A new article on early violin making:
Wim RAYMAEKERS, “True Violins” and “Artistic License”:
Two Prejudices that hinder the Study of Early Violin Morphology. (Louvain, 2022)
https://www.academia.edu/74199516/True_violins_and_artistic_license
This is a scholarly article, but at the same time a plea for an urgent rewrite of the early history of the violin, this time unhampered by prejudice and entrenched ideas. To me, this is symbolic of the world we are now fighting for: a world where truth is sought in freedom, especially when it is threatened by arguments of authority and ingrained norms.
It is high time to correct the misconceptions about violin making before 1650. The idea that this craft meant little or nothing outside of Brescia and Cremona must urgently be dispelled. The mistrust in the documentary value of art works is widespread among makers and scholars, who still believe extant instruments are more reliable sources when it comes to studying the early history of violin making. The second bias is rooted in the strong belief in Cremonese violin-making principles as the sole basis for determining whether an instrument is a decent violin or even whether it can be called a “violin”. The influence of Cremonese violin making before 1650 is overestimated. From representations in art and from archival texts it appears that in various centers in Europe, professional violin makers supplied the local markets with instruments, in a style and with techniques that were once common and are now gradually being rediscovered. The early history of violin making needs to be rewritten, and the new insights need to be popularized, answering a number of questions.
Translated from Dutch
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Stylistic Features of the Instruments of the Violin Family in Seventeenth Century Dutch Paintings Whatever the meaning, the hidden symbolic messages or the iconographic theme of representations from the Golden Age may be, the elements with which they are composed are often so realistic that they can be studied in detail. This certainly applies to the illustrations of the instruments of the violin family. In addition to the fact that they play a remarkable role in the iconography of that time, they offer, due to their large number and their quality as a document, the possibility to study the visual characteristics of the seventeenth century violin in the Netherlands. They allow us to follow their evolution starting as early as 1620, despite the fact that no extant organological material concerning this material has come to us from well past the middle of the century. This unclarified period between about 1620 and 1660/1670 appears to be a pivotal era, because it is precisely then that the transition from "archaic" to "modern" stylistic features can be observed in Dutch iconography. Report on the Reconstruction of a 17th Century Dutch Archaic Type of Violin by Wim Raymaekers © 1997
While I was extensively studying the forgotten lutherie style represented in many Dutch paintings from the era between 1620 and 1640, the plan arose to make a reconstruction, not only on paper but also for real. It was of course impossible to make an exact copy or anything like it, simply because not one example of this type remains. For the time being I simply conceived a violin that contained a number of stylistic and technical features of this "new archaic" type of instrument. I didn't choose the most frequent hallmarks, but the most characteristic ones. The result is now part of the permanent exhibition in the "Museum Vleeshuis" in Antwerp to illustrate the kind of violins used by minstrels in the16th and 17th century cities of the Low Countries. |