hats, sugar, just to name a few of their wares.
Although the city was under the control of the Venetian state, life was precarious. Safety was never assured, and wars between the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, and even neighboring states was a constant danger.  The people of Cremona lived in an ever present shadow of war.  John Gagne.
John Gagne
 Venice also had a claim on Cremona. So, part of it was that it was, Cremona was being tugged in three directions, the French claimed it, Cremona actually broke away from the Duchy of Lombardy in 1499 when the French took over and it gave itself to Venice for nine years or something and then the French captured it back. There was a lot of back and forth.
For strategic reasons, obviously, it was a, for all the reasons we've described, it was a desirable city in terms of its productivity, it's revenue and that kind of thing.  Exactly. Yeah. Moles everywhere.  And so, uh, but there was also, interestingly, and maybe this is characteristic of Cremona, there was also a large sort of community of resistors to a lot of the foreign occupation.
There's one great story about. In the 1520s, as the Cremonese were trying to escape from French oversight that 500 rebels against the French entered the city disguised as peasant grocers to lead a revolt from within. So that's the kind of thing that's going on all the time is an attempt to pull the city in one direction or another, often by the residents themselves that are trying to fight against whoever is in control.
Yeah, it's, it's tremendously, um, tumultuous until basically the, French totally withdraw. And it's, as I said, Cremona is the last city other than Milan that the French withdraw from. And so it was really kind of like a war zone.
In the story of the 16th century though, if I can tell big stories for a second, is one of recovery. So through the, let's say up to 1600, uh, there's a lot of recovery going on, economic recovery, you know, a post war boom of some sorts where the city is reestablishing its earlier successes.
And then after 1600, there's a slide downwards that comes as a result of a number of things, including the 1630 plague and the 30 years war, which runs from 1618 to 1648. And that really, Sets most of Italy on an economic decline that's, that it never really recovers from, you know, until the 19th century.
Linda Lespets
One day when Andrea was seven years old, news came of the brutal sacking of the city of Brescia by the French. I speak about this in the very first episode of the Violin Chronicles. Brescia was only 60 kilometres away and also part of the Venetian state. Would Cremona be next?  Word came that Bergamo had paid the French 60, 000 ducats to avoid a similar fate.  Cremona was not in danger, just now. But after some complicated manoeuvring, the city was now being ruled by the Dukes of Milan, the Sforzas.
Battles were being fought and armies were passing through the city, again. But life went on, and Andrea would grow up in this time of uncertainty, with continual war looming on the horizon. A horizon that could be seen from the top of that really tall bell tower. We were just talking about the terrazzo.
At around the age of 14, Andrea would have started learning his trade. He was most likely apprenticed to an instrument maker, or learnt from his father, perfecting his skills and honing his craftsmanship.  In the Amati household, after several years, Andrea would have finished his apprenticeship, become a craftsman, and continue to work under a master for many years.
He would live through the turbulent years in his town until he reached the age of 30, when the city changed hands once again and was now controlled by the Spanish.  The irony of this war was that the Spanish created relative peace and stability by investing in local infrastructure and injecting money into the region.
They absolutely wanted to keep other powers out, and ended up creating a bubble of stability for the area.  John Gagne explains how the Spanish came to rule Lombardy and Cremona. 
John Gagne
I should say that the whole century was a bit messy, or the first half of the century was very messy.  The first thing to say is that the Spanish and the French had been, in Italy for centuries.
So, the Spanish had ruled, or the House of  Aragon had ruled the Kingdom of Naples on and off with the Angevins of France  since the 13th century. So, in the south of Italy, there had been a kind of give and take between France and Spain over the rulership of, Italy's largest kingdom since the Middle Ages and this had been going on even earlier in Sicily. So, there's kind of an upward movement of this contest between the crown of France and the crowns of Spain that then breaks out at the end of the 15th century when both the Spanish and the French try to gain more territory in Italy. The fulcrum for their dispute, well, it starts actually in, not surprisingly in Naples, but the Spanish managed to keep Naples after some tumults between the 1490s and the 1510s.
But in the north the French succeed for the first 30 years of the century. So the French establish, they take over the entire duchy of Lombardy. They kick out the Milanese dukes, more or less. I mean, there's a lot of fighting. They come back three times. So there's a lot of in and out of regimes.  So the French succeed and in fact, Cremona is in French hands for the longest of any city in the Duchy and is one of the most fought over. There's a lot of violence in Cremona through the 1530s, and there's a lot of tension with the French occupiers through that period as well. In fact, there's a great chronicle in the civic library of Cremona that I've looked at, which is vivid that just in describing the suffering of the people of Cremona in the first 30 years of the 16th century. Then the Spanish crown manages to kick the French out and they say they claim the duchy of Lombardy for themselves, which in truth they did have some claim to because the Spanish crown became soldered to the Holy Roman Empire.  In 1500, when the little prince, Charles V, inherited both the Spanish crown and the Holy Roman Empire.
So in one person, you had that trans European claim on a lot of territories. So it's largely thanks to the inheritance of Charles V that he could lay claim to the Duchy of Milan. which finally came into his hands in 1535 when the last of the native Dukes died. And then, it basically remained in Spanish hands until the 18th century.
Much of Italy was under Spanish rule of some kind, until the 18th century. And maybe the key, the last thing to say here about how Cremona became Spanish was that, Emperor Charles V retired. He handed, he broke up this unified dominion over much of Europe and handed off different parts to different people.
His son became, King Philip II of Spain. And in the 1540s, the late 1540s, King Philip established personal rule over the Duchy of Milan. And in that case, you know, he sent a lot more, governors to Italy to take over and make sure that his own orders were being enforced. So by 1550, let's say, by the time Andrea Amati is an adult man, the government he's working under is run by a Spaniard.
Although the, let's say, the city of Cremona is still being overseen by a largely Italian group of magistrates under the rulership of these Spanish representatives.  The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza Lodge in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts.
Linda Lespets
This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family.
This brings us to the end of the first episode in this series on Andrea Amati.  The picture we have of Cremona in the early 16th century is of a busy commercial hub full of artisans, not particularly many instrument makers, yet things are about to change on that front. Despite the city being battered by wars, the people are particularly resilient, if somewhat warlike, and as you will see in the upcoming episodes, they will have to face even greater odds to survive and thrive. All the while creating some of the most beautiful instruments we have surviving today.
 
I'd like to thank my guests, Carlo Chiesa,  Benjamin Hebbert, and Dr. John Gagne for sharing their knowledge with us today.  Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and I'll catch you next time on The Violin Chronicles.
Whether you're a seasoned musician, a lover of classical music, or simply curious about the art of violin-making, “The Violin Chronicles” is the perfect podcast for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of one of the greatest craftspeople in history. Join us as we explore the life, work, and legacy of Andrea Amati, and discover the secrets of his enduring genius.
The music you have heard in this episode is by
Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Bloom - Roo Walker, Getting to the bottom of it –, Fernweh Goldfish, Le Magicien- Giulio Fazio, Industrial music box-Kevin Macleod, The penny drops- Ben Mcelroy, Gregorian chant- Kevin Macleod, Make believe-Giuolio Fazio, Casuarinas- Dan Barracuda, ACO live in the studio Baccherini

Ep 3. Gasparo da Salo Part 3 And his new fancy pants assistant. Violins on the rise!

Stay with our maker as we look at the ups and downs of life and hear from Maxime Bibeau about his instrument and what it is like to share his career with a da Salo.
Maxime Bibeau double bassist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrated for his exceptional talent and profound connection to the historical instrument he plays on made by the famed violin maker Gasparo Da Salo chats to us, in this intimate interview, we gain insights into the unique challenges and joys he encounters while performing on this extraordinary Brescian double bass.
Discover the allure of this instrument, crafted centuries ago in the heart of Brescia, Italy, as we explore its rich tonal character, exquisite craftsmanship, and the historical significance it holds in the world of music. Maxime Bibeau takes us on a sonic voyage, sharing the intricacies of his relationship with this rare double bass and the emotional depth it adds to his performances.
Music you have heard in this episode is by
Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Budapest – Christian Larssen, Bloom - Roo Walker, Brandenburg Concerto No 4 – Kevin Macleod, Frost waltz- Kevin Macleod, Getting to the bottom of it – Fernweh Goldfish, Telemann Sonata in D maj for viola da gamba – Daniel Yeadon, Crooked old shrew – Fernweh Goldfish
 
