Lutherie

From the Archive: Andrea Amati, 1564 ‘Charles IX’ violin from the Ashmolean Museum collection

2022-07-06T10:20:00

Mystery 12.1

In this extract from an article from the December 1991 issue of The Strad, Roger Hargrave discusses the ‘Charles IX’ Andrea Amati instruments with particular reference to this 1564 example from the Hill collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

In spite of some fantastic stories in the available literature about Andrea Amati being:

  • A rich man belonging to a family dating back to 1007.
  • A maker of viols and rebecs who only began to make violins in his later years.
  • A widely travelled man who lived and worked in Paris for a time and who bought amber and wood in Venice.
  • A pupil of Bussetto [who was actually born long after Andrea’s death] and being, [optionally], a ‘contemporary’, an ‘assistant’, a ‘pupil’ or simply ‘born after Gasparo da Salo’

The real truth is that we know almost nothing about Andrea and that which we do know is mostly derived from his surviving works.

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