Michael Darnton is a violin maker, restorer, writer and teacher who lives in Chicago...
A friend pulled these out of an old violin, and knowing I was interested in this kind of stuff, sent them to me. They’re violin pegs that probably predate 1800, and are maybe as old as 1750. (Notice that one peg doesn’t match–a later replacement, probably.) Eric Meyer, a great fittings maker on the west coast, tells me that they’re probably French, and, based on the number of them that he’s seen (that is: many), they were probably being commercially produced and distributed.
This f-hole is on a Brothers Amati cello dated around 1615. It’s one of the most beautiful I’ve seen and is perfect in execution. I’ve used it on a cello, and reduced it to fit on a violin, and a violino piccolo. In each case, when it’s the right size, it superimposes over the original model’s 4/4 and piccolo f-holes precisely, with no changes. That’s something would not have thought would happen; usually parts between violin family instruments don’t transfer well with a simple percentage change.
People who aren’t intimate with violins don’t have to consider all of the things a maker has to. There are all sorts of details on a violin that have to be done in some intentional way. Not necessarily one way… I don’t mean that. I mean that when you have to do them, you find yourself wondering exactly which choice of the many you should make.
The cut off ends of the ribs at the corners are an example. There’s a definite thickness there; the c-bout rib feathers off to nothing on the inside of the joint (which is a miter, like on the corner of a picture frame), but the outer rib overlaps that and has about 1mm of thickness. You can cut the ends off to mimic the tip of the corner of the top and back (that’s the way that many people find natural, that’s often taught in violin making schools). Some makers in the past trimmed down the outer rib to form a sharp point; that’s logical, but fragile. Makers who taught themselves, and schools that put clamps on the ends of the rib when they glued the rib tips together, often bring both ribs up to the end full thickness, 2mm, with the joint in the center. If they were looking at good violins, they might have subsequently thinned both ribs so that the whole width of the end was 1mm. Some very obscure schools brought the inside, c-bout, rib out to the end, and feathered the outer one, so the (invisible) joint is at the outside of the end of the corner.
The corner in my drawing is the way that 17th century Cremonese makers did it: they cut the end of the (outer) exposed rib off square, so that it doesn’t match the end of the corners of the top and back. It doesn’t make a whole lot of visual sense, in context, but it’s the strongest way to make the tip, so that it doesn’t quickly wear. Guarneri del Gesu, with his sometimes very long corners backed up by blunt endings on the corner blocks that didn’t reach far enough out to give much support, often carried the outer rib out past the inner one a mm or two, by itself, and then finished it off square.
There’s lots to think about for just the end of a rib, and yet virtually everything you see on a violin has been similarly considered, calculated and designed to give a particular effect.
I hope the friend who created this drawing of a very grumpy prototype of a baroque bridge will not mind if I share it with you:
This one’s interesting mainly because of its lack of great age: it’s from 1944, made in Hamburg, Germany; not a time and place you see many violins from. Usually I would associate this type of mud-crack surface with a soft varnish that’s been overcoated with something much harder (violating the painter’s fat over lean rule), where expansion and contraction of the softer underlayer has caused the over coat to break up gracelessly the way ice breaks up on water, but I’m pretty sure this particular violin has nothing over the original varnish.
In real life the surface of this violin looks leathery; it’s an attractive surface, but better in some places than others. Nevertheless, the whole effect is positive on a violin of a type that you’d normally see polished up like a bowling ball.
I started a series of tests this week, something I’ve always meant to do. I have a lot of scraps of wood with various things painted on them, but never have gone about it in an orderly fashion. Yesterday, I took a bunch of cheap bridges, scraped one side of each, and started putting a different ground coat on each one. Some dried right away, and I have some ideas about which of those I like. Others are going to take weeks or months to dry completely, but this time, when I look at them in a year, I’ll know what they are. (I have one little scrap of wood from about 20 years ago, stuck in a notebook, with nothing written on it, that if I knew what I’d done, that’s the varnish I’d be using.)
So far I’m testing Kusmi shellac, spray shellac, mastic, Ace spar varnish, oxidized turpentine, raw linseed oil, stand oil, propolis, gum arabic, and casein emulsion. As other ideas enter my mind, I’ll try them, too. Eventually I hope to have a sample of everything imaginable.
What started this whole thing was reading Jacques Maroger’s book, The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters. It’s his analysis of the materials of the first Renaissance oil painters, and a couple of the things he mentions in the book made me wonder how they’d work as grounds. Maroger’s work is one contribution to how I originally got the idea for my uncooked mastic/linseed oil varnish (which is not the same as anything in his book), but I’ve never read his book before, because it’s hard to land at a price I could afford.
Over the last few years I’ve been messing with a contractor’s laser level to show violin arching more clearly. It’s a variation of the maker’s idea of using a ruler and light to cast a shadow on the arch while shaping it, as pictured above, and initially I used a series of photos, and then went to movies for the same purpose. There’s more from the laser, and a movie, at this post.
Finally, I got the idea of a way to mix both together, so that the entire arch would be mapped in one shot, of higher resolution and sharpness.
If you have an outline of the violin so that you can scale out the widths, and just this one photo, you can make accurate templates. It’s simpler than the old way of spending all afternoon cutting templates off the real violin with thin slips of wood, or using a carpenter’s contour copy gauge. Now, if I have ten or fifteen minutes with a violin, I can extract all the data I need to make a copy of it, from just a set of drawings and photos.
The final step in this process for me, since I’m only copying Cremonese models, is to redraw the arch without 300 years of distortion. This requires a bit of reverse engineering to figure out what they were thinking then, and what their originals must have looked like when they weren’t so bent out of shape as they are now, through three centuries of strings tugging the parts of the violin in different directions.
In conjunction with Canadian violin maker Quentin Playfair, who originally outlined the role of curtate cycloids in Cremonese violin making in a STRAD magazine article some years ago, Stephen Mann developed free computer software to draw the appropriate curves without any fuss. All that’s necessary to generate the cycloid shape is the distance between the low spots of the scoop around the plate and the height of the arching, at the location for where you want to make a template.
Even if you’re not making a violin, the software is fun to play with: as you change parameters, you can watch the curve change in real time. It’s an interesting shape which appears to change radically as you approach extremes, yet all of the apparently different versions are mathematically related.
There are links on the same page as the software if you’ll like to learn more about these interesting shapes and their associated math. Those of us who once were children may remember the spirograph, or may even have generated cycloidal curves using buttons and a pencil
Genuzio Carletti, in Italy, had a working relationship with Joseph Settin in New York. Carletti made instruments, and Settin set them up and sold them. The two labels above were found glued one on top of the other (the earlier dated one hidden under the newer). It appears that Settin wanted some way to indicate the collaboration, and wasn’t sure how obvious to make it, but ultimately settled for the less-transparent solution.
A friend of mine remembers visiting the Settin shop in the 60s. He said that it was a messy place with incomplete bits of old violins were strewn around, and it appeared that perhaps new whole instruments were being made to include them, John Lott style.