Transcript
 
 
Welcome back to the Violin Chronicles and part 3 about the world of Gasparo Da Salo, instrument maker, businessman, and collector of needy nephews and nieces. In the last two episodes, we've seen how Gasparo Da Salo has led a successful career as a violin maker, or a luthier is perhaps a better word, as he didn't just make violins, but a variety of instruments, in Brescia.
After humble beginnings moving to Brescia as a young man, he has made a name for himself, and he seems to have taken his family responsibilities quite seriously.  In this episode, we will continue to look at Gasparo Da Salo’s life, and Maxime Bibeau, double bassist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, will be talking to us about the wonderful Gasparo Da Salo instrument he plays on, and its story.
Gasparo Da Salo came from humble origins, son of a musician, or instrument maker, who died too early, leaving his family to pick up the pieces and move to the city to try their luck in business.  Entering his workshop now, there is a profusion of activity. His son and assistant are working at benches finishing instruments that will be sent to France.
When there is an overflow of work, he ropes in his other children to help out.  Business continues to flourish. Gasparo Da Salo and Isabella are able to buy their own house and workshop.  Family responsibility was something that weighed strongly on Gasparo's shoulders. When his sister and his in laws died in the recent plague, Gasparo felt he had to take responsibility for his nephews and nieces.
He knew better than anyone what it was like to lose parents.  And with his connections to the other artisans, there was always opportunities to find work and apprenticeships. And help out he would.  One less thing to worry about was Ludovica. He was able to breathe a sigh of relief. It was done. Ouf Now he just had to sort out her dowry. The match with the fur merchant was a good one.  Ludovica had a good grasp of business matters. At the age of 22, she was ready to move out and have a family of her own, but not too far away, still in Brescia.  She knew she could always come and ask her favourite brother for help if she needed to.
There's An interesting story of Gasparo Da Salo’s little sister who was 12 when she started living with them.
So he'd, at this point, when he was in his late twenties, he had two young sons and his 12-year-old sister Ludovica comes and lives with them, and then she grows up and when she's about 22, she gets engaged to a furrier.
What were furriers doing? Was it just collars? Dr Emily Brayshaw is an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney School of Design.
Oh no, no, no, it was everything. So you know, we actually have collars definitely, but also gloves, muffs trims on hats. We know that people wore doublets.  And these are a style of jacket that came together at the middle. These are menswear. So it's a snug fitting jacket that's shaped and fitted to the man's body. The doublet gave a fashionable shape and padding to the body. And it also supported the hose, like the pants by providing ties so you could tie your hose to the doublet and it also gave warmth to the doublet but richer men would slash it and show the lining underneath and sometimes we have images of this being fur so you'd have like fur trim poking out you'd have fur collars you know you could wear Fur coats, as much fur as you want to.
And  when we talk about fur also from the era, it's really interesting. Like, they're all different types of fur that was worn. So Brescia, there are portraits of one of the young noblemen from the era wearing a gigantic collar made of lynx.  Yeah, but people also wore otter. What else were they wearing?
Do you think the lynx would be more classy than the otter? Oh, that's like so yes. Would you look down on the otter wearing one with your lynx coat?
It depends what you were wearing the otter for, right? So we've got there are records of kind of nine different types of fur. So including lynx, of course. Sable, Ermine, which, you know, the super rich war. Also Squirrel,  Otter, you know, these kinds of furs, you know, and yeah, obviously the richer you are, the more ritzy your furs.  But it's really interesting that the family is kind of positioning itself. So Gasparo Da Salo's family are really positioning themselves in the luxury goods market, right?
He's got the fine instruments. His little sister's gone into the fur trade. He's got another, is it the nephew, doing the fine kid gloves and the perfumes. He's got the shoemaker.  And there's this this interesting little story with Ludovica, his little sister. So she, when she gets married, she has a dowry supplied by Gasparo Da Salo, but her five other brothers as well and also she has a generous amounts psuppplied to her dowry by the Count Alfonso  Capriatis. Huh. And it's a bit of a mystery why he, he contributes do we know his relationship to the family or what he did?
 So the Capriatis were, they were an important family in Brescia. They often engaged musicians to play for them.
Right.
And so they had a relationship of sorts with musical families of Brescia. And, but there is a suggestion that Ludovico and he could have met under other circumstances,  but then again, he could have just, you know, had a burning passion for the arts.
Yeah, he might've just been wanting to like  getting good with the best instrument makers, you know and coming back to this story of the noble woman who's like, oh, yes I had the entire set made by Gasparo Da Salo  and you know, and this guy's like, yeah Well, I know him better than that. I paid his sister's dowry. Mm hmm, you know again a lot of this is about appearances and A lot that's done is really closely scrutinized as well, so particularly among the noble families, Brescia, Florence, these areas, if you're not dressed correctly for the occasion like we were talking about with the women in their funeral before, you could really attract ridicule.
Perceptions of dress were at the forefront of processes around honour and shaming. So it might also be part of this, you know, like these perceptions, this largesse. I've got the means to support the dowry. Yeah.
Now in his early 40s, Gasparo Da Salo is run off his feet. He has a household of children, the older ones can help out in the workshop or look after the younger ones.  They have just bought a small country property out of town, hopefully the local farmer he put in charge of cultivating the olive groves and fields yield a good harvest this year.
Tragically, one of his brothers in law died a few months ago. To help out his sister, his niece and nephew are living with them. With the help of his resourceful wife, they will be sure to find a husband for his niece and a trade for his nephew to learn.  Amongst their fellow craftsmen, they've found a perfect husband for Caterina a shoemaker.  And after asking around, Gasparo Da Salo is able to organize an apprenticeship for their nephew to learn the trade of glove maker and perfumer.  This brings us to the question of what place these artisans occupied in society.
John Gagne
It's, I think there's a struggle in the 16th century exactly around these terms, which is the the honor of artisans who work with their hands.
And maybe the place where, I mean, I've studied more is in the history of painters. where painters have this transformation from the 15th into the 16th century where they become sought after as  noble artisans. And it wouldn't surprise me if Luthier followed the same kind of pathway. I mean, they're producing highly beautiful objects for very knowledgeable collectors or, you know, sort of big patrons like the church or, you know, or a court. And so my sense is that they would be, and they're also basically not an industrial level. Let's say, you know, by comparison, another large industry in Brescia at that time, the gun makers, I mean, they're working with hundreds and hundreds of men in really dirty conditions. And that's not the world of, you know, intarsia workers who are more in the world of let's say printmakers, who’ve got small workshops often with their families there. So I think they probably already just on that level have a lot more steam because they're, So they're probably, you know making their way up to the level of, but not yet quite at the level of like doctors and lawyers, but they're probably at the level of, you know  you know, other tradesmen like leather workers, tailors, shoemakers, you know, the people who are providing necessities and luxuries of the everyday.
Some painters are now in the 16th century vaulting into, you know, international prominence. They're sought after by courts, but frankly so are many musicians, right? Singers, composers, some instrument makers are becoming desired and they're requested to visit court or country. So I think it's, there's probably a, let's say there's opportunity for social mobility, which is very interesting in the 16th century where, you know, these people who had been In previous centuries, kind of stuck in the dusty choir lofts, you know, putting little pieces of wood in places. They’ve now got an opportunity to show off their craft as individual artisans.
In Gasparo Da Salo’s life, there are about 18 monasteries and the monasteries were really centres of art, music, of creativity. So there was this, this huge burgeoning of activity going on coming out of. the sack previously. When Gasparo Da Salo was in his, about his 40s, that's when he would have got the order for this, this double bass that we have here in Sydney.
Ah, yeah. This that has this beautiful inlay, the purfling. The purfling.
I will just explain what violin purfling is, Do you?
Yeah, no, I do not know. My viola doesn't have it. My viola's a 20th century viola, so Well, is it drawn on? No, it's not. Emily Brayshaw.
But you do have purfling and you don't realise it. You do. So purfling, if you look closely at your violin, you will see two black lines running around the contour of the instrument.
Oh yes.
It's like narrow and decorative edging, almost. Yes. And so it's inlaid to the top and the back plate and what it is is actually three Small strips of wood. It goes black, white, black.
And Mine doesn't have white, I don't think, but I do recall that Barry, I call my instrument Barry after Barry White, the soul singer.  Because you hit that C string and it's like, oh baby, you know, lay me down by the fire. So I was, I will check out Barry and see if So.
So often it's Tinted wood. You'll have black tinted wood, white tinted wood, black tinted wood.
If you look closely, it probably is there. And then you will, you'll make a groove in the instrument and you will push it in. You will inlay it into it. So on this double bass, the characteristic of Brescian instruments is they used ebony, which is a notoriously difficult wood to work with and not very flexible.
And they, on this double bass, there's this intricate Sort of  zigzaggy, it's,  what would you call that sort of design? 
Just call it like an ornamentation. It's, it is kind of geometric, it's interwoven. It was a highly decorative, highly ornamental era. All done in, you know, at the top of the, in, in beautiful taste.
But, you know,  Italy long has this reputation for being, you know, a little bit, a little bit flamboyant, a little bit passionate, a little bit elegant. And, you know, why not extend that into your crafts?
Even the armour, you see the armour made in Brescia. And it's not just It's your suit of armour, it's got these, these engravings, these intricate patterns, these pitches, these seams on it. It's like they turned it into a work of art.
 Yeah. A craftsmanship. Yeah, you see that in the tailoring too, like in the very fine embroidery in the clothes.  Yeah, you know, and again from materials that are often quite difficult to work with and unwieldy, so, you know, with fabrics, the finer something is, the more delicate something is, the more unusual something is, the trickier it is to work with, you know, and so, you know, this is, this is an ebony inlay.
This is almost like a craftsman's flex. Yeah, you know, it's like not only do I make the best goddamn basses, I can do it with ebony. Which is expensive, more expensive than your tinted poplar. Yeah, it's more expensive and Boom, it's hard to work with, you know.  So Gasparo Da Salo, he's got this like really, he's got this thriving workshop.
He's got lots of orders. He's got people helping him out there. He has like the normal dramas of a workshop. You've got this count Anisto, Zanetto, who owes him all this money for instruments. He's not paying.
Of course he's not paying.
And he has to pay suppliers for wood in Venice. He'll get his wood from Venice. He gets his strings from Rome and they come via a monastery. So the monastery will order these strings and he'll go to the monastery, pick up the strings. They were sort of the dealers. Right.  Because monasteries had a lot of music happening. Oh, definitely. But also connections. Yeah. Yeah. And the church was spending a lot of money, on, on music and art.
And the church is flexing too in the face of the English Reformation. It's like no, don't even think about this here. Whereas of course the Swiss have got like the reformations happening as well, you know, and Lutheranism and Germany and You know, Italy, of course, being the centre of Catholicism, it's just like Luther actually prints one of his first versions of, I think it might be the Old Testament, in Brescia.
Ah, wow! Yeah, they had printing presses because they had the, the wood and paper was another famous You know, another thing that Brescia was famous for was for paper as well.
I'm Maxim Bibeau, I'm the principal bass of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The instrument I play is  possibly an earlier one. It is very, very large, very big. And I can't understand how anyone could play these at the time. It was probably made for a church, a monastery where it was found in Brixen, Neustift Monastery. It was found there in the 70s by a player in a state of disrepair and black full of soot. It used to double up the sound of the organ in the chapel and there are many accounts of music from the creation of the monastery in 11 something rather.  I've even found inside some inscriptions that says it was fixed by the chapel carpenter in 17 something or other.
So it would have The other Gaspar Da Salos were found in the last few decades. That's where all found in monasteries. The quality of the wood is incredible. The bear claw spruce on it is like one I've never seen before. Seeing the width on the instrument, it's got small wings on the edges, but there's still 266 rings on one side, 267 on the other side. The earliest ring is 1166. The latest one is 1534, the day Canada was discovered by Jacques Attier. 
Dendocrinology is the scientific method of dating tree rings. It enables us to see when the tree was alive and growing. So we know that the timber used in this instrument came from a tree that was growing in 1166, Genghis Khan was a child at the time,  until the latest tree ring that was in 1534. The year Henry VIII of England became head of the Church of England.  Now he can get the ball rolling on some divorce proceedings.  In any case, this was timber that had been around since before Gasparo Da Salo was born, and the age of the tree itself is something quite amazing.
They're so far apart from each other, those Gasparo Da Salos.  It's really hard to compare them, and a lot of them have been cut down, or simply made.  I played one in the town of Salo,  a more petite one, and I'd love to try the one that is at the San Marco Cathedral in Venice, which used to be owned by, or played by, Domenico Dragonetti, which is the one, very interestingly was in London in the 1700s,  which inspired all the local  makers, the English makers, to copy that form, that shape, and it's created this British taste, so they all Yeah, they all took slight, slight variations on, on that model, but it's all based on that specific instrument.  So I happened to own a Thomas Kennedy, and when I tried the, the solo, I thought, okay, it's bigger, it's slightly different. But in its essence, the, I felt it was a connection. And furthermore, I found the connection. I further saw the bass that Domenico Dragonetti was playing, has a bridge on it, made by Thomas Kennedy.  Da Salo was known as a wealthy man in his days, not a  poor artist. It sounds like he was doing very well for himself,  um, and played the instrument as well. So maybe that's what made it so special, because he did play the basses.
He did play, apparently, he played them in consort. He did probably lower the lower voice down the octave. We hope to find a painting or a drawing, something that correlates to that instrument, because it's so specific, the inlays, that there’s nothing else like it and now we have yet to find anything of the kind.  Purfling, as we mentioned before, is the decorative inlay that traces the contour of the violin. And on most instruments, there is one simple set running around the edges of an instrument. But in Brescia, there was a tendency to really go for it and to do fancy designs.
The second row of purfling traced inside the first or swirly motifs that covered various parts of the instrument.  I think it's very special and the people that tried it as well, if you can get around it's, share width is a real challenge. So when I'm showing it to specialists I believe that it was made as a three stringer bass, not a six stringed bass.
During those years, there was, these were the transition years, and so who made the first double bass from a violin in this shape? Not sure, but it's very close to being double bass number one. That's why it's the original subwoofer. 
And how much bigger is it than the standard double bass?
The string length at this point is definitely four to five or six centimetres longer, depends on what your standard is and the size of the body is definitely 10 percent bigger than your average English sized double Bass instrument. The thickness of the ribs is normal though, which is a saving grace, otherwise I wouldn't be able to. It's very wide, very very wide. It's crazy wide. I think the bottom belt is 76cm wide, which is basically higher than your dining table.
Oh wow, it's like a small boat.
But I think that's where the depth of the sound comes from.  Double basses with sloppy shoulders have a thin, shallow sound and it’s I guess there's something in its sound, and it's there's a lot of wisdom in it, it's very hard to describe it, there's a lot of depth, a lot of depth, and it, strangely enough, works best with other instruments around, or on stage, that's where you get the full impact of it. Some instruments sound good close up, and in the distance, the sound loses. This double bass, it gets better with distance seemingly.
