The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Ep 12. Nicolo Amati, The calm before the storm. Lutherie and beyond!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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