Ep 4. Unveiling the Secrets of Andrea Amati and his violins: Part 1

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

The Amati family; in this Series we explore the life and legacy of Andrea Amati, the masterful craftsman behind some of the world's most revered violins. In these episodes we delve into the fascinating history of Amati's life, his revolutionary techniques, innovations, and the enduring impact of his work on the world of music.

Through interviews with experts in the field of history, instrument-making, and performance, we uncover the secrets of Amati's unique approach to violin-making, from his choice of materials to the meticulous attention to detail that went into each instrument. We also explore the rich cultural and historical context that shaped Amati's work, and the role that his violins played in shaping the sound of the Renaissance and beyond.

Transcript

Andrea Amati Part I

A traveller passing through northern Italy's Lombardy in the 16th century would be struck by its beautiful plains, fertile meadows and abundance of grains and livestock. Large fields planted with wheat, alternated with meadows crossed with an intelligent system of irrigation ditches, and long rows of trees growing around the edges of the fields gave it that typical Po Valley plantation look.

In the distance, on the northern bank of Italy's longest river, the Po, lay the bustling city of Cremona. East of Milan, on the flat Padana plains, it was described as being “rich in men and traffic”, an important commercial hub, and here you would find a strategic river crossing.

In this city lived a handful of noble Cremonese families, owners of almost all the land in the surrounding countryside’s, cultivated by peasants still living under a feudal system. The crops they grew, of flax, wheat, millet, rye, and rice, would be transported into the city to feed its citizens. After Milan, Cremona was the largest and most important city in the state, bursting with tradespeople and merchants.

Almost 50 percent of its inhabitants are artisans, and the wealth of the city is substantial. In the Duchy of Milan, Cremona contributes as many taxes to the Duke's coffers as the rest of the provinces combined, making it a noteworthy place indeed.

This was an era in which transport via water was 20 times cheaper than overland. Goods and people were frequently passing through the city on barges, often coming from Venice, then on to the markets of all of Europe with their wares. It was a transient place, an inland port even, where many people would pass through, stop and stay a while, then move on.

But for those who stayed there, life was never dull. In the year 1505, a Cremonese artisan called Gottardo Amati and his wife welcomed a little baby boy into the world. They named him Andrea Amati. As was often the custom, their son would one day learn a trade similar to that of his father. Of this his parents were fairly certain.

What they couldn't have known was that this child would grow up to be the first in a great dynasty of violin makers, whose instruments would grace the salons of royalty and become proud acquisitions of noble families across Europe, influencing every violin maker that would come after him. Whether they realized it or not.

The Amatis.

You may or may not have heard of this violin maker. But hopefully by the end of this series you will be like, Amati, yeah sure. Which one? The father, the son, the brothers, the grandfather? Because yes, there were a bunch, five to be precise, spanning four generations and they all lived in the northern Italian city of Cremona.

In these episodes I'll be looking at the Amati family of Violin Makers, their extraordinary story that spans almost 200 years and the world changing events that moved their lives. I started by talking to someone who knows a whole lot about this family. Violin maker, expert, author, and researcher in Milan, Carlo Chiesa.

Carlo Chiesa

I'm a violin maker and a restorer and the researcher on the history of violin making.

To find the Amati workshop, first we must go to the city of Cremona. The Amatis are all connected and if you look at the history of the Amati family of violin makers, that's the history of the Cremonese making for about two centuries because the Amati workshop was the only serious workshop in Cremona for about 200 years.

When you speak of Cremonese making, of course you must start with the Amati workshop.

Linda Lespets

In the 1500s, Cremona was a city full of life, its streets filled with the sounds of clanging hammers and the buzz of conversation. It was home to a thriving community of artisans, each with their own unique skills and talents. Half the population found themselves in trade, but the other half worked and survived by supplying manual labour for the domestic market.

There were servants, shopkeepers, coachmen, navigators, bankers, blacksmiths, carpenters, woodsellers, farriers, instrument makers, the list goes on.

I spoke to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, author, and international man of mystery.

Benjamin Hebbert

So, Cremona's actually a very interesting city, if you think of Italy and, you know, Italy's got the sort of long boot kind of going down into the Mediterranean and then you've got the sort of, the top of Italy is sort of, kind of oval shaped, like the socks sticking out of the top of the boot.

And if you take that area, the great landmass of Northern Italy, at the top and at the west, it's lined by mountains. And then you've got the Adriatic Ocean with Venice on the other side. And right going through the middle is the River Po. And that really connects everything. The Po becomes, by the time you get to the middle of Italy, it's a very wide river.

So your last stone bridge is at Piacenza. It starts at Trieste, goes to Piacenza. And then when you get to around about Cremona, there's a number of islands, very swampy islands. And the river kind of kinks a little bit so it slows and it becomes a little bit narrower because of the swamps and that's not good enough to put a bridge on it but it's controllable so that you can put a pontoon bridge over the river so at certain times of the year you've got a huge bridge for trade for taking armies over and that's really the history of northern Italy is armies going one way or another.

Cremona is that point right in the middle of Italy where you can get huge amounts of trade, commerce, anything can travel through and get over the pontoon bridge and of course that pontoon bridge doesn't exist anymore it's even difficult to see on maps because in maps people draw land features and stone buildings they don't do disposable bridges.

So right away from the Roman times, that's what Cremona stands for. If you go to Cremona, you'll see that there's all sorts of arguments, whether it's the highest tower in Italy, the highest tower in Europe, but the cathedral has this enormously high tower. And that's because actually from the top of the tower, people wanted to be able to see over the river to whatever was coming from the other side. There was a massive fortress in Cremona, towards the western edge. And one thing that you'll miss when you go there is that because of the way that the river's silted up, it's now about a mile. Maybe two miles from the city walls.