Sound waves really come together at 10 meters. This seems to be the ideal spot to listen to it. And also, the depth of its sound, and like a great singer, like the strength of its diaphragm is supporting its sound if you play extremely quiet or very loudly.  It always has that massive support, like, yeah, she's a great bass singer throughout its range. It's very rare to find, but you get to hear that with  other string instruments around. I had a colleague play it the other day and I was definitely four meters away. I kid you not, I could feel the floor move, so it's remarkable. And obviously the history of what it's done, you always wonder if it could tell its story, where it's been.
You know, I have a feeling it has not been played a huge amount because it would have been played for some services, not every day. And there are accounts of the young monks playing it. The weekend, just having fun with it and one had lessons in Bolzano, like I think this double bass has never been played as much as it has been in the last eight years and I've been trying to play everything. I could possibly do renaissance music to modern to burial sequences on it and yeah, I think our relationship keeps evolving because it's a long term one, hopefully. Yeah, we did a lot of work on the setup and, and. It left Germany in winter, arrived here in December, just before Christmas.  And it was in a state of shock, I'd say, for two months, and then we had some work done on it to adjust it to my liking and the way I play. Whenever you come to a concert, when I play on the E string, it’s, it's so  big, so wide.  So I found the double bass has this ability to resonate with its environment a lot. And you're in a space that the more you, you feel what it, it does to everything else around, just like a subwoofer.
It's not necessarily directional, but the low end of it is just absolutely remarkable. This double bass was never made to play that low, it was never made to be played that high, but throughout its register, it's, it's nice and open and, you know,  it's been played a lot of late. Yeah, it's a privilege every time. It does get me a little tired at times.
I wish I'd played something a little smaller. You know, you just have to play this one note and it gives you this incredible feeling of power.
I remember when we were looking at  purchasing the double bass or having someone purchase it. For us, for me to play. Someone had said it was not the right instrument for the ensemble because it was too big and lumpy.
And stubborn me said, no, no, no, I am playing against Antonio Stradivarius and a Guarneri Del Gesu and a brothers Amati cello and, and I need as much power as I can. I decided that I was going to try to make my playing. and make the instrument as agile as possible. And because it's so special and beautiful that I really wanted to own it and do all that repertoire on it was worth spending the time on the relationship, getting all these physio appointments for me to be able to get around  the instrument without hurting myself.
Stretching your arms.
Yeah, and reinforcing my, support as well, the way I hold myself and whether it's standing up or sitting down, but you, you just need to play the one note and then you understand why it's worth it. Yeah. It gives you a great feeling of power. So I, for it to be nimble, agile, quick, took a little while for me and probably the instrument to change for us to work on a relationship, but I think we've gotten there in the end. So it's very exciting.
When the double base originally arrived in Sydney  in December humid Sydney in December versus leaving Frankfurt in the middle of winter where it was dry, it was in a state of shock for quite a few weeks. I guess the wood, different types of wood, were adapting to its new environment.
Climate at different rates.  Part of the work I had done on the double bass, I had an extension, C extension added to it that brings, gives me notes all the way down to the low C with capos when I don't need, don't want to jump. I remember the first few times I got a bit worried because  Below E flat, it was not really working, it wouldn't,  it was not really happy to give me those frequencies and a few weeks later it I embraced it and now it roars through the halls with those notes, it's amazing how they would.
And I still, I wish I could understand. Do you guys understand how the word just gets used to vibrating a certain way? And even though they're very close frequencies, it's like I'm not going to do this. And it's like, please, I'm going to, you know, trick you, trick you into liking this and then it does eventually.
John Dilworth talks to us about the Brescian way of approaching an instrument.
The Gaspar Da Salo and the Brescian ones in general, the G.B Maggini and Gaspar Da Salo, they do vary a lot and I don't think they even used a mould at all.  I think that's another big, you know, it's a very sort of nerdy observation from a violin maker's point of view, but I do think it's quite significant that Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari, all the cremonese makers, you know, you can take out and they will just lay on top of each other perfectly.
They used moulds, they used them beautifully, and it was all part of the intention to make something distinct, geometrically harmonious. You know, once you've designed this shape, you want it to be finished exactly according to what you've designed. It's an artistic thing. Whereas the, all the Brescian stuff is, is clearly much more improvised, and Gasparo Da Salo, he might have had a drawing which he could tweak and did and, you know, change his mind and blah, blah, blah, but he wasn't fixed to a mould, he didn't have to make a new mould each time he made a new instrument.
In my opinion, and from my own observations, I think that Gaspar Da Salo didn't use a mould, and he didn't use linings, and he didn't use corner blocks, but the ribs are quite thick. So they're sort of self supporting, but he just bent them to a drawing and put the thing together. Yeah, there are limits. You can't bend those ribs to a sort of Stradivarian curve, the ribs meet like that. They don't do that elegant overlap. They just go, because they're not supported by the block. And you see this thing where the inside is carved. The carving on the inside actually bears very little relationship to the edge. You know, he sort of,  you can see him diving down with the gouge, you know, a nice safe margin away from the ribs.
It is an intriguing thing that there's this big flat platform all around the inside of the, of the ribs, you know, far more than you would need for linings, but even then it didn't have any linings in the first place. It's quite strange, all sorts of very profound differences in the making technique between  Brescia and Cremona,  and you always get this really crazy toothed finish, and I had it in mind all the time that you have this thing called a ball rasp. You know, it's a, it's a rasp, but it, it's like a knuckle duster, and you work, there's no sign of a thumb plane or a scraper on the inside. It's, it's, he sort of gouged it and then got this big rasp.
A tennis ball.
Yeah yeah, exactly. 
Oh, were they the shoemaking tools?
Was that the So, yes, absolutely right. The connection with the clog makers. Back to the shoes. Yeah, oh, I think we're on to something here.  But I think there is a really interesting issue about the, the pine. That all the violins, but there's a very important distinction between all the instruments that Gasparo Da Salo made as violins, or violas, use imported  Swiss pine, alpine pine, exactly as the cremonese that comes from the same source, but everything he made beyond the violin family, all the  basses, so called cellos, and viols, and braccios, and all these things, are made with this local Bussian wood. It grows on the shores of the lake, Lake Garda, and it's got this very, it's got this very distinct, strong, hazel figure running across. It's very, very distinctive, and he used that a lot, but he never used it on violins and violas, but he used it for all the other stringed instruments he made. And this wood, it is definitely a separate species and it is low altitude pine, it's not grown up on a mountainside. And I find it really interesting that he clearly made a conscious decision not to use that when he was making a violin. You're essentially working with deeply figured pine and, you know, you know what it's like working deeply figured maple and it's just the same really. It chips and it’s  I assume that it was easily available to him and therefore a lot cheaper and he didn't mind it chipping a bit. You know, well you can see just from his general workmanship that wouldn't have bothered him much but when Da Salo was making a violin he seems to be aware that he needs to work to slightly raised  standards to finish, but the materials  Very important, and the other that sort of argues against a lot of what I was saying is in Brescia they always, always, always, always, and then always again used ebony for the purfling and if it's an absolute giveaway, you know, somebody shows you I've got this lovely Brescian violin here and you just Take a quick squint at the purfling. No, you haven't. I'm sorry. It's a German fake. But they used ebony. And if you've ever tried to use ebony purfling, it's, it's not a walk in the park. It's one of these remarkable things that the Cremonese purfling, you know, the poplar and pear, it's just got just the right combination of It's rigid enough that it will take a lovely curve, and if you've made a few slips in the channel, it'll just ride through that beautifully. But it's flexible enough to bend nicely. It just works. It's perfect.  And probably inlayers and decorative cabinet makers have been using that forever, even then. Always, in Brescia, use ebony. Which is an absolute nightmare, really. But whether it's because it, it saves them the trouble of staining it, I don't know, but the only way I've found to do it is to inlay it in three separate pieces. Awfully tricky. And that works. You, you do get a lot of gaps, but you get, you see that in the original instruments and it's all filled with paste and stuff. And the, and the central core, I had that identified at the Kew Gardens Library, and it is spindle tree wood. To all intents and purposes, it's, it's the same as boxwood and again, you've got sets of very rigid, you can't glue those three straight, you know, ebony, boxwood, and ebony, and then expect to bend it. The only way you can do it is to put them in separately. And that's very fiddly. That's the way they chose to work. I mean, it's not totally thought through. In the way that the Cremonese instruments always are, you know, just the attention to detail.
What I was going to say is a very expensive material it was clearly already in use for inlaying and decorative work.  So there's a supply of it, but you only ever see it in thin, so fingerboards are just veneered with ebony that to, to make a solid ebony fingerboard would have been  impossible, I think, at the time.
I mean, they, they were Venetian merchants were getting all sorts of exotic stuff from the far East. I mean, I'm sure. You could get it quite easily, but it would have been very expensive. Anything imported. And they didn't use it for pegs or tail pieces or anything like that.  The pegs were all made out of pear or plum or things like that. Just sort of hard fruit wood. Also, this is a bizarre thing that they, they put in twice as much purfling as everybody else did. You know, why?  You've got this really difficult stuff to manage, and it's actually quite expensive. So what do you do? You put, you do it twice!  And then put all these decorative You know, you've seen these ones with fleur de lis and things inlaid on the back.
You know, that's a huge amount of work with this really unfriendly material. But they, they felt, well, I'm talking specifically about Gasparo Da Salo, they felt that was worth doing. 
Have you heard the story about the maple? that the Venetian  gondoliers would reject and send to the violin makers. How much truth do you think is in that story?
It's plausible, absolutely plausible, that they were importing wood from the Balkans to the Venetian shipyard, to the Arsenale, and they would reject a lot of stuff that was flamed because yeah, it's not good constructional material.
In 1588 Gasparo Da Salo is in his late 40s. He still has many dependent family members to support. His son Francesco, 23 now and married, is living with them.  His second son and three daughters are still at home. They have a manservant and a maid. Business wise, things are becoming a bit strained. There are the usual workshop dramas.
The Count Ernesto Martinego da Zanetto owed him 52 lira for instruments he had made months ago, and getting the money out of him was like getting blood out of a stone. He had to pay invoices from his wood supplier in Venice. And he still had to settle an account with Friar Marco Antonio at the monastery for strings he had brought in from Rome. Another spanner in the works was his French connection. France was having another civil war. This one was the war between the three Henrys.  It was particularly confusing because three people called Henry were all trying to be the king of France, hence the war of the three Henrys. Anyway, all this meant that Gasparo Da Salo's agent for his French sales had stopped business, and over the last few years he had started depending heavily on the income from these sales. Just to make ends meet, he would have to borrow some money this year, until things calmed down in France. He could always fall back on his music. He was, nonetheless, a skilled and sought after musician, but he needed this extra income to support his household.  He still had a substantial stock of instruments, and his farm was supplying them with a generous amount of beans and olive oil. He just had a cash flow problem.
Although there had been some bad blood between the French and the Italians in the past, there was a strong trade link with France that Gasparo Da Salo relied on, John Gagne explains. 
But what we said earlier about you know, some international border limitations that would make it sometimes costly and troublesome to trade across borders. The demand also makes you do that. Gasparo Da Salo had a French student in his workshop. So there may have been interesting, you know, apprenticeship possibilities for, you know, young people from around Europe to come work with some of these makers. But my sense is that, I mean, where a lot of stuff gets traded in the 16th century is, is that international fairs that doesn't seem to me like the obvious place for instruments because you probably want a destination with a relatively reliable seller. You don't want to be sending instruments to the fair and then bringing them all back. So my sense is that, you know, you would have agents basically at work in some of the major cities, Lyon, Paris, some of the places perhaps in between and you would, you know ship on consignment basically, or, you know, with the expectation of selling a lot of stuff to an interested buyer, basically. The French connection makes a lot of sense. I mean, because there were Italian Queens twice in quick succession, I mean, Catherine de Medici arrives in France in the 1560s and is there until she dies in 1589 and then there's Marie de Medici, who marries Henry IV, and she's queen until  1610, and then she outlives him a little while. So there are two sort of seasons with a very short gap, you know, during Gasparo Da Salo’s kind of heyday, when there isn't a French queen. But other than that, I mean, it's a, there is a strong commerce of, Italians at court, you know, the Italian art is, as you just said, like tremendously desired in all its varieties, right? Music, sculpture, painting,  architecture. I mean, they're all hugely desirous of Italians. Comedy, you know, all that kind of thing.  So yes, it makes, it makes perfect sense to me that there was a hunger for Italian artisanship in, you know, at the, at the French court and probably regional courts as well.
There's a great quote  about Mary Queen of Scots being greeted in Edinburgh with a serenade played by “wretched violins and small rebecs”.
It just, you just have to dream of a picture of cold, rainy. These little rebecs, violins, I know, I know so when Gasparo Da Salo is in his 40s he has his son is now married, has his own children but still living with him, yep. And they have a manservant and a maid, so they've also bought a country property which gives them beans, olive oil, and wheat so he's, you know, he's, he's moving on up.
Yeah. Like he's building it up. Yeah.  But what happens is in France. It's one of his, where he's sending all these instruments and he's basically really relying on it this income. There's this, another war. Of course, there is. The war of the three Henrys, just to make it really confusing. Yeah. And this sort of shuts down the trade.
Yeah. As we know, war can really affect trade and supply of things. What I find fantastic is in tax, we learn so much through tax records. Oh, absolutely. And fashion and dress scholars also use taxation records as well for exactly this same purpose. Yeah. So he's saying, you know, I need to borrow some money this year. His godfather is still living in a part of their house. He can't ask him to leave. It's his godfather, but the family is really huge. And he needs a bit of money to tie it over until things work themselves out.  Yeah. So I was just thinking in Australia, we keep our tax records for seven years. Yeah. And, and here it's like, Oh no, they must file them somewhere.
And then, but here they're like 500 years old. We've got their tax records. They're wonderful historical documents. Yeah. He, but he was also during this whole time, he was also a violini player. So he played the double bass and he was actually quite good at it. And so he always had that to fall back on if he really needed to.
And so this could actually have been him, you know, you're seeing him here in this portrait of a Cremonese artist holding it looks like a gamba, but it could have been, you know,  a bass instrument. Yeah, and I suppose a gamba would have been a bit more made you look a bit more important than a violini player, which is more for accompanying in your accompaniment, yeah, you're standing up the back. Yeah, yeah. Whereas your soloist would be, have more of a gamba type instrument.
Part of this sort of you know, I guess social media idea of curating your identity, you know, the stories you want told about you. And that's very interesting. Something that  struck me as well is, I wonder if, so all of these instruments,  are made for somebody.
 
