New Look? Old Look?

Last year, I spent a few days with a Francesco Linarol viola, which violist Yizhak Schotten had dropped off for routine maintenance. The Linarol (shown below) is one of those loosely built, utterly gorgeous old Italians where all symmetries are approximate, and each square inch is a landscape in itself. Sunset-orange varnish over dark gold ground deepens here and there into storm grey, burnt umber and black – all lent a jewel-like depth by the reflectivity of the wood. I could not take my eyes off it.

On my bench at the time was an unfinished violin – not a copy, but intended to look more or less old and more or less Italian. Beside the Linarol, its varnish seemed over-pigmented. The colours were too hot, the surfaces too smooth. Thinking I could do a better job with inspiration near at hand, I stripped off the varnish and began again.

There is nothing very original about trying to make a new violin look old. Makers going back to Vuillaume and beyond have built careers on it. Still, there is within the profession a deeply rooted ambivalence towards the practice. It shows itself in raised eyebrows, in the shaking of expert heads, in website arias about ‘faking’ and ‘artificial ageing’. It is articulated more clearly in the rule books of competitions. While both ‘antiqued and pristine instruments’ are admitted into the Violin Society of America competitions, the Cremona Triennale disallows ‘artificial antiquing of the wood or varnish’. The First China International Violin Making Competition forbids an ‘antique effect’. The Mittenwald International excludes instruments that have been ‘aged artificially or imitated’.

Violin makers typically use the word ‘antique’ as a verb. To antique an instrument is to shade, wear, chip, scratch, dent or otherwise distress the varnish and underlying wood so as to give the appearance of age. Some makers do it; others do not. Those who don’t tend to claim the moral high ground. They build honest, unashamedly new instruments, and they count among their number all the Italian makers from Andrea Amati to G.B. Guadagnini. ‘The ignorant,’ wrote Simone Sacconi, ‘remain more in awe of the back of a Stradivari instrument worn away, than [one] whose varnish is intact.’ A violin should at least start off with crisply cut edges, sharp corners and a uniform coat of varnish. Time, playing and restoration will do the rest.

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