CO-REF-01 · Violin
Violin - Nicolò Amati, 1669
1669 · Nicolò Amati · United States (present holding)
Cited from a public museum record so that a real example stands beside the invented ones. Nobody has been approached and nothing has been proposed.
Research interest
I have been writing about a violin I can actually touch, and I should be honest that the best example of my own argument is one I will never touch at all.
Here is an instrument whose name and institutional identity have been continuous for over three centuries. It was modernised in the nineteenth century, as almost everything was. Then, in 1977, somebody deliberately moved it partway back: a shorter fingerboard, gut strings, an approach toward a state it had left more than a hundred years earlier.
So there have been at least three configurations, and the third is a considered reconstruction of the first. If you asked what this violin's physical state was in 1700, the honest answer would involve a date, a list of interventions, and an admission that the 1977 refit is a hypothesis about the past made in wood and gut rather than in words. That is a more sophisticated piece of historical reasoning than anything on this website.
Repair lineage
Dated where a date exists. Where the evidence is structural rather than documentary, the entry says so: an inference and a record are different kinds of fact and are not printed as though they were the same.
Mid-nineteenth century
Modernised, in the manner of most surviving instruments of its age, and given painted decoration around the same period.
Evidence - Museum record.
1977
Refitted with a shorter fingerboard and gut strings, to approach an earlier configuration.
Evidence - Museum record.
Documentation
- Museum object record
- Public. Object images are open access; modern performance audio on the same page is not, and we link rather than reuse it.