So whether he gets to meet them  and make according to their specifications or whether somebody just writes him a letter and says I want a 15 inch, a 16 inch and a 12 inch or what, but that wonderful base.  that the ACO has.
So Maxime Bibeau is quite tall.
And it makes me wonder whether that was specifically made for someone.
And you know, it ties into with this idea of tailoring, you know, and having your clothes made for you, having your Instruments made for you.
 Yeah. And as far as we know, there is no other bass with this intricate inlay. Often they're just quite simple. This one has very complicated. It's very beautiful. The wood is amazing.
Yeah. Ancient. It, yeah, I, it would likely have been a commission. I'd say, you know, and yeah, something like that.
Gasparo Da Salo is now entering his mid-fifties. The workshop is unrivalled in the area, fulfilling orders from wealthy clients.  His son Francesco Bertolotti, now in his 30s, is his right hand man, making instruments alongside him. Helping out as well is his manservant, Battista.  He has had other apprentices over the years, but now, at the same time that Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona just down the road from Brescia Gasparo Bertolotti was taking on a 15 year old apprentice from Botticino, a town 12 kilometers from the city.  Giovanni Paolo Maggini, Gasparo's new apprentice, would become, over the next few years, very important indeed in the story of Bresian violin making.
Maggini was the son of a shoemaker, well, a failed shoemaker in fact his business went bust, and then he died, in 1595, leaving Maggini's mother to sell land to support herself and the children.  That same year Gasparo Da Salo took the young Giovanni Paolo Maggini on as an apprentice. Seeing as shoemakers appear to be hanging out with instrument makers a lot here, perhaps he was a friend of a friend, and Gasparo Bertolotti being the kind of man he was, employed the boy, so that he, in turn, could support his own family.
This turned out to be a good move, because as time went on, and Gasparo Da Salo moved into his 60s, his son Francesco Bertolotti existed in his father's shadow.  But the young Maggini had the enthusiasm, talent and drive to continue the Brescian tradition. Things were changing more and more. People were ordering violins and the demand for vials was dropping off.
John Dilworth talks about the emergence of the violin in Brescia. 
All makers would have had to turn their hands to almost anything, I think, at the time. Before, I mean, the violin sort of suddenly, or seems to suddenly appear very dominant at the end of the 16th, well in the, in the 17th century and everything else just falls away. They found a way of making it much louder, which I think, you know, is the sound post and it suddenly made a quantum leap in development. And before that it was more like a rebec for a little treble viol and it made quite a small noise and it was associated with shepherds and peasant dances and it wasn't a distinguished instrument until, I mean, the first really carefully thought out and constructed instruments appear in Cremona in  1564 and thereafter.
I think this is, this is the point at which some genius. Invented the sound post and the bass bar even. I mean, there's, there's the violin in the Ashmolean Museum that clearly never had a bass bar. There's no way it can accommodate a bass bar. It was that evolution from, you know, developing this offset bass bar, having it down one side of the instrument.
And then, you know, it all seemed very counterintuitive.  You make this, set up this instrument in a completely asymmetrical way. But when you do that, it suddenly does become much louder and forceful. And these little, the renaissance instruments, the rebecs and so on, they, I’m absolutely certain they wouldn't have had that.
And they would have just, you know, like these angel consorts in paintings. There'd be this nice little gentle murmuring in the background.  And again, it's all connected with the development of public performance and concert halls and moving from, you know, private aristocratic palaces or, you know, just entertainment for the lord and lady over supper to becoming a public thing, you know, needing all this extra volume and definition.
It is interesting that in the Brescian tradition, Gasparo Bertolotti he makes predominantly violas. He makes relatively quite a lot of Double basses, which were actually made as violone, it's not double basses. All sorts of church establishments would have been clients and that yeah, we learned from Tarisio that, or again, it's kind of hearsay really, but he certainly targeted monasteries when he was traveling around Italy, looking for old instruments and a lot of them did turn up there were very, very few actual professional players of any sort at that time or of anything.
I think it would have been very hard to make a living as a musician. Unless you were attached to a palace of some sort. And even then you would probably mostly have been a butler and a footman or something who was asked from time to time to play the violin for a posh supper, you know?
After cleaning my shoes Your shoes are the connection! 
Can you just pick up that violin and accompany the dinner.
This is a whole new line of investigation. The role of the shoe in the history of the violin, chopins.
The chopins, yeah, yeah.  So there you go. That's a whole exciting new field to investigate.
He was quite ambitious. He was clearly quite ambitious and he, he got quite rich. And you, you can see from all these tax returns, he was a very wealthy man. But what happens subsequently you know, his son Francesco Bertolotti doesn't seem to have done much and I don't know,  you know, there's one or two instruments violins, violas that are sort of attributed to him  and he, I think he was just not that interested and Maggini took over instead,  and then comes 1632 and, there's the  pandemic and  Brescia's almost wiped off the map.
Gasparo Da Salo is in his 50s still, you know, his workshop's probably the most well known in Brescia and at the same time that he's kind of coming towards the end of his, well, you know, he's over starting to get over the hill in,  in your fifties at that time. Yeah. But it's at this time that Shakespeare writes Romeo and Juliet, which happens in Verona, which is just down the road.
 
We see both men and women of the time wore you know, really, the wealthy in particular wore really bright colours, you know, so it's a riot of colours and the more wealthy you were, the richer your fabrics, but also you can afford better quality dyes, but, you know, colours of the era, we can see scarlets, greys, you were, purples, greens, yellows, reds, browns, deep violets, a lot of different purples,  light blues for millions.
Men and women will have cloth embroidered with real silver and real gold thread, you know, amazing hats trimmed with furs and jewels and, you know, I was talking about, and feathers.  I was talking about the ruffs you know, they were also trimmed with furs and jewels and there was also a garment called the jerkin that men would wear.
Sounds like an insult.
It does a little bit. Jerkin? But they were fascinating. So the jerkin was leather.  And it was worn over the doublet and we might have even seen something like this in Romeo and Juliet because what is so interesting is so we had you know, I think I was talking about was I talking about the French, the Louis, Niccolò di Luigi Caponi, so his portrait from 1579. He was extremely rich, he had textile companies in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. We know that he shopped for gunpowder and weapons in Brescia. Yep.  And he was a total fashionista. He was like super wealthy. And you know, there are lists of his clothing that's extant, but one of the things he had, he had more than 60 leather jerkins and there was a law actually passed in 1585 banning jerkins because they were considered aggressive. So it's kind of like this leather jacket that was worn over the top sleeveless.  And it was very thick and they offered protection and they were worn by soldiers. So they were close fitting, usually made of a lighter coloured leather, often without sleeves, worn over the doublet.
But they were banned because it was thought that wearing a jerkin encouraged brawling  and duels and fights. It's like, you know, because there's this extra layer of stiff padding.
Like, come and stab me.
Yeah, yeah, you know, brilliant. Think about Romeo and Juliet and the brawls between the Montagues and the Caplets. You know, we may well have seen these outlawed  jerkins on the stage. I'm not sure.
So do you think so in Bresca at this time, could we imagine what we see in Romeo and Juliet, how that's how people would've dressed?
Well, no, because historical reproduction, so there's the Globe Theater in London and like English fashion's, kind of same, same, but different, doing kind of its own thing and the fashions on that stage were also being worn by actors and so they were often like hand me downs of rich people's clothing. Ah, so they were just making do with what? Yeah, making do, making do, making symbolic do, whereas these rich Verona families would have totally had all their own thing.
I think the best thing we can do to get the idea is to have a look at, again, of portraits of the era of these wealthy, wealthy people to get a sense for what they're wearing.
And I was reading that they had these, some a duke had a sleeve just covered in pearls. Yeah. Like, costing like the equivalent of millions of dollars.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because You can. Yeah. Because he can be, and because that's expected of him, because he's portraying this, you know, again like wearing the correct dress was such a thing and if you're not wearing it you're going to get laughed at, you're going to get ridiculed. Something also you were talking about theatre that's really interesting is this Niccolo di Luigi Caponi there are records of what he wore to carnival trips in Florence and so, and he went to see the Comedia del Arte performances, and these are kind of the very first performances that  established, like, traditions of schooling and clowning and slapstick.  Yeah, so we're seeing these conventions there, sort of starting here, and all of his clothes that he wore to Florence for these performances, and for carnival trips, they were really colourful really, really, really colorful and silk and shiny and like he's getting into the spirit of the carnival. Yeah, because you're saying with your clothes, like I'm here to party. Yeah. Right. And they were. 
So Romeo and Juliet's being written at this point. And then at, so it's around about this time that Gasparo, he employs a 15 year old apprentice from Botticino, which is a town 12 kilometres from Brescia. And this was Giovanni Paolo Maggini, who could be considered probably more known  than Da Salo. My viola edition of Sebchik has a Maggini viola on the front picture of that. And it just says, an important viola.  Doesn't tell us anything about the viola, it's just, you know, made by Maggini at this time, but it's an important viola. Yeah. So G.P Maggini once again, child of a shoemaker,  shoemakers everywhere. He was 15 and his father was actually a failed shoemaker. His business went bust and then he died. And so Maggini's mother, just to make ends meet, had to sell off parcels of land that they had and the same year, Gasparo Da Salo takes him on as an apprentice. And we see like throughout his life, he'sv he's helping family members, he's helping his sister's children, he's helping his like nephews and nieces, his little sister, and he, I think he was quite a, quite a nice guy. Like he takes on this 15 year old apprentice whose father has died and he's, he has to, you know, support his family.
And at the same time, Francesco Bertolotti, his son, you know, he was, he was making instruments, but he wasn't really, he just didn't have the drive.
And with any of these fine crafts,  that's what differentiates  the master from someone who's just kind of good. Yeah, and I think  Francesco's life was probably quite easy. It had all been literally given to him. And here you have Maggini, he's lost everything.
And it might have also just been a personal interest as well. Yeah. You know, sometimes you do have people in industries who, you know, they haven't had a particularly difficult life, but they find their passion and it's like, Oh boy, that's, that's what I'm, that's what I'm here for. You know, I'm here for the violas.  I'm doing it for the violins. violins.
 So, like, so it turned out to be quite a good move on Gasparo's part because Maggini ended up he ended up giving him more responsibilities. Giovannin Paolo Maggini. We think made a lot of the violins that came out of Gasparo Da Salo's workshop and, and Maggini actually becomes good friends with the son of Girolamo Virchi, the, the organ maker, and Paolo Virchi, because he comes back to town after being exiled for 12 years for a crime. Right. But we don't quite know what it was. Okay. But it was bad enough for the magistrates not to want him around. Yeah, it's like, out you go, Sonny Jim. I like, the way how it's like, you've done this really bad thing, we can't be bothered putting you in a prison, so just go away.
Yeah. For your sentence. Like, you're someone else's problem.  And I'm imagining other people's problems were coming. Like, to them, this is how it worked.
It might have been, but it also might have been things like it might have been something like speaking out against the government or speaking out against the church or nobles or you know, crimes like treason or something which, or publishing a pamphlet or, you know, there's sort of sometimes these political things.
It's not, you know, as black and white as  We're gonna cut, cut your head off and that's it. Sunshine. Yeah. Or you know, if they've a connection to a wealthy family,  you know, maybe it's not politically expedient to cut the head off, but  you know, it's like off you go sunshine, you're exiled for 12 years.
I like to think it was just something sensational.
Yeah, that would be fun.
It would be better. Yeah. Yeah. Gasparo Da Salo, he is 64 he has his employee. He was paid quite a handsome fee to go and play the base for the feast of the assumption. So he, you know, he still has his reputation. Yeah. And you know, that's quite elderly, I suppose, at that time.
Not necessarily, you know, if you keep yourself fit and young and healthy and stuff. Avoid the plague. Avoid it like the plague. You can make it. And he's probably having a healthy Mediterranean diet.  He's got his beans and olive oil from his farm.
He sure does. And he's, you know, staying active.
And then, yeah, so slowly Giovanni Paolo Maggini takes over. Francesco Bertolotti, he's still there. And then in 1609, Gasparo Da Salo dies and he's buried in a church that has links to woodworking trade, and, apparently there was quite a harmonious dividing of the assets.
Oh, okay. That's the family.
Francesco Bertolotti inherited the workshop,  and, but he sort of, you know, he was there, but not really there, but then next to it you've got this firecracker.
Giovanni Paolo Magini going off just, yeah, bringing, you know, violin making to another level  in Bresia.
As Gasparo Bertolotti’s life was coming to an end, what happened to his workshop and his legacy?  Giovanni Paolo Magini became good friends with Girolamo Verchi's son, Paolo Verchi a musician and composer who was newly back in town after 12 years of exile from the Venetian state for a crime he committed.  In 1604 Gasparo was invited to play the bass in Bergamo for a handsome fee at the Feast of the Assumption.
Even at the age of 64 he still had his reputation for being a fine bass player.  Giovanni Paolo Maggini was turning into an accomplished instrument maker, and Gasparo Da Salo was entrusting him with ever more work and responsibility. He was especially good at making violins, the soprano instrument, becoming more and more popular.
But as for Gasparo, no one could make a bass like him. The sound you could get from one of his basses was amazing. He made them not like a large viol, but in the manner similar to that of the violin family. This was the instrument he loved to make, and play.
In 1609, on a spring day, on the 14th of April, Gasparo Bertolotti died. He was buried in the church of San Giuseppe, a church that had links to the woodworking trade. His death notice reads, “Messer Gasparo Bertolotti Maestro Violini is dead and buried in Santo Giuseppe”.
After his death, his sons divided up his 14 plots of land, a family home and a country estate.  The workshop went to Francesco, who didn't really have the drive to continue his father's legacy and preferred to live off his inheritance.  While Giovanni Paolo Maggini opened his own workshop and hit the ground running to be the next big thing Brescia saw in instrument making.
Today about 80 of his instruments are known to exist and among those  are 12 Da Salo basses that we know of, but it is estimated that between 150 to 200  basses would have left his workshop to be played around Europe.
In the case of Brescia, the violin seems to have evolved from the viola, which in turn evolved from the viol and the lyre da braccia. I also find it fascinating the thought that Brescia could have developed the double bass in an attempt to emulate the organ in an outdoor setting. And that the violin family seems to have superseded, in a sense, the viol family because of the fact that it was more stable and a less delicate instrument.
Musically speaking, we are leaving the Renaissance and moving into the Baroque, where the tenor voiced instruments, so sought after in the Renaissance era, were shifting towards the soprano being the principal voice.  And the violin family ticked a lot of boxes, being able to generate a very powerful sound.
Even more fascinating is that 40km down the road in Cremona, A very similar process was taking place at around about the same time. What they chose to make and how they made it was vastly different, but to be sure the violin was now unmistakably present and a force to be reckoned with.
Thank you so much for listening to these episodes about Gasparo Da Salo. I hope you've learned something and have a clearer image of this make. His life and the world he came from. If you would like to experience the amazing Da Salo bass played by Maxime Bibeau, I would encourage you to go along to one of the Australian Chamber Orchestra's concerts, where you will not only be able to see the instrument and hear it, but feel the vibrations.
And lastly, I would like to thank my lovely guest.  John Dilworth, Dr Emily Brayshaw, Maxime Bibeau, Dr. John Gagne.  In my next series, I will be looking at the Amati family, working down the road in Cremona.  Theirs is an extraordinary story. Spanning 200 years, their instruments profoundly influencing all of the Cremonese makers to come after them up to the present day.
 
