A Little Longer

Count Ignazio Alessandro Cozio di Salabue could see that the wooden form had been used repeatedly. He could also see that it was a little longer than the one marked PG. What he could not discover, when he listed it in 1823, was when it had been made.

The form belonged to the working material of Antonio Stradivari’s violin-making workshop in Cremona, northern Italy. Marked G in ink, it was a flat piece of walnut with a violin-like waist, holes through its face and recesses around its edge. It had helped instruments take shape without becoming part of them. Once a set of sides could stand on its own, the form came out and went back to work.

Cozio had acquired the remains of a workshop whose products were already valuable. Alongside the instruments, he preserved things that a musician had no reason to keep: patterns, forms and working drawings. The G form survives in the Museo del Violino, accompanied by four small maple patterns for cutting wooden blocks. Those pieces carry the history into an operation that a finished, varnished violin conceals.

Building the sides

The G form is about fourteen and a half millimetres thick. It provides an inner boundary for a body that must eventually be hollow. Six wooden blocks are lightly attached around it: one at either end and four at the corners where the waist turns into the upper and lower curves. Thin strips of maple, the ribs, are bent to shape and glued to the blocks.

The distinction between those two glue joints matters. Blocks must stay with the ribs when the assembly is released; their temporary connection to the form must give way. The result is a freestanding framework of curved sides, ready to meet the front and back of the instrument. The solid walnut can be used again.

A separate pattern carries a decision from one piece of wood to another.

The smaller maple patterns associated with G guide the cutting of the blocks. The form establishes the broad proportions; the blocks carry the ribs round the corners. Cutting those blocks, bending the strips and bringing them together still require judgement. A slightly different corner or a rib that does not lie quite against the form can change the finished outline.

Other instruments required other equipment. For the Medici set of 1690, Stradivari made both a contralto and a larger tenor viola. The surviving tenor form has its own block patterns, while the instrument is preserved in Florence. A violin and a tenor viola could share a way of working without sharing dimensions or a form.

Even for a single instrument, the body form settled only part of the work. The front and back had to be carved into arches and brought to their thicknesses. Their edges projected beyond the ribs. Sound-holes needed their own positions and shapes; a neck, scroll, bridge and fittings introduced further decisions. One reusable outline could not do all of that.

A house with a shop

Stradivari bought his house on the Piazza San Domenico in 1680. The Hill brothers’ later account places the shop at the street entrance, with rooms and a courtyard behind it and living space above. Household and business occupied the same building.

Francesco and Omobono, sons of Antonio’s first marriage, grew up there. Francesco became an important maker in the family business. In Antonio’s testament, as discussed by the violin maker and historian John Dilworth, he is the son entrusted with supporting the profession. Omobono also made instruments; the will left him tools on condition that they stayed in the workshop.

There were several violin forms available, including P, PG and G. Dilworth suggests that this could have allowed several instruments to be under construction at once. The patterns would let a practised hand repeat a shape already decided in the workshop. They do not tell us that Francesco always used one form and Antonio another, or who bent the ribs of a particular violin.

Some surviving drawings concern a different stage altogether. A cello sound-hole layout reproduced by the Hills combines compass circles with a reference to the B form. It connects the openings to an established body design while leaving the worker a separate task: setting out and cutting them in the front plate.

A closer look · 4:15 · English

Templates and tools at the bench

Play film

The equipment outlived the making business. After Antonio and the two elder makers had died, his son Paolo held workshop material and instruments. Paolo offered the remaining equipment to Cozio in 1775; the museum’s account of the correspondence records his own son arranging its shipment after Paolo’s death. Inherited working stock became something to study and catalogue.

The words on it need the same scrutiny as the wood. The G form bears a sentence saying that it is a little longer than PG, but the museum’s updated description rejects the writing as Antonio’s autograph. A later custodian could label a genuine old form. Cozio’s inventory is valuable evidence for what he possessed and observed, rather than a transcript of Stradivari speaking from his bench.

Fittings can travel backwards

The instruments changed too. The Gould violin at the Metropolitan Museum was made in 1693, but its present Baroque arrangement dates from a deliberate reconstruction in 1975. The museum commissioned Frederick J. Lindeman of Amsterdam to make the alterations.

Lindeman fashioned a shorter neck and bassbar and supplied a new soundpost, bridge and pegs. He fitted gut strings. For the fingerboard and tailpiece, he used surviving originals on a different instrument, the Tuscan-Medici Stradivari of 1690 in Florence, as models. Old objects supplied working patterns for new parts three centuries later.

The Gould therefore preserves a Stradivari instrument and a modern attempt to recover a historical way of playing it. Its fittings cannot all be read as things that Antonio left in place. Nor does its photograph establish which surviving mould was used to build it.

Finding the extra length

One closer comparison concerned the Cremonese violin of 1715. In a study presented in 2016, Piercarlo Dondi and colleagues at the University of Pavia compared it with G and PG. The forms were similar in width, but G was about 2.6 millimetres longer.

Their laser scans recorded the violin’s exterior. To estimate the inner rib boundary, they used the purfling—the narrow inlaid lines near the edge of the back—in a photograph scaled from the measurements. This was an approximation. Both forms fitted the upper half reasonably well; lower down, PG fell short by up to about two millimetres. G followed the outline better, supporting an existing attribution rather than recovering every step of construction.

G had travelled through Cozio’s heirs and the Dalla Valle family before the violin maker Giuseppe Fiorini acquired the collection in 1920. In 1930 he placed the material in Cremona’s care. The city could display equipment from the workshop, but acquiring a playable Stradivari took another campaign.

Museum director Alfredo Puerari began that effort in 1959, seeking the help of the restorer Simone Fernando Sacconi. The violin eventually chosen had been given to Joseph Joachim at his jubilee in 1889. Cremona completed the purchase on 18 December 1961 and renamed it the Cremonese.