 

Ep 2. Gasparo Da Salo Violin maker and Luthier part 2 This guy is going places.

Join me as I delve into the world of Gasparo Da Salo once again and discover what  guns, Monetverdi and a war in France have to do with his business.
I speak to Violin maker and expert John Dilworth, fashion historian Emily Brayshaw about the influence clothes and style on players of Violins, Violas and cellos and finally Fillipo Fasser a contemporary violin maker in Brescia, explains the importance of the master Luthiers of his city.
Music you have heard in this episode is by
Bach Violin partita No 2, Telemann Sonata in D maj for viola da gamba – Daniel Yeadon, Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Budapest – Christian Larssen, Bloom by Roo Walker, Brandenburg Concerto No 4 – Kevin Macleod, Frost waltz- Kevin Macleod, Getting to the bottom of it – Fernweh Goldfish
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I will attempt to bring to life the stories surrounding the famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history. My name is Linda Lespets. I am a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now.
Welcome back for part two of the life and times of Gasparo de Salo, instrument maker, musician, and man on his way up.  In episode one, we looked at what it would have been like to live in Renaissance Brescia in the 1500s.  The destruction and subsequent rebuilding of the city after its sacking in 1512.
This led to a flurry of activity amongst artisans and artists. And the role that this played in the rebirthing of the city of Brescia.  In this episode, we will look more in depth at instrument making in the city, and how Gasparo Da Salo started to make a name for himself.
The 1560s heralded in the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean. But closer to home, and an event that is more important to the history of the violin, but that I will only come to in a future episode, the then 10-year-old Charles IX of France becomes king after his brother Francis dies of an ear infection!
Not to worry. Catherine de Medici, Charles's mother, is more than happy to act as regent for her son.  But what is important to note here is that an Italian born queen, with her love of the arts and music, is wielding her power in the trend setting capital of Paris.  But back in Italy, as Gasparro Da Salo grew up, he became an organ builder's apprentice. And then, in his early twenties, disaster struck the family. When his father Francesco died, the decision was made, they would move to Brescia.  If Gasparo Da Salo was to become successful in both his musical career and instrument making, Violin making and lutherie, Brescia was the place to be.  But how important was Brescia in the role of instrument production at this time?
John Gagne.  I'm John Gagne, 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.
 There's a guy named Ugo Ravasio, who wrote a lot of books about Brescian violin making in the 1990s. And he claims in one of his like seminal articles that the word violino first appears in Brescian documents on the 17th of April, 1530.
There are other words before then for sort of other instruments like viola da braccio or lira da braccio, but the actual word like violino is apparently a 1530, you know, invention and he also tells us that the first document to record a maker of violini is the 11th of December, 1558.
That's very precise.
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of interesting. And this is the beauty of experts. I mean, this shows us that there's like, I mean, that's, it's more about language, I suppose, because as I, just said, like  in the 15th century, there are people in Brescia making instruments of all kinds, but the word violino and the actual identity of the maker of violini seems to be like 1530s to 1560, basically is when they're like, agglomerating as a self-named kind of group of people.
That's what Ugo Ravasio claims, that basically the word violino, yeah, is, is actually  Brescian, of Brescian origin.
The period in which Gasparo Da Salo moved from Salo to Brescia to set up his workshop coincided with the end of the Italian wars.  These were the series of conflicts we spoke about in the first episode where the city of Brescia was violently sacked by the French army. But now in this time of peace, trade was able to flourish.
The feelings the Brescians had towards the French a few years earlier were quite strong. One inhabitant of the city described the French as “The enemies of God and of humanity. Bloodsuckers and people without laws. Of faith not worthy to be called Christian”.  But now these bloodsucking heathens were paying a good price for instruments coming from Italy.
It was a rare moment of relative peace in this part of the world. So commerce prevailed.
Actually, there's a good story that you probably know that relates to Galileo, where Galileo, the scientist, was because he came from a musical family, obviously, his father was a theorist and a composer. And he asked a friend whether he should buy a violin from Cremona or Brescia and the friend asked Monteverdi, who at that point was like Maistro di Capella at St. Mark's in Venice. And Monteverdi supposedly replied “Brescian violins, you can get anywhere. But the ones that are incomparably beautiful are from Cremona.”  The answer he received when inquiring about purchasing a violin for his nephew Alberto, was, “I have conferred with the concert master of Saint Marks who told me they're easy found in Brescia but it's in Cremona that the best ones are made. I ordered one through Signor Monteverdi, whose nephew is in Cremona. In the end, he acquired a Cremonese violin, one that would be guaranteed to be singularly successful”, that ended up costing 15 ducats, handling and shipping not included. 
The key here is that Monteverdi was from Cremona, so there's a bit of, probably, local pride involved in that too.
But, you know, even if, if Ugo Ravasio is not right, I mean, it gives us a kind of, like window of time, at least in the Brescian documents, where the word and the sort of identity come into shape. It gives us a sort of timeline that, you know, 1530s. 1560s, and then this kind of efflorescence between 1660s, when the Brescian community is really becoming internationally known for producing great, great instruments.
Experts have found in surveys of lutei, or luthiers, or violin makers from 1550 to 1600, the number working in most of the Italian cities, which gives us a sense of like where the hubs of making was. And from 1550 to 1600, there were 26 violin makers in Venice, 21 in Brescia, 17 in Ferrara, 11 in Rome, 10 in Bologna, 10 in Padua and down the list and down the list. So it gives you a sense Venice, Brescia, I mean that that what hour less than an hour ride between Venice and Brescia shows you that I mean, and interestingly Cremona is not on that list, right? Cremona seems to grow a little bit after 1600 in terms of the number of violin makers.
The comparison between Brescia and Cremona keeps coming up in the story of Gasparo da Salo because the city of Cremona, which is 40 kilometers from Brescia, is the other great hub of violin making in Italy. But you will have to wait until the next series to hear about that.
Brescian instruments were extremely popular and sought after in the Renaissance period. In 1500, there were 14 instrument makers registered in the city, as time went on, that number kept growing.  Well, after the sacking of the city a generation earlier. Musicians and instrument makers had bounced back and by the time Gasparo da Salo moved with his family, the city was once again a bustling centre of trade and craftsmanship.
Walking down the colourful streets one could admire the many palaces in the Venetian style being constructed.  The boulevards aligned with bright picturesque frescoes adorning the walls, and many art loving Brescians would have the exterior of their houses painted by local artists in vibrant colours. Looking out past the city walls were fertile lands and rolling hills making up the Lombard plain. Brescia was once again famous for its wool, silks and arms manufacture.
There's an instrument maker in Brescia called Giovanni Giacomo della Corona, and he was a lute maker in around, around 1500 but he also sold anvils and meat. Yep. And he sold land, if you're looking to buy a place. And also he was selling off a stock of weapons. Okay, so a bit of everything. 
Dr. Emily Brayshaw is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney School of Design.
Because by the time Gasparo De Salo's working in Brescia, that's like almost sort of 50 years later and a lot happens and a lot shifts you know, we've had that big sack of the city, you know, which I think you talk about earlier on. And of course, that's going to have like a huge impact on, you know, who walks where. So, by the time Gasparo Da Salo moves, Brescia's kind of starting to get itself back on its feet and reestablish its, its industry as well. Particularly as what's been happening it was known for wool as well, like very fine wool. But of course, what's starting to happen is Venice is starting to tax the living daylights out of it.
By the end of the 16th century, beginning of the 17th  century, the merchants started to buy their wool from elsewhere because the quality had dipped because Venice is starting to tax it. And they're also starting to tax other industries as well really, really heavily. Also, you get a plague in Brescia between 1575 and 1577, like this two-year plague, and it took the lives of about 10, 000 people.
Things like these extreme events also had like a really interesting impact on the clothing of Brescia because what's happening with clothing at the time and what these guys are wearing is, there are all kinds of exchanges. So the rich, of course, are just mind bogglingly wealthy and you know, can afford to just get all the very finest made. But because it's so expensive, they're also quite thrifty. So there's a lot of a sale in second hand clothes. A lot of clothes are reused. The wealthy, if they were kind of a bit hard up for cash, they'd have private buyers coming to their houses to buy garments, to buy accessories. shoes, gloves, furs, you know, these things. But of course, and you know, you also have garments being made, remade, like it's the ultimate economy because clothing is so labor intensive to make and so expensive. But then also with events like plagues and a lot of people dying and moving, things like that, there's a lot of stuff left over. So that's also going to shape what people are wearing, the access that they have to clothes and to fabrics.
That's really interesting because Gasparo da Salo, so when Gasparo's in his, he's around in his thirties, he, his sister and brother-in-law die in the plague, and he has his three nephews living with him. He also has, ends up having about seven children, so lots of people in the house. And also he has a niece, a niece and a nephew from another sibling whose parents die in the plague and that, and the nephew they, find him a trade as a glove maker and perfumer.
Ah, that is interesting too. So, you know, as, as part of the, the plague as well, it is entirely possible that he inherited a lot of their textiles too and their clothing, so as to be able to again repurpose, refashion, remake, to be able to clothe this huge family that he's got. But of course, what also happens during plagues is that, you know, again, in Brescia, 10, 000 people dying, these cities weren't that big, and suddenly a lot of opportunities open up to move because, you know, people die. So, you know, you've got opportunities to move into these trades, and so people can perhaps move up socially, people can get opportunities, you know, maybe the apprenticeship had been promised to  Giovanni blogs and Giovanni blogs Children have all died. So here's the opening for someone else.
All your competition's dead. You can just go on. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly what happened. There's also access to property and interestingly to gloves and perfumes, dare I say, often worked hand in hand because a lot of the time too, leathers would be scented.  To a delicately perfumed for sale to yeah, I heard it's because they stunk they do so part of the tanning process of course was to use urine  and It's disgusting, but by the time, you know, it gets to your fine kid glove The urine's not no longer there, but it still smells Ow,
and I saw that at that point time, a recipe for making your hair like golden and beautiful involve urine?
Oh yeah, yeah. They're chucking that in everywhere. Everything, mate. Everything. Well you know. Add a bit of urine to that?
 It’s acidic as well. You know, and it's, it's cheap raw material, you know.
There was an Australian violin maker who had this theory that the wood like, seeped in urine was superior for violin making, and so he would come over and pee in a bathtub in his backyard and he'd have this wood and then when he died his stock of wood was bought by another workshop and a friend of mine worked there and every time someone had to cut a piece of this wood someone would yell out I’m cutting the piss wood and then all leave the room because she just said it reeked it just  It was in the wood.
Yeah, and it, does, it really absorbs. And so, you know, particularly these big tanneries, which is, you know, let's just say they weren't particularly hygienic.  Yeah. And then also he's so that his nephew became a glove maker perfumer, his niece married a shoemaker, and they seem to be quite closely in cahoots with shoemakers.
And there's a lot of violin makers whose parents or siblings are shoemakers.
Another, I mean, the other thing that's interesting that also relates to this. Period around 1530 is that's also when the Beretta firm is founded, which is still in operation, which is producer of handguns.  Brescia of course is still today an industrial city. In fact, I mean, my personal story is that I was one Sunday when I was a student, I was trying to go to Verona and I took the wrong train and the conductor said to me, you've got the wrong ticket. You could go to Brescia, but you don't want to go to Brescia because it's an ugly industrial city.  I went. And yes, I mean, it's industrial but that's the kind of amazing thing about the city is that it has this 500-year-old history of industry, basically ironworks and like, you know, sort of woodworks and that kind of thing, and they've got this beautiful sort of Roman culture that's still totally on view.
So what's interesting, I suppose, going back to my original point, is that, In the 1530s you get this kind of identity of the violin maker and you also get this, like, firm that's still in operation that's making handguns. So sort of violins and guns, that's what's coming out of Brescia for the rest of the 16th century basically, into the 17th century.
If you were a Brescian, would you  have a very close link to Venice more so than any interaction you would have with Cremona? Because Cremona is 40 kilometers south of Brescia and Venice is 180 kilometers to the east of Brescia. Yeah.  You know, that's a really good point.  I would say politically that the distance is less important because the rectors of the city, basically the people who run the city, as a kind of dependency of Venice, are Venetian. So it's a, it's in a way, it's kind of like a Venetian colony city so your political traffic is coming and going that longer distance to Venice. By comparison, Cremona belongs to the Duchy of Milan. So they're under a different sort of, you know regime. But yeah, I mean, obviously, that, there are no borders. There's no border patrol. It's very easy to travel between the two cities.
Could you go and sell an instrument without having to pay any tax or duty?
No, probably not, because, I mean, that's where the borders do exist, is that you've got each, sort of, duchy, the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan had protections against untaxed sales and that kind of thing, so you would probably have to  pay some kind of duty if you wanted to.
So it is, I mean, in a way, a kind of an international border that you'd have to cross for sales between those two, two cities as close as they were.
So, Brescian violin makers would, it would be easier for them to go to Venice to sell or people to buy and trade between Venice and them.  I mean, you know, obviously there are ways of getting around.
I don't know anything about the black market and instruments. But usually, I mean, I think there would be obstacles that would make it challenging to do massive you know, trade and get around the taxation. There may have been, you know, agreements to make the trade functional and easy. But, you know, from what I know from documents in the 16th century, there's a lot of complaining, obviously on the part of merchants of all wares about the difficulties they have selling across borders. So it wouldn't. Shocked me if there were more, if there were equal difficulties with, you know, instruments.
Violin smuggling. Exactly.  I'm sure it happened.
 These taxation and border policies would have directly affected Gasparo Da Salo’s business. And it just goes to show that artisans of the day had to be both skilful in their trade and business savvy to make their enterprise a success. Juggling border administrations, currency exchanges, and language communication between different provinces was not given to everyone. It kept you on your toes,  and still does today.
Far from the cliche of the struggling artist, Gasparo Da Salo thrived in the music loving Renaissance Brescia. He is cited as being a very talented violone player, so the violone at this time was a double bass sized instrument, not a violin. It's confusing, I know.  Gasparo Da Salo immediately rented a house and set up a workshop in the Quadro seconda San Giovanni.
John Dilworth talking about instruments made in Brescia.
I don't know why there wasn't, there doesn't seem to have been a demand for double bases in Cremona, but there clearly was in Brescia and that's another thing we know that Gasparo Da Salo himself did play the double base. And there's records of him that he played at a wedding. But the other thing is hes strict about it, it, they weren't actually double bases. They were violone there. There was definitely a different tradition in Brescia and viols and violas are much more important in Brescia than violins. The emphasis throughout seems to have been on making violas more than violins and I think that comes from the, the viola da braccio tradition, which was strong in Venice and Brescia, but you don't see much of that at all in Cremona. And it's, it's just, yeah, it's just a different musical style and the, and in the early history in the Venetian instrument making, they, there's a predominance of the viola da braccio is the instrument that everybody wanted and you made them in various sizes from, well, the soprano, but it's, it's still bigger than a violin and down to quite a big tenor instrument. So they, they clearly had, you know, consorts or little gangs of Viola da Braccia players.
And the collective noun for a Viola da Braccia is a gang?
Is a gang. Right. Okay.
No, no, you say it, you said it a little bit.
I'll sign up to that, yeah. Take responsibility for that. And it's also, it's a thing, it was used primarily for vocal accompaniment. It's, you know, the Bracci, you have, it has about seven or eight strings, you know, and they're played as drones, and so it's, and the, I get carried away with this, sorry. But the organ is a very, the church organ is a very significant thing. And I, if you, If you listen to a gang of viola da braccio, it's like hearing an organ because you're hearing sustained drone notes and they're playing chords.  So, it's the portable,
a portable organ.
Exactly. And, and the thing about double basses as well I've also got this bee in my bonnet about it, people were working hard to get a portable bass instrument, which I think was in order to duplicate the church organs. In a, in a church organ, you can just keep on building the pipes as big as you like. There's no limit really. And you can go right down to, you know, Wagnerian earth shattering. profound bass notes.  Perfectly straightforward, there's no difficulty. But if you move out of the church, and you want to start making music in a place that doesn't have an organ, or outdoors, you suddenly, well, we haven't got a bass, how are we gonna, you know, structure the harmony and all that stuff? And in collections of ancient instruments, you constantly see these attempts to make, you know, double bass trumpets and, well, everything.
 I saw there's a lot of Venetian civic ceremonies that were held outside. They seem to be very into outside festivals and hence the, the need for the bass instruments, I suppose what you're saying, and it would Cremona, if Cremona's tradition was less outdoor carnival.
Yes. I, I don't know what defines it, but yes, all these images of parades and people on wagons playing violins and viol, whole viol concerts, consorts installed on a wagon and trundling through the town and I can't imagine, you know, the noise of the wagon wheels rumbling on the cobbled streets, you know, and there's a bunch of vial players in the back.
You know, I can't imagine what, what it sounded like, really.
 I saw music and it was written for three trumpets, a hurdy gurdy and a violin.  And I was like, wow, they really love a good trumpet. And I love how they just aren't afraid of whacking in a bagpipe.
Yes Absolutely. And it's, it's in such a volume and certainly, there's a different culture in Cremona for sure.
And would Brescia have had that sort of outdoor tradition that Venice had as well?
Yes, Yeah, Well, I think, you know, Brescia, you have to think of really as, as part of the Venetian  state. It's part of the Veneto and yes, there's a lot of connections and the early Venetian makers, well, there's, in fact, there's Giovanni Maria, who's known as Giovanni Maria da Brescia, who was working in Venice and making these viola braccio and viols, all sorts of things. And they're very stylistically, not that far away from Gasparo Da Salo.  I mean, there's this fantastic, it's in the National Gallery in London, but Titian of him, the artist, playing a violone at it's the, the wedding at Cana is the title of the, and, and the artist is prominent in it, playing this huge violone.
Yeah, because Titian was working at the time that Gasparo da Salo was working, he was painting churches.
Yeah, that tradition died out in Venice and Brescia, and the, the Cremonese tradition won.  And it's the string playing tradition that we know now. 
An interesting observation is that while Brescian musicians liked to play in groups, they often stayed within the Venetian territories. Perhaps there was such an abundance of work that they had no need to travel afar.  Whereas the Cremonese musicians tended towards a different model. At the time they were under Spanish rule and their musicians would travel alone and play anywhere they offered work. They would travel to foreign courts, especially to Paris.
So while the Brescian makers were working on instruments to be played in ensemble playing, particularly the medium to large instruments, the Cremonese were concentrating on the solo soprano instrument.  As an artisan, Gasparo da Salo quickly got to know his neighbours who worked in other skilled trades.  For the past three years, Gasparo da Salo had been working long, hard hours to set up his business and earn a reputation as an instrument maker.
He had family, his mother and siblings, to support.  Still, after a hard day's work as he leant against the doorframe of his workshop that led into the cobble lined streets of Brescia, he watched the sun slowly set behind the Lombard hills.  Here I would like to have him smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee, but unfortunately, tobacco and coffee beans had almost, but not quite hit the streets of Northern Italy yet.  Well, he thought maybe it was time. He started a family of his own. And then it happened a few doors down on the other side of the Contrata de la cossere a door opened and a vision of loveliness appeared dressed in a simple woollen dress, her hair shimmering in the fading sunlight.  It was Isabella Cossetti, the daughter of Giovanni, the artisan potter and glassmaker.
Well, I would like to think it happened like that. In any case, at the ripe old age of 24, Gasparo Da Salo married the 18 year old Isabella. She moved out of home and across the road and became Signora Bertolotti.
 Gasparo Da Salo turned 25 and Isabella 19. They had their first child, Francesco. Their good friend, Girolamo Virchi, one of the most prominent craftsmen in the city became godfather to the first of their seven children. Girolamo Virchi belonged to a family of woodcarvers, who at first specialized in clogs, but then moved on to make instruments, notably organs.
You see, Brescia is famous not only for its stringed instruments, but its organ makers as well.  Girolamo Virchi’s two brothers were also wood carvers. One made citterns, a cittern is a stringed instrument similar to a lute, but with a flat back. And the other would always refer to himself as a luxury clog maker. Throughout Gasparo Da Salo’s story shoe makers have a tendency to pop up a lot.
John  Gagne, one of the things that's interesting about the sort of situation is there seems to be a, a strong, tradition of decorations for churches, especially organs and the sort of style of Brescian organ design had to do or had a lot to do with woodwork, sort of intarsia, you know, sort of cut wood that you insert into other pieces of wood to make designs that have and you often see it in like choir stalls in churches, you know, you can picture like, the seats that choir boys flip down are often decorated with inlaid wood and, and so one of the interesting facts about violin makers in this mid-16th century is that they work in a kind of triangle of interrelated woodworking jobs, one that's often cited is  Benedetto Virchi, who was like the brother of a famous violin maker, Girolamo Virchi, and he was listed on a document as an intarsia master, you know, inlay master an instrument maker, and a shoemaker. We have a lot of Venetian shoes, women's shoes from the mid-16th century, that are sort of platform shoes.
The Chopines.
Yeah, and some of them are inlaid as well, so there's actually like, it makes sense in a way if you're a master of kind of inserting small bits of wood into planes of wood, that you can do it, you know, in an organ stall in a church, you can do it for a woman's, you know, special order of shoes, or you can do it on a violin too.
So you go, you buy your violin.  You get your pair of Chopin's and off you go and you wobble out of there Because weren't they really tall?
Yes, I mean some of them are, maybe, you know How much were you saying? Yeah, like 10, centimetres or something but some of them, yes, they're kind of like, you know 30 centimetres  But I think it shows that there's an interesting, let's say Trajectory in the history of violin making That's not self-evident like they're sort of pulling a lot of related specialisms into a developing school of arts.
John Dilworth.
There are several violin makers in Venice. Well, in the following century who were, and they belong to the shoemaker’s guild.  And they're described as clog makers. It does come up quite often.
 Girolamo Virchi was a noted woodcarver in the city. And the fact that Gasparo Da Salo had a close friendship with him shows that he was making it, moving in influential circles already.  Brescia was a city of artisans, where one discipline could easily converge into another. For example, a man called Bernardo was a well-known shoemaker in the first half of the 16th century. His son, Bernardo II, became a renowned organ builder. If you can make a shoe, why not try an organ?  In Brescia, there are records of three brothers. Two are violinists, and the third is a shoemaker. Again.
In 1568, over in England, whilst Queen Elizabeth was throwing Mary Queen of Scots in prison, Gasparo da Salo was lying on his tax return about his age, shaving off a few years.  At the age of 28, Or 26, as he preferred to see it. Things are looking up.  Gasparo Da Salo now has two sons, Francesco, three years old, and another little boy, three months old. His 12 year old sister, Ludovica, is also living with them. He has a busy workshop and a warehouse with a stock of instruments ready for sale. He is officially a master violin maker, and he still finds time to play the double bass for a bit of extra income.  But what would have been happening in this typical Brescian instrument maker's workshop?
Filippo Fasser. 
But I think that not only in Brescia, but in all these big workshops, because we have to think that this workshop is not like we made to imagine like the first 20th century in which the violin making, for example, is working on in its own workshop, not.  This workshop in the 15th century and 60 and 70 was a big workshop with many people that work as a chef and different people that work, in different level, of responsibility in the, in the workshop and in this big workshop, So till the middle of 18th century, they make different instrument, not only bow instrument, but gamba. But plucked instruments. So in the same workshop, make lutes, make gamba, make it is workshop that make, I think  I think also for me today is workshop that makes tools for make music for the musicians
In workshops today we tend to specialize in a certain family of instruments you have people who deal in instruments of the string quartet. You have different people making guitars. If you want a harp, you go to a harp maker, for example. But as Filippo Fasser explained, these workshops made all manner of instruments.
Musicians also would have been able to play a variety of different instruments to ply their trade.  So imagine the atmosphere of a workshop, in which harps, viola da gambas, or double basses could be in the process of being constructed simultaneously add to that a network of relationships with musicians, composers, monasteries, and wealthy patrons, it's not hard to imagine the birth of the violin family.
As Filippo Fasser said, it didn't just appear out of thin air, it was more a question of evolving, making an instrument that fit the demands of the Luthier's clients.
It was not an artist, or it was not I don't know, an event, or that today, I don't know, today I invented violin, no, no. It was the musicians that want good tools for make music so it's obvious that the artisan make viol it's not the, not the opposite, no. 
The place of the instrument maker was still as a tradesperson making a tool for musicians or wealthy patrons, although it is significant that Gasparo Da Salo, for instance, signed his work by inserting a label into the instrument with his name on.
Artists also started signing their work during the Renaissance. This takes these objects from being not just a luxury item, but a luxury item made by someone.  And that someone is important. At the same time, makers are collaborating with musicians, composers, and the nobility to meet their varying needs.
And the second thing that That I, I think, is important to, to know is that in this period, the, instrument was the family was the consort. Today we think we, yes, we think that the violin is 30, 35 and the viola is.  41 and the cello is 75. I don't know, but it's not. So when made the violin is different size and the viola is different size and the cello is different size because there's a few of different kinds of sound in there.
For example, it's late, but for example, the orchestra in France that I don't remember, there's 12 kinds of different type of instrument because maybe you want to. A range of sonorities so different that they wanted this kind of sound.
Today we have more or less standard sizes for violins, violas, and cellos, but as Filippo Fasser explains, at this time it was not so much the case.
Violins could come in a range of sizes and be tuned differently according to their size.  Today we might say that they are three quarter or half sized instruments, or the larger ones may have been reduced or cut down in size to meet modern day requirements. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was not so strange to have a large range of sizes.
So today if you see a string ensemble, you will see four or five different sized instruments. But walk into a 17th century noble court, and you could see up to 12 different sized violins, violas, or cellos. This was the consort.
Today we have decided that in this last century, we decided the violin is, is one, the viola is one, and the cell is one. Is the reason that why I think, for example, the Gofriller cello today is cut down.  There's not one that is original state because probably is too big.  For our idea today. 
To explain the abundance of violas made in this period, when we look at strings, we have the violin as the soprano instrument, and the cello as the bass. The double bass is an even lower bass. But in between the violin and the cello, there is a large gap that left room for two voices. The alto and the tenor. And so, two sized violas were made.  Today, very few tenor sized violas remain, as most have been cut down to a smaller size. But in the past, four-part ensembles would often have one violin, two violas, and a cello, or a five part ensemble would have three violas as the middle register instrument.
And so, it is not so strange that Gasparo made such a quantity of violas.  As Danny Yeadon was explaining in the first episode, a lot of music at the time was played in consort. So, in effect, you had lots of different sized violins, violas, cellos, and basses. Today, we have much more standardized instruments.
And this explains why many of these older instruments have been modified. Sometimes they are enlarged, sometimes reduced to fit the modern standards we have today.  There are pros and cons to this, of course.  Some people say that it's a shame to transform such an old instrument from its original state. Others would say that because they are modified, they are being played and maintained. Something that might not happen if it stayed in its original size.  A great topic to throw at a dinner party of violin makers. It's a bit like asking a vegan if a mushroom is a plant or an animal.  Think about it.
In Gasparo Da Salo’s workshop, so much is happening. He and his employees are working on many different types of instruments. He's making double basses for monasteries to accompany the organs, viola da gambas for wealthy families in Verona, Violas for religious processions in Venice. Violins and viols for the French. There are intricate inlays on the more costly pieces. The scrolls are often sculpted or decorated, depending on the client's wishes.  Music and the demand for instruments was great. By now there were 18 monasteries in Brescia alone, all centres of art and music.
John Dilworth.
Gaspar had his son and Giovanni Paolo Maggini working with him. I think the degree in which techniques are passed from father to son and workshops through the generations that stay unique to that family indicate to me that it was all done in house, you know, everything they did. was between the, within the little family circle. It's the Ole Bull Gaspar da Salo in Bergen. But I, I've been to see it a few times now, and I'm absolutely sure it's absolutely right.  And it's got this fantastically carved head. And the amazing thing is in Brescia itself, um, there is an organ loft, which was  supposedly, built by this chap Gasparo Da Salo was associated with.  And that whole organ loft in the church is festooned with these exact same characters.
So, I mean, I'm perfectly willing to concede that Gasparo Da Salo passed that on to his sculptor friend to carve.  But there's also the possibility that he was trained in the same way, and he could probably do all that anyway. There is this close link between him and Girolamo Virchi, and there's organ lofts, and there's various other  things attributed to Girolamo Virchi, and, and I've seen this organ loft, and it took my breath away, because the little putty, little cherubs carved around it and they were exactly the same, but there were quite possibly a, you know, a whole gang of people in Brescia who, that was their job. They went around carving these things into churches because like, again, like all Italian towns, there is almost literally a church on every street corner, and it was a huge amount of labour going into them all through the period.
I still get this image of these early makers. just in a little cottage with a, with a bench and a little opening shopfront where they could actually deal with customers. But it was very small scale, really, you know, it's not the idea, sort of grand idea that Victorian writers have of a huge workshop with dozens of apprentices and out workers and, you know, so on an industrial scale.
I mean, we know there's an amazing amount of Gasparo Da Salo’s tax records and things still available, and those indicate that he did, he did get quite rich and he had a country house and was selling barrels of olive oil and, and wine. You know, he, made enough to establish himself as a farmer with, you know, a country estate.
And in his tax returns, I think he's, he makes a point that most of his work actually is being sent to France, and that's where his income is from mostly. And there's a period where he's asking for a bit of relief on his taxes, because there's a war going on in France, and his, and business is, you know, not so good. But it's all coming from this very small workshop. Well, not a big, it's, it's not work on an industrial scale as, as we would see it now. And, and the, the essential thing also, the difference between Brescian work and Cremonese work is that Brescian work is clearly done very quickly.  It's very spontaneous. It's not, it's not immaculately finished. I think, you know, he was churning these things out. And the other difference is that he was making quite a broad range of things that you find. Double basses, which you never find in Cremona at all.  Until well into the 18th century. 
Gasparo de Salo is making viols, viola da braccios, citterns, violins, a whole variety of Renaissance instruments.
Viols and citterns are particularly beloved in the Venetian state, and so the orders flow in. Gasparo da Salo is sourcing quality materials and fulfilling commissions for important patrons as his reputation continues to grow. 
So, so yeah, there's this cliche of the struggling instrument maker working by the light of a candle just trying to make ends meet but Gasparo De Salo basically from the beginning he had quite a successful workshop and he had he had actually quite good connections he was good friends with a guy called Girolamo Virchi who was come for came from a family of organ builders  And organs are really quite important.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you've got to have one in the church too, right? Yeah. And so these famous Brescian organ builders and Girolamo Virchi becomes godfather to Gasparo Da Salo's children. There's also this, uh, these instruments that, that the style of carving from the organs. can be recognized in the style of carving on some of the scrolls of Gasparo De Salo's instruments.
So it could have been a style from Brescia. It could have been Girolamo Virchi, we don't know. Yeah. But in Gasparo De Salo's workshop, he wasn't just, he, he was making viols, viola da braccio, citterns.  Citterens are like a lira, a type of flat backed  lira. Violones, so a violone is a what we call a double bass today, but maybe with just three strings, right? And that seemed to have been something that he was quite well known for the the violonis, the basses and the violas Which were, the viols and the citterns, they were, a lot of music was written for them. When he was in his late 30s, in around 1578, he had, he had like so much work, he had an, an assistant.
He had a French assistant called Alessandro de Marcellis.  Alex from Marseille, Europe.  And his son, Francesco, would have been working with him. He would have been 16 around about now, but he probably would have started working with him when he was about 13.
Sure, but also would have been in the workshop growing up as a kid. You know, and so, you know, we fashion and dress scholars, we talk a lot about like haptic knowledge and as a craftsman or crafts person, you know about this as well. You get a feel in your hands for how something should be. And when you're a tiny tucker growing up in this environment, kids suck up so much from their parents, so much knowledge. So even though you might start working officially for your dad at age 13, you're playing with the strings when you're a little kid, you're playing with the offcuts, you're watching dad  sand down the wood, you're watching all of these processes and just like really absorbing everything, so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was very kind of family affair. Yeah. And often the workshops were integrated into the house. You'd have the workshop on one level and you would be living behind it or above it. Yeah.
 John Gagne,
I guess, you know, the, the simpler point is that there clearly  interested in sourcing the best wood, sort of no matter where it comes from, and maybe the, the local forests were not always the best.
Sort of like the best resource, you know, the decorative schemes of a lot of these Bressian instruments, which, you know, take advantage on one hand of like intaglio work, which is, you know, you where you scrape into the wood sort of a design or intarsia, which is the, you know, inlay. And then like also sculptural work, which is amazing. I mean, there's one famous  cittera in Vienna, which, which culminates at the end of the neck in a figurine of the suicide of Lucretia which is, you know, dramatic, very dramatic thing to put on an instrument. And that was probably ordered specifically by the Archduke of Tyrol, who, if you, you can travel from Brescia up to Innsbruck pretty quickly. And he had a huge palace full of, you know strange oddities, naturalia art armour, and also instruments and so clearly he had an eye, like the Archduke of Tyrol had an eye on the Brescian makers and probably asked for this unusual instrument. But even, I think, some of the ones that we've got in, in Sydney, right, are, they're beautiful, they're beautifully made with, you know, unusual designs that tend then to get flushed away by the 17th century.
In 1578, Gasparo De Salo is in his late 30s. His workshop is bursting with activity. He has so much work. In fact, he has needed to take on an assistant, Alessandro De Marseillis.  Francesco, his eldest son is 16 and has been working alongside his father for the last three years already. The French are good clients, always looking for Italian instruments. He's making more and more instruments from the violin family. Sometimes he feels a slight regret that so much of his best work leaves abroad and he will surely never see those pieces again.
There's a, a, a beautiful letters of gas in which he wrote,  I, I don't remember exactly, but he wrote that, he don't want that his own arts  goes like always in France.
At this point, he was selling a lot of his work to France,  uh, as one of his main clients. A lot of his work was being sent via an intermediary.  So that's really interesting because Marc Antonio Martineño de Villachara, who we were speaking about before the Bressian military general who wrote the collection of madrigals, he was very, very well connected with the French court as well. And so, you know, we can see this guy almost welcome from Brescia, rocking up. These connections are there. Everybody's traveling around in each other's pockets. And also because of the, the geography. For us today, for example, getting from Brescia to Villa Ciara, it’s,  you know, it's a short drive. But if it's there halfway between Brescia and Cremona, it's still 25 kilometers. You go there, you spend the night, you know, maybe two nights, and then you go back, you know. So you have sort of slower time to. build these deep relationships and these deep connections as well. And within that too comes the opportunities really again to study dress, to study fashions, to study what everybody else is wearing, and you see that too with some portraits from the era as well. So, you know, it might be a nobleman from Italy. But he'll be wearing clothes in the French style, which will sort of, you know, show that he's got diplomatic connections with France, or he's spent a lot of time at court. These kinds of things too.
It's not just the instruments that are getting exchanged as well, it's ideas around fashion, it's ideas around dress. One of the really interesting things that comes up time and time again throughout, you know, the Renaissance is this idea of the rough, you know, and you think of the Renaissance and you think of Elizabethan and you think of, you know, the big roughed collar, and that just traveled throughout Europe, even though it was kind of, you know, we do think of it as an Elizabethan thing, an English thing. It was incredibly popular all through Europe and particularly by the aristocracy because they just became larger and larger. They used a lot of fabric. A lot of the time you could only wear them once. It holds up your head and your neck, so you look kind of snooty, and you know, it's like the ultimate fashion prestige thing. If you're wearing a ruff, you can't really do much but wear a ruff and hold important conversations and sign important documents, you know?
Why, why could you only wear them once?
Because they were so delicate. You know, they might have been nothing but lace, they're a mixture of linen and lace, and, and they were just. It's so delicate and so large and they might often kind of just like crush or fall apart. Sometimes they'd, you know, sew jewels and precious metal onto them. And once you apply any kind of weight to these super fine fabrics, it can tear very, very easily.
And so you know, they started originally as an extension of a man's shirt, but you know, they grew larger and larger and of course transitioned into their own separate piece.  Wow. Yeah. Crazy. So yeah, the ruff travels through France with the instruments and with, you know, violas, ruffs. It's all, it's all on.
Cool. And I got this feeling that the Italian violinists were quite the thing. The French was sort of like, Oh look, we have Italian violinists because they're the best. And then the, the English who are often wanting to be kind of do whatever the French are doing are like, well, we too have Italian violinists.
Yeah, and that's really interesting too, and I think if you grow up with these instruments, I mean, as you know, as your listeners will know, you start learning the instrument when you're three or four. You grow up with it, right? And so if you're growing up in the environment where these exciting new instruments are going to be made, you're going to be testing them out and playing them from You know, knee high to a grasshopper.
And so unlike perhaps a French or an English musician who will be playing a much older style of instrument, you'll be able to speak to this more, you know, there might be differences between a Rebec and one of these violins that I don't know about, but perhaps technically they're quite different. If you grow up learning the Rebec, and then suddenly you're given one of these new fangled instruments. You're not really going to be as great as an Italian who's grown up fiddling around with this stuff, playing this stuff. You know, so these are the reputations. And what we're also seeing as well with this idea of them being the best, there's this wonderful portrait called Portrait of a Musician by a Cremonese Artist, and it's painted around the time of Gasparo De Salo. And we don't actually know if it's Gasparo Da Salo or Monteverde.  We don't know. It looks like it could be a young Monteverde, but there are definitely Gasparo da Salo instruments  hanging in the background there. We've got, that looks like the one that Ole Bull famously had with the ornate fingerboard and impression type.
 It's very hard to draw a violin. And sometimes you see like artists, you're like, you got it. And then sometimes you're like, Ooh, that's probably what you thought a violin would look like.
 It's like those memes you see where you know, it's like  man says to medieval artist, can you draw me a picture of horse? Yeah, yeah. I can draw a horse. You know what a horse looks like, don't you? You know how to draw a horse. Yeah, yeah, and then you see it and it's like this wonky half goat thing that's, ha ha ha. So yeah, we do, we sort of see, you know, like in this portrait, the bridge isn't positioned between the F holes, for example.
Right down the bottom. Right down the bottom. And the cut out is like really pronounced, but, you know. Yeah, you get the idea. You still get the idea in general that it's a violin, but what I think is really interesting about this. is this, this musician ain't no starving artist.  So, he is quite pale, and yeah, I guess you are, and he's also, his hands are quite fine and pale, suggesting like he spends a lot of time indoors on his craft, you know, on learning the instrument, you know, he doesn't have rough worker's hands.
But,  we can see here, he's got really fine lace cuffs and, and ruffley cuffs in the style of the Ruff, and, you know, that tells us you know, there's like this virtue, purity, possibly devotion, this pure devotion to music. Interestingly too, he's not wearing a Ruff. Because he can't actually play the violin in a rough, but he is wearing a collar that we see in other portraits of the time, and it's a big white big collar that's turned over and, you know, trimmed with a fine lace as well. And this is like a really sort of stark contrast against his all black ensemble, his black doublet. You know, this looks to be quite a fine wool.  And there are slashes on the arms and we see the lining underneath and that could well be a darker silk. His buttons are also darker. They might be sort of a a darker silk buttons to match the, um, match the trimming. Yeah, they all had lots and lots of buttons. The doublets, you know, obviously some of the super rich could have them all made out of gold or you'd have them, you know, sometimes made out of leather.
I think, you know, I'm not sure if these trimmings are silk or velvet underneath, but they're definitely matching that. And so he's, he's quite.  richly dressed, quite richly dressed as well and there's a high degree of realism in Brescian paintings that really does tell us what people wore and doublets were often made in wool and this could also be like, appropriate to his connections to the wool industry, to the sheep industry as well.
You know, so there are these things too. Black was so important at the time too, because it was unchangeable and permanent. And so  it kind of represented like this steadfastness, this single mindedness and firmness, that was associated with a masculine virtue and action and strength. And so we really see from this black clothing of this musician as well that he is completely, 100 percent dedicated to the life of being one of the best musicians, a manly, a manly musician, but also like a really dedicated musician, dedicated to the craft as well. Yeah. One of the finest in Europe, you know? 
Yeah. It's interesting. Like you, how, how much you can tell by what you're wearing, where your instrument was played. What you're playing, you're telling this whole story of your position in society.
And Gasparo da Salo's position in society was here, amongst the wealthy artisans of Lombardy. He would never be on the level of the nobility, but he would have interacted with them, or at least their agents. And he would have Orbited around the world of the wealthy, he would've known how to hold himself and to speak to them.
Musicians also at this time could be the subject of portraits and what's more, they had the money to commission one in the first place.
I would like to say a very big thank you to my guests, Maxime Bibeau, Dr. John Gane Filippo Fasser. John Dilworth, Dr. Emily Brayshaw. I would also like to thank the Australian Chamber Orchestra's cooperation.  I hope you'll join me for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles. And Maxime Bibeau, double bassist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, will be talking to us about the wonderful Gasparo da Salo instrument he plays on, and its story.
 
 

Ep 1. The master craftsman: Gasparo Da Salo and his violins.

Join me as I explore the life and craftsmanship of Gasparo da Salò, a master luthier whose contributions shaped the course of violin making history. From his early beginnings in Brescia, Italy, we uncover the secrets behind his distinctive style and celebrated instruments.
Discover the allure of Gasparo da Salò's double basses, renowned for their robust tone and striking aesthetics. In this episode I speak to Violin maker and expert John Dilworth as we delve into the techniques and innovations that set his instruments apart, captivating the ears and hearts of musicians across generations.
Through expert insights and captivating anecdotes, we unravel the legacy of Gasparo da Salò and the profound impact his creations have had on the violin-making tradition. Explore the stories behind his violins, viola and cellos in The Violin Chronicles Podcast.
 
Music you have heard in this episode is by
Bloom - Roo Walker, Szeptuchy part 2 - Maciej Sadowski , Brandenburg Concerto No 4 – Kevin Macleod, The penny drops – Ben McElroy, Frost waltz- Kevin Macleod, The waltz from beyond – Albert Behar, Wandering Knight – Giulio Fazio, Telemann Sonata in D maj for viola da gamba – Daniel Yeadon, Budapest – Christian Larssen, Unfamiliar faces – All good folks.
 
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding the famous. infamous or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  My name is Linda Lespe. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now.
In this episode we will be looking at one of the very first violin makers known to us. His name is Gasparo Da Salo. Gasparo Bertolotti is confusingly known as Da Salo because of the town he came from, called Salo.  He is perhaps best well known for his basses.
 I'm Maxime Bibaud, I'm the principal bass of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. I have the pleasure of playing a bass by Gasparo Da Salo for the last eight years.
Gasparo Da Salo, maker of the double bass that I get to play every day, was born in the mid 1500s, past early 1600s.  He is known to be the first maker of double basses, if not the first. Very close to being the first. We believe there are no more than ten of his instruments surviving these days.
And I’m one of the lucky ones that gets to play one of those. I should also say about Salo that, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but he was known to have created the modern violin. 
Ooh, it's a touchy subject.
Okay, I will stay out of it.
To answer some of my questions about Gasparo de Salo, I had a chat with John Dilworth, a violin maker and restorer in England. He is one of the people who literally wrote the book on Brescian violin makers called Lutai in Brescia. Here he is. 
Well, there's two people at the beginning of the violin, Gaspar de Salo and Andrea Amati in Cremona. And it's still very moot which of them made the first violin. Nobody really knows.  Gaspar, in all the old literature they all say, without any doubt, that  Gaspar invented the violin. But, you know, subsequent research finds that Amati and  Gaspar were  virtually, they were working at the same date, and the big problem is that, uh, in Brescia, the whole...All the violin makers in Brescia, they never put a date on their label, which is really annoying.  So we don't actually know when any of them were made, whereas 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. 
The jury is still out as to the birthplace of the violin.Was it Brescia? Or a small town 40 kilometers south, in Cremona? We don't quite know, and as John Dilworth explained, the fact that the Brescian makers didn't date their instruments also adds to the confusion, or creates it.  You see, most, but not all, violins have a label on the inside, glued to the back.  In Cremona, for example, Andrea Amati would have on his label made by Andrea Amati of Cremona in the year 1560, for example. But in Brescia, these labels would have “Gaspar Da Salo in Brescia” with no date. A lot of these labels were printed and the date filled in by hand. You see the printing press came at about more or less the same time as the violin, and I imagine that it would've been terribly modern of them. And a question of pride to have a printed label. So herein lies the conundrum. One group dated their instruments  and the others didn't.  But then again, why would you? Artists at that time didn't necessarily date their paintings.  And perhaps Gasparo de Salo identified more with the painters in his city than anyone else.  Who knows?
The year is 1585 in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. At the feet of the Alps lies the ancient city of Brescia.  The city is a hive of activity, full of wealthy merchants and tradesmen. The Brescians are renowned for their lavish dress made of costly fabrics. Their lively jousting tournaments, their production of superior weaponry, and their music. Not only their music, but their talented musicians, and most of all their instrument makers.  It was around about this time that a recent arrival was becoming more and more in demand amongst the instrument makers of Brescia, and they were the instruments of the violin family.  If you took a stroll down one of the busy streets near the city centre of Brescia and turned into the Contrada della Corsera, you would eventually happen upon the workshop of Gasparo Bertolotti, one of the most popular violin makers in Brescia.
When we talk about a Brescian violin or the Brescian style, what do we mean exactly?  Well, we are mainly talking about a period in the city of Brescia from the middle of the 1500s to the middle of the 1600s.  Where the instrument makers worked in a particular fashion and their instruments have characteristics that we would recognize as being unique to them and Brescian school.
I'm John Gagne. 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 century. Maybe the, the place to start is to talk about the city and sort of where it fits into the geography and the culture of Northern Italy of the, of the Renaissance.
And I suppose, so one of the things is, there's an old Roman road that runs from Venice to Milan. And on that Roman road, you have, You know, Padua and then, uh, Vicenza, Verona. Brescia Bergamo. So they're all like, that's the, a string of cities that over the course of the late Middle Ages, we're in this tug of war between Milan and Venice.
Brescia is one of those, it's one of the larger cities. And what makes it interesting in relationship to Venice is that it's an older city. So Brescia is a Roman city, and you can see it when you go to Brescia today. The old Roman forum ruins are right there in the city.  Venice, by contrast, was founded in 421. So last year was its was its 1600th birthday. Brescia is interesting because ultimately it was a Much smaller city than Venice, but it had greater antiquity. And so the people who lived in Brescia were very proud of their, you know, ancient heritage, but over the course of the 15th century, uh, starting in 1426, they fell under Venetian rule.
The other thing to sort of introduce here in terms of the 16th century is the, the so called Italian wars or the wars of Italy, which started in the 1490s when the French kings invaded and Brescia was sacked violently in 1512. By 1512, it was a city of about 50, 000 people, and about 30, 000 people died or fled after the sack.
So these Italian wars were a period in Italy's history that lasted from 1494-1520 Gasparo de Salo as he's known, was born sometime in 1540. So he was almost 20 when these wars finally ended.  It's quite hard to keep track of who was fighting who, but basically the French army arrived and everyone started fighting everyone else in a complex power struggle.  Involved were France,  Spain, Milan, Venice,  the Habsburgs, the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders, even England and the Ottoman Empire wanted a piece of the action. During these wars, even if your town or city was not the target of an invading army, having thousands of soldiers abiding by no particular law tramping through would have been just a bit terrifying.  Amidst the chaos of these years, Brescia found itself caught up in a spectacular conflict between the French and the Venetians. Brescia was a fantastically wealthy city. It was a center of the arts, a place of science, literature, and architecture. Famous for its musicians and music. It shared all the benefits of trade, wealth, and culture with Venice.  During the Italian Wars, the French had taken control of the city, and the King of France thought of it as his possession. But the Brescians identified more with the  Venetians, and so, when Venice recaptured the city, the Brescian people were happy to return to the Venetian state.  Only the French were not going to let go of such a rich prize so easily.  The French king, Louis XII, sent his fiery young cousin, Gaston de Froix, aka the Thunderbolt of Italy, to take back the city.
So in 1512, on a freezing February day, 25 years before our violin maker, Gasparo, was born, under torrential rain, Gaston and his soldiers attacked the city of Brescia, ordering his men to take off their shoes to be able to walk through the squelching mud.  This probably didn't help the soldier’s bloodthirsty mood.
The French went on to sack the city in what has been described as one of the most brutal sackings in the Italian wars.  And that's saying something because what was happening elsewhere was extremely violent. 4, 000 cartloads of goods were taken away worth three to four million ducats. That's about 600 million US dollars, according to one source. and many of the French soldiers after the sack just went home.  They had just hit their biggest payday.  This ended up creating a crisis for the French army as they lost so many soldiers, retiring basically.
The French eventually left Brescia, or what was left of it, to Venice.  But did they give up?  No. The memory was raw, but the people of this city threw themselves into the restoration of their city in a momentous way.  There were building projects, monasteries were constructed, six new churches arose, a modern hospital, houses were restored, and businesses recommenced. Brescia was still a luxury brand Venis wanted in its collection.
What? you are asking yourself, do these Italian wars have to do with violins? Well, the ransacking and destruction of the city during Gasparo's parents’ generation created a sort of post traumatic growth in the city during Da Salo's lifetime. And this is when the violin emerges. It's the renaissance and never more so than in the city that had to rebuild itself physically and creatively. And perhaps this created the right mindset for the violin or the viola to be embraced.
John Gagny. So you can think of the beginning of the 16th century, starting with a crisis, which was where all the houses of elites were ransacked, where people had to escape the city. And it took basically the rest of the century to recover from that experience at the beginning of the 16th century. So by the time we get to the sort of violin makers of the 1530s through, you know, 1590s, that's part of the story of cultural recovery is, you know, people coming back into the city, having reasons to spend money and, you know, build up artisanal culture again.
And would they have had a memory of the sack?
 Yes. 
So,  Gasparo, for example, would his parents have,...
Lived through it?, probably. But actually, I mean, to give you an example there is a mathematician named Niccolo Tartaglia. Who wrote a book of, you know, math book basically in the 1550s, and he writes about his experience as a young boy where he was stabbed in the jaw by a soldier. And the reason his last name is Tartaglia is because that's the Italian word for stuttering. Basically, his, mouth was so disrupted and, you know, injured. So yes, I mean, they're, so basically he's living in the 1550s around the time when Gaspar was a 10 year old. So there is, you know, that generation takes a long time to die out. It would be, you know, ever present. The, the, the question I have about Gaspar in terms of this Brescian political history is, you know, Salo, where he's from, is up the west flank of Lake Garda you know, 30, 40 kilometers away. So, unless you were in the city, which the walled city during the sack, as a boy, he probably would have, and his family might have been able to escape the worst of it.
 
Yeah. . But I imagine that people his parents age, they'd be like, oh.  The French...
I mean, there was evidence of this that, you know, took, the rest of the century to overcome. And that's in a way, part of why the 16th century is a century of huge, civic development in terms of architecture, because they're really trying, they have the opportunity, not desired, but sort of forced upon them to rebuild some of the city. And so, that's part of, you know, there are a lot of new structures, churches that go up in the 16th century and in relation to, you know, music and instrumentalists, that is the hub of. Artisanal work for music makers and decorative arts is churches, right? So the fact that there's a chance to rebuild some churches and, you know, refresh them, uh, I think is part of the story of the growth of the artisanal sort of class in the 16th century.
So we find ourselves with these early violin makers in a city rebuilding itself, literally. There's new infrastructure going up. The economy is back in swing by the time De Salo arrives in Brescia and the wealthy citizens are back commissioning art and music, and most importantly for our story, buying instruments.
I'm now talking to Filippo Fassa, a contemporary violin maker in Brescia, who is also a coauthor of the book Lutai in Brescia, a reference book on Brescian instruments.
 I'm Filippo Fassa, I'm violin maker in Brescia. I was born in Salò, like Gaspar Oda.
 So are you  Filippo da Salò? 
Exactly.  Yes, but I am just, uh, was born in Salò, after I live in Brescia.
The thing you have to remember here is that Filippo is Italian and he speaks with his hands. This, sadly, is lost in the audio medium, so you will just have to imagine them,  the hands… remember. 
Yes, first I think that it's important to know that Italy in this period, in this age, was,...  It's made up of different countries, different states. The Republic of Venice, that's the Vatican, that's the  Bourbon in the  south, that's the little Florence, and Bologna, and Ferrara, and Pisa,  and Genoa, and Milan.  Many, many, many, many different state. And in this age, I don't know, from, uh, 15 to  the end of 18 is, is a  really particularly player in Italy. You know the Renaissance is the all arts develop  really  fast and, the richer people, particularly the, also the Pope, but not only, the king, uh, the different kingdom, wanted to, have the better artist, arts, generally. Close to the, develop of the music, is  obviously that many artisans that make the instrument for, is the reason, I think, why in different part of Italy start more or less together this, uh, this practice. 
So we have competing city states in Renaissance Italy all trying to outdo each other in art and music. Could this be the reason the violin appeared on the scene in Brescia and other areas at around the same time?  Remember, after the sack of the city, it was almost as though they had to start from zero again. And perhaps this was the perfect environment for a new instrument to make its mark.
The year 1540 was the year that King Henry VIII of England both married and soon after divorced Anne of Cleves, who managed not only to keep her head intact, but also outlived all of Henry's other wives. Bravo!  It was also the year Gasparo Bertolotti was born, in a northern town in Italy, and grew up in the small lakeside town of Salo.
This is where we get the name Gasparo da Salo from. It literally means from Salo.
Gasparo da Salo was born in this village that's called Salo. Really not in Salo, the Salo  called Pulpenazza.
Salo, on the shores of the magnificent and ancient Lake Garda, is the largest lake in Italy and home to the Benacosaurus. A monster in the lake, and close rival, or maybe a cousin, to the Loch Ness Monster.  The area of the lake the Bertolatti's came from was well known for its fine musicians and musical ensembles.
Gasparro and his family lived on the Contrada of Villanorum, or Violin Street.  He was raised in a musical family. His grandfather was a musician and a flock holder. Some think he produced gut strings for instruments from his livestock.  His father, Francesco, also played music. He was registered in tax records as being a musician and painter, although he was mainly a musician.
In this busy household with six boys and two girls, Gasparo would have learnt music from his father and perhaps other family members.  His uncle was also an accomplished musician, and his cousin became a virtuoso player on the violin and trombone.  This cousin would go on to work in the nearby courts of Ferrara, the Esté Court.
In Mantua, for the Gonzaga family, and eventually in Rome for the Pope. 
Dr. Emily Brayshaw is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney's School of Design.  She will be explaining the importance of fashion and dress that would have greatly impacted the world and lives of people in Renaissance Italy during de Salo's lifetime.
I do love Brescia, I love that they're all about the lower half of the string family, like violas, double basses. Bring it.
And like Brescia's a really great place to get yourself established because it's sort of like catered on this frontier Milanese States It's also bigger than Verona. It's bigger than Vincenza.  It's bigger than Bergamo. It's richest. It's the most strategically located of these Venetian cities. So there's a lot of opportunity there for him and also an opportunities for patronage as well.
So I don't know if de Salo got that, but you've got influences of feudal nobility and feudal privilege on the city as well. So, you know, some of these sort of feudal guys, these nobilities had a lot of their own court musicians. So one of the leading guys, guys, I sound like a jerk. One of the leading,Uh, nobility Noble Families was the Martino family and Mark Antonio Martino de  Vira collected Madrigals so that he collected and published a volume of Madrigals in 1588.
A magical, is a secular vocal music composition.  In simpler terms, it's the Backstreet Boys of the Renaissance, without the music.
And he was a military general from Russia, but he was also a nobleman and a composer himself. He was incredibly well connected in the courts of Europe and super richly dressed. He would have had like a nosebleed, lavish wardrobe because diplomatic relations.  were very much also about how well you dress too. So if you rocked up to a court poorly dressed, that really besmirched your honour, it besmirched the honour of the nobility of the court as well that you were trying to build contacts with. So, you know, he would have been really set to dress. Right. So he was like representing Brescia. .. And Venice as well, like in the state of Venice to like represent, you know, he actually lived in Villa Ciara, which is halfway between Brescia and Cremona.
And He had his own court composer too. So,  you know, these people are incredibly, not just sort of military, sporting, but they're also, you know, really at the forefront of the artistic endeavours of the day, of culture, of music making, and It's really quite an exciting life that they led.
 And when you say he collected madrigals, did he write them or he heard them and he sort of collated them into a...
So this collection is fascinating because what it sort of did as well, uh, aristocratic life of the era was marked like by this spirit of competition. So there were lots of duels and jousts and this was sort of central to this expression of masculine virtue. Right? Which we can talk about a bit later when we're talking about the colour black, because that's a big reflection of it as well.
But what he was doing as well, sometimes musicians would challenge each other to duels as well, and they would compose upon the same melody and perform in front of a panel of judges, right? So what he did though, like, this is fascinating because he composed a poem and set it to music, and then he sent that around to 17 different composers, like really notable composers around Italy, inviting them to set this poem to the, like, write their own music for this text.
And this is his collection. And it's really quite important because it shows, you know, the different regional styles in the late Renaissance around Italy of these key composers. And it also doesn't surprise me, therefore, that guys like De Salo benefiting and really honing their art in this region and making the very Finest instruments that they can.
I can imagine In the workshop, them going, oh, did you hear about, you know, what was his name?
Uh, Mark Antonio Martignago.. Like, have you heard about Martino's latest poem? His collection of.  It's like really early rap.
 I don't know about early rap, but what's really interesting if we start sort of thinking about what these guys were wearing as well is, a lot of it was really about,  creating their own identities and curating  their own identities. So it's like...  Early, I guess, social influences, early social media, you know, curating your identities and we see this in the portraits of what they're wearing as well. So, you know, a lot of these portraits show them almost, like, it does give us a really great idea of, you know,  what they wore, sometimes it's aspirational, sometimes like they pose to,  you know, the poses are all like significance and it shows what they want to be, who they want to be. They'll reflect things like their occupation, or their cultural station, their social station.
 We see DeSalo is working in an environment in which noble patrons really wanted to impress and say something with their wealth. How they dressed, the houses they lived in, and the ability to employ musicians and supply their instruments was definitely a part of this story.
And this is where our instrument maker enters the scene.  His profession places him between worlds, much like the musicians of the day whom he would have spent a lot of time with.
John Gagne, again, speaking about what it would have been like to be a musician at this time and the Gonzaga Court.
There is a whiff of disreputability associated with the theatre, but of course musicians also work in churches and  Music also, you know, there are theorists of music who are becoming quite renowned and respected. Um, you know, performers who are taking on a, a life, you know, that brings them in shoulder to shoulder with princes and that thing. So I probably, I imagine there's, you know, depends on who you are, right? Like if you're a rough and tumble commedia dell'arte troupe, who's traveling, you know, City to city, you're not going to be necessarily invited into great company. But if you're one of these, theorists, like there's a, there's a famous Brescian theorist from the early 16th century named, Lanfranco, Giovanni Lanfranco, who writes this book called scintillii di Musica or sparkles of music. And that's, you know, that's complex musical theory, mathematics,, ideas about, you know, the movement of the spheres. I mean, like that guy, I imagine he's probably at the level of. associating with professors. And so, you know, I mean, like there's.
 If I picked up a book called the sparkles of music, I would not expect  such a heavy topic.
 Exactly. I can show it to you. It's beautifully illustrated too. It's got all kinds of, you know, diagrams. And so that, I guess the, one of the interesting things is how aware. contemporaries were of the quality of Brescia, like they were sought out for those qualities. The two that I was, you know, trying to remember to talk about today were, you know, the Archduke of Tyrol who has more than one,, Brescian instrument and they're like extravagant instruments. And then the other place where it seems there was a lot of traffic in terms of the specific desire for Brescian instruments was Mantua, where the Gonzaga court was like very musically advanced in the 15th century already and, you know, sought out all kinds of the best musicians and makers, the Gonzaga collection seemed to have quite a few Brescian instruments as well.
So there, I think, you know, it shows you about, let's say, the connoisseurly eye of some of the princely families in the greater region who, you know, developed a love for these instruments and really wanted to put them into their, into their collection.  Isabella d'Este marries into the Gonzaga family in the 1480s, you know, she's probably one of the best known collectors of the Renaissance, intensely interested in music. You know, she is one of those people who, she was also courting Leonardo da Vinci, trying to get him to do all kinds of work for her, and does the same with. almost all aspects of her life, Um, clothing, perfumes, musicians, singers, poets. She knows exactly who she wants, and she targets them by sending out her guys, like her agents, to harass them basically into, you know, doing whatever she wants with, you know, greater or lesser success. But it makes perfect sense that she would be quick to sort of like, get the aroma of the quality of Brescian instruments in certain makers, even before this like explosion of, of their prominence, she dies in  1539. So, I mean, this is, this is even before this sort of take-off of the, uh, of the real sort of like  the known masters.
She sounds like a real, an influencer.
Absolutely, she totally was.
An IT girl.
 Isabella's husband, Francesco Gonzaga, was, you know, a soldier collector. So he's sort of, you know, a man of the, army and a man of peace and the arts.  He did, in the last 10 years of his life, he died in 1519. Suffer from terribly from syphilis. So he was out and about, let's say, but there's a new book by, a great scholar, at Monash, Carolyn James, who spent 30 years working on Isabella d'Este and she's, her book is about their partnership basically as rulers, collectors, uh, patrons, that thing. And how Francesco and Isabella worked together. To sort of, you know, both rule a state and produce great art.
I was going to say the Brangelina of the Renaissance, but that didn't end so well. But you know, did, were they happy? 
I think they were. I mean, that's part of what, this book is tracing is the, you know, they had a lot of respect for each other.
Um, and the great thing that Carolyn has discovered is the way that Isabella could dish out just as much as Francesco could, could give, you know, that sort of, he would sometimes scold her for things and she would say, look, We agreed I was going to do X. And so I did X and you can't get angry, so, I mean, I think it did, it did turn out well.
And so they drifted apart. Let's say they started living apart, but frankly, that happens often with, power couples is that they have jobs they've got to do and they don't, they can't always work together.
They  had their own castles on  twin castles.
The Gonzaga court where Gasparo's cousin worked had a long history of patronizing the arts. And when historians talk about the importance of Brescia in the history of instrument making, they will often refer to Isabella d'Este, who in 1495 ordered a set of vials from an unknown luthier in Brescia.  If Isabella had ordered them from here, believe me it must have meant that they were the best.  You see, Isabella came from the important house of Este, in Ferrara. Growing up, she was given an excellent education, and her little sister, though she loved her dearly, was her main source of competition.  They took sibling rivalry to the next level.  At the age of ten, the Duke of Milan offered for her hand in marriage, but she was already promised to the Marquise of Mantua…You had to be fast with these things.  But no problem. Isabella's little sister, Beatrice, was free, so he accepted her. A wealthy, influential d'Este bride was still a wealthy, influential d'Este bride.  This meant that her youngest sister would be a Duchess, and she was just a Marquise. One point to Beatrice.
The two sisters were both intelligent, trendsetters, and very wealthy women of their day.  Leaders in fashion, patrons of the art, and in Isabella's case, an astute diplomat.  If you can remember the Italian wars we were talking about previously, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he was that bright spark who invited the French to invade Naples, and then all hell broke loose.
Well, that was Beatrice's husband. Isabella's husband, on the other hand, Francesco, was captain general of the Venetian armies.  So, while he was off fighting whoever was attacking them at the time, Isabella was literally holding the fort back home, probably grinding her teeth wondering what her genius brother in law would do next.
Despite the whole wars, invasions, and sacking of cities thing, the sisters still managed to compete in their own way.  Beatrice was rubbing it in that she had two healthy sons, whilst Isabella was finding it hard to fall pregnant. When she did, she had girls.  Well, Isabella is also an accomplished musician, so when she adds to her collection of beautiful Renaissance objects, she has a set of vials made in Brescia. So you can imagine these were the best money could buy.
So in the violin making histories of Brescia, this story will always come up of, Isabelle d'Este ordering,  uh, a set of vials from, Brescia  because she was, uh, well known for, for ordering the best of everything. It's sort of, it’s, it put into prominence the importance of  Brescian, uh, instrument making. And, I love this, the stories about her and her sister, how they, they grow up and they're very, uh, competitive. And there's, there's this whole exchange of letters between them and it was about a family funeral and really what they were talking about was one sister was going, so I'm actually going to be wearing this dress. And I've got this painter to paint a picture of me, and I'm sending it to you, just so you know what I'm wearing, and you don't wear the same thing.
And this was actually incredibly important. Emily Brayshaw. Because, you know, there's a lot been written and researched about the role of dress and fashion at funerals, particularly in Florence around the time. But again, these customs extend because.  Uh, you know, to show, it's sometimes to show disrespect, to show up in the same clothes.
It's all very carefully curated, like so maybe some of the lead mourners might wear the very finest clothes, and then the next group of mourners might wear sort of like the next, next rank down and things like that. So it's a social occasion, but also, you know, if you're caught wearing the wrong thing, and this applies to men and women as well, you get ridiculed, you get laughed at.
It's like, nah, like you just, it's a big thing. So even though there is that sort of sibling rivalries, if you will, it makes absolute sense and that, you know, they wouldn't want to be wearing the same thing, they'd be curating their outfits, but, uh, you know, I can imagine it'd also be sort of within the context of what's appropriate to wear to a funeral as well.  What's interesting too is like collecting this set of instruments, I read that apparently women didn't play these stringed instruments so much at this time. It was considered more suitable for the ladies to play sort of keyboard instruments. So, it would be fascinating to know if she wanted them for her court, if she wanted them for, you know, to have a bash herself, if she was quite an accomplished player, Um, because also, you know, a lot of very, very wealthy women of the era, also had like the agency to be able to sort of buck the trend as well. You know, it's like, well, you know, I want to play the viola. I don't care if I'm a woman. I'm rich. I've got nothing else to do. I'm going to play the viola. You know,
I think she did play the lute,  which was a ladies.
A lady's instrument, but I get the feeling the violin definitely wasn't a lady's instrument. It did come a lot later.  Hmm.
So far we have looked at the environment in which our violin maker lived, the history of the city, the different ways people would display their wealth, and what they wanted to portray to people through how they spent their money. It is the Renaissance and art is a big thing, but what are people listening to?
Although we call Gasparo de Salo a violin maker, he did in fact make many different types of instruments. Gambas and viols were extremely popular and would have encompassed a large part of his production.  Music made on these instruments would have filled noble houses and courts of the day.
Here I'm speaking to Danny Yeadon about these instruments.
So my name's Danny Yeadon, and I play the cello and the viola da gamba, and I have a full time post at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as a lecturer in cello and chamber music and historical performance.  The main transition that happened in terms of compositional technique, from Renaissance into the Baroque, uh, was, uh, one from polyphony, which was the predominant technique of the Renaissance, where all the people involved, get a chance to, to sing or play the, key melodies.
So the, the transition was from that to, uh, what's, called monody or sonata writing, where one instrument is the predominant instrument for the melody.  Monteverdi is a good example, actually, because he wrote, he left us all these wonderful madrigals in which the part writing is equal, pretty equal, but he started to explore more soloistic, if you like, or idiomatic writing for the voice in pieces like Vespers  and, his operas like Orfeo.
So my most familiar context for the console is vile console playing, because I play the the viol, which of course is the family of instruments that predates the violin family by a couple of hundred years.  And originally comes from the Vihuela, which is the medieval equivalent of the vial.  A vial consort consists of usually one or two treble viols, one or two tenor viols, and one or two bass viols. Um, and they're all instruments that are played.  They rest on the lap and they're played with an underarm bowing technique. A lot of it does, of course, originate in dance music. Galliards and, and jigs, yes.
 Is that easy to do on the viol or is it easier on a modern instrument? The sort of the baroque, more sustained note for a very long time? Is that, as you're playing, do you find, , as you're playing different types of music, that it's easier?  on your period instrument or is it easier on a modern instrument to play different types of music?
What's interesting is that, the early instruments, the viol and the, and the cello when it's set up as a baroque cello  in conjunction, so with, with gut strings and then in conjunction with a baroque bow which is of course tapered, , it's easier to emulate speech and to get nuancing into the sounds with a tapered bow than it is with a modern bow. Because a modern bow is with the heavier tip, and likewise with a viol, a bass viol, and, uh, and a viol bow, which is also long and tapered. It's actually easier with uh, the modern setup to play long legato phrases than it is with historical instruments.  So it's as if the historical instruments were designed for lots of rhetorical nuancing and ease of articulation. And with a, with a modern bow, with its heavier tip, it's easier to play these longer sustained notes and phrases. To some extent, the materials inform us.  how to play the music, which is, that's fascinating in its own right.
  So the French, there was a certain amount of consort writing in France, but the French really championed the bass viol or the viol de gamba, as they called it. And, uh, there were a couple of composers that really particularly championed the instrument and wrote.  Much more soloistic music for it in the 17th century., so that was Marin Marais, and also Antoine de Forqueray  I think he's called. Forqueray  It's fun to pronounce, isn't it? There was Foucault, the scientist, wasn't there?
In England it was played both in courts and in relatively wealthy households.  I'm pretty sure also in the courts of northern Italy, and I imagine the same, the same was the case in France and Germany. France and Germany had multiple composers that championed the viole family and, wrote legato lines for the instruments within larger works.
So Bach, for example, included it in some of the most poignant arias in the passions. 
And would, the Nobles play as well, or is that seen as the, what was sort of the, the.  role or reputation of a, a musician.
So there were, there were nobles who, who played and engaged musicians in their courts.
So, and quite a lot of the nobility were into playing these instruments themselves, and the wealthier ones employed, they had multiple musicians in their employ. There were probably both, uh, musicians playing viol family, but also the, the violin and actually the flute was a really, really popular.
The baroque flute was a very popular instrument with male nobility.  There are, I've seen in several museums in Europe, walking sticks that doubled up as baroque flutes.
 You never know when you need to, like, whip that out.
Exactly, just play a tune.  Start piping up. To appease the enemy.
Okay, and then do you think that, all this music was then just picked up by the, the violin family afterwards? Is that what we've done? Have we, is there a lot of music that we think, think of as, you know, music for the violin family today? That was actually written for the, 
Yes, I imagine that at the time in the, in the, 17th and 18th centuries, uh, music from earlier from the Renaissance period was being played by people on instruments from the violin family. But at the same time, the sonata was being cultivated as a compositional form. And, uh, in the Baroque period the music for the members of the viol family really, shone a light on, it was idiomatic, so it was really was specifically for those instruments.
Right, so the, the sonata is like in the Baroque period and you're saying that that's where we see more of the violins coming into more prominent role in the Baroque?
Yes, so through the 17th century and then into the 18th century.  So there are early sonatas for the Baroque violin specifically, quite a lot of those are from Italian composers like Castello. And so ornamentation is a whole thing, that whole feature of music throughout the whole period. So a lot of the composers from the Renaissance period wrote out ornaments in addition to expecting players to do their own ornamentation.
Whereas As we move into the Baroque period, there's a sense that, uh, composers expected the players to, to do more of their own improvisation. So we have, examples, for example, Corelli's Violin Sonatas. Corelli has, uh, it's a wonderful, the Opus 5 Sonatas, the original manuscripts and engravings show simple version of the violin part above the basso continuo, and then above that, Corelli writes out his own ornamented version. Right. Of the simpler version of the melody. So that really gives us an idea of, of what composers expected musicians to do spontaneously.
I get the feeling that it was very, the music was very, open to interpretation and the musicians themselves could put, could add their personality to  the works.
Yes. A lot more so than today. Yes.That's a Yes. That's definitely, definitely the case in my opinion. Yes, I think we've become very allied to the score these days, scores from through the ages, but we do know from pedagogical writings and treatises that musicians were expected to, to very much to have their own input.
Increasingly, you're seeing brave musicians who are writing their own  cadenzas from music of any period., like they're saying, this is your improvisation.
 Okay.  And we've become quite, like, today, if you just went off and started mucking around with the adding or augmentation to a very well-known piece, it might be a bit shocking.
Yes.  Although, although there is a return to that practice. Yes, lots and lots of brave performers are doing that more and more.
And do we get the word concert from the consort?
 Quite possibly, yes.  Yes. I'm not 100 percent sure, but... 
I'm going to a consort. And  it turns into I'm going to a concert. 
Concert and concerto, of course.
So the Brandenburg Concertos are a very good example because  There are many different instruments involved from one concerto to the next. It's as if Bach wanted to give a real solo highlighting spot to instruments in turn. And that's where you needed a lot, a quite powerful instrument.
  Yes, yes. And he wrote for violin.
He did, yes, yes. Much more for the violin family than for the, for the viol family. In the, in Brandenburg six, that scored for two violas da gamba Okay And two violas from the violin family, so that's a really, really beautiful texture. Gives us an idea that Bach was just as fascinated by the viol family as the violin family, even though the violin family was the, was becoming by far the dominant family of instruments.
It's a bit like chicken and egg, isn't it? Which came first? Did they, did they produce those amazing, powerful instruments  and that  inspired writing or all  were they exploring?  Writing styles that led to even more powerful instruments.
I could imagine a musician going, “Look,  I've got this Bach piece.  I want people to hear me more. I don't, I feel like I'm getting drowned out by the others.  I'm special. Come on”.  Is it harder to get a very loud sound from,  It's not about power, is it, the gambas? 
No, no, definitely in terms of decibel level. It's much softer than the cello,  but it's fascinating because it does have quite,  there's something penetrating about the sounds. For example, Brandenburg Six is played in large concert halls, and the viola da Gamba players in that piece really, really have to  play at maximum volume a lot of the time in order to be  heard. But it does work, it is possible.  You need so many facets on there, that, as you say, these things that tie in. I'm trying think how like, the, it sort of was overtaken by the violin family.
Um, and  I think also one of the things was it was easier to take a violin outside, it was, it's probably a bit more fragile to go walking around out in the damp Venetian air with a with a viol. Yes. With a viaol, yes.  And uh, also in terms of outdoors, of course, violins transportable. You can walk and play the violin outdoors with a viol as it sits in the lap.
It's not so, not such a portable instrument.
As we heard, vials were a very important instrument in 16th century Italy, and Gasparo's workshop did indeed make many instruments from the viol family. But as we will see during De Salo's lifetime, the viols and viola da gambas will have to start seriously competing with the violin family.  We do see from time-to-time cellos and violas that were once viols and gambas that have been at some point in their history transformed to feed the demand for more modern instruments, and yet these instruments can still hold their own today as you have just been listening to the enchanting Teleman Sonata in D Major, played by Daniel Yeadon on his viol.  So here we find Gasparo Da Salo in Brescia, a city controlled by the very powerful and fashionable Venetian state.
They've had to rebuild themselves and move on from the brutal sacking a generation earlier and reestablish themselves.  Brescia had, before the wars been known for its fine artisans and now in the mid-1560s the city is back on its feet and embracing the renaissance ideals with a boom in building and culture.
We have seen how important fashion and dress was and the ability to have musicians or play music oneself was also part of the fashionable world, and who better to supply you with that beautiful instrument but Brescia's best instrument maker, Gasparo de Salo.
I hope you have enjoyed this first episode of the Violin Chronicles about Gasparo de Salo.  I wanted to convey an idea of the world in which he operated, that in some sense is not so different to the one we live in today.  In the next episode, I will be looking into this instrument maker's life and his own family dramas.
It's a story of war, plague, musical innovation, love, and loss.  All the big hard-hitting themes.  But before I go, I would like to thank all of my lovely guests. Maxime Bibaud, Dr. John Gagne, John Dilworth, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Filippo Fasser, and Danny Yeadon. I would also like to thank the Australian Chamber Orchestra for their help and cooperation, and to you, the audience, for listening.
In part two, we'll see what happens to Gasparo when he moves to Brescia and sets up his workshop. Gasparo da Salo is starting to look a bit like a Renaissance Mrs. Bennet, trying to find spouses for an array of family members, and at the same time, run a successful business.  I'm Linda Lespets, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode of The Violin Chronicles.