Linda Lespets

Carlo Chiesa talks about cultural life in Cremona and how it was placed in the dutchy of Milan.

Carlo Chiesa

Cremona was a large town in northern Italy in the plain, so in a very quiet and rich environment. But the problem was that, Cremona was never, the main center of a state. It was a large city in a rich area without a court and without a university. So it was a quiet place, so to say. The noble families from Cremona, had a, usually a palace, a building in Milano. So Milano was the important city and Cremona was just, an outskirt, so to say, there was no high cultural life in Cremona for many years, and at that time, that was the situation.

So it was, I would say, a quiet place to live, but for the fact that sometimes it happened that armies arrived from one place to going to another and there were wars and riots and things like that. So, I think life was quite, easy in Cremona, but not, we must not, consider that as we see today, it was not safe. There was never a safe idea of life. That is the main difference in my opinion. It was the seat of rich families, very rich families. It was a very rich environment, but since there was no court the cultural life was never as important as it was in even smaller towns which had rulers and small courts, let's say Parma or Mantua or Piacenza even. These are cities smaller, much smaller than Cremona and less rich than Cremona but situated just 40, 60, 80 kilometers away of Cremona. But they had a richer cultural life because there were kings or princes or counts or some people who took care of the court.

Linda Lespets

Cremona was a booming city on the rise. Around 35, 000 people lived there. The size of it meant that merchants would not accumulate fortunes like those in Florence or Venice. But what we do find is a healthy middle class. earning a good living for themselves. To get an idea of the atmosphere, in the mid 1500s, 50 percent of people living in Cremona were artisans, 10 percent nobility, 20 percent were classed as just poor, and the rest worked for the others.

Zooming into the artisan class of Cremona, we find that sixty percent of them worked in the thriving textile industry. Cremona was known for its fustian, that's a heavy cotton fabric often used for men's clothing and padding. The Cremonese fustian had dazzling colors and beautiful designs. Cremona was making 100, 000 pieces of this fustian that was exported to Venice and beyond the Alps.

This well connected city thrived through its manufacturing industry. Their success was an availability of raw materials and their ability to be able to process them. As in the textile industry, there was a sort of funnel of goods arriving from Venice, from the east and the rest of the known world. They would be shipped along the Po River in barges to Cremona where they would either be processed or go on to be sold in the rest of Europe.

There were products arriving from the north, Germany and from the south, from Naples. Merchandiser materials coming from all directions, converging on this one town, which made it a fantastic place to be an artisan. All you desired was at your fingertips.

The time we find ourselves in is the Renaissance. Cremona is an intersection of trade, had not only physical goods, but ideas, and it is into this world we find our first violin maker. Andrea Amati, a Renaissance man. Carlo Chiesa.

Carlo Chiesa

When Andrea Amati was born and when he grew up, he was working and he was an apprenticeship in a Renaissance workshop, meaning that his training was as an artisan who was intended to be an artisan artist.

Linda Lespets

So the Renaissance, what was it exactly? I spoke to Dr. John Gagnier

Dr John Gagne

I'm John Gagne. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries. What is the Renaissance? Oh, right. Okay. Just in a nutshell. Yeah. So the Renaissance, largely speaking, is an intellectual cultural movement. Based upon, well, you know, as you know, it's a French word, meaning the rebirth refers to any flourishing of some previously existing culture. I say this generally because, you know, there were renaissances before the, the famous one, the Italian renaissance, there was a Carolingian renaissance, there was a 12th century renaissance. But the one we're most familiar with is the, let's say the 15th century renaissance, which really got its start in the. 13th century, grew in the 14th century, maybe made most famous by Petrarch, who was a scholar and poet. And then sort of exploded across Italy in the 15th century, when many culture makers and princes began to return to the inheritance of classical Roman antiquity to try to suck out of it the, you know, a platform for moving ahead in European history because they saw, they thought that the past had been so rich and so much had been lost that only by going back, could you find something to build the future with and what's maybe most notable about the 15th century renaissance is They really scraped all aspects of the, barrel, let's say, of ancient culture, so it was, intellectual, moral, philosophical, cartographic, scientific, musical, arithmetic, it was everything that the classical world had left. They really wanted to absorb and internalize. So in the 15th century in Lombardy, which is where Cremona is, there is a court in Milan which also has a sort of satellite in the city of Pavia, the second city of the duchy. The duchy of Lombardy is, you know, probably a few million people, one of the most industrious in northern Italy.

The courts at Milan, the Ancestral Castle is at Pavia, that's also the university town. And then, the third city, let's say, although Pavia is very large, Cremona is often referred to as the second city of Lombardy, because it's also a city of industry. And so, The world in which Andrea Amati would have grown up.

So there were maybe two aspects to that world. And one is the one I just described, which is a world of antique rebirth, which by the 16th century was in very full swing and had been internalized, even at levels below elite levels, thanks to things like the printing press, which had made access to knowledge more accessible.

And then there's the political environment, which was more tumultuous because, the Duchy of Milan, or Lombardy was, contested territory for the first half of the century. So it was a war torn part of Italy. And so the world he would have grown up in would have been, extremely tumultuous because of shifting political regimes, especially in Cremona.

Linda Lespets

All the income taxes, I think it's income taxes, in Cremona just as a city, had as much income tax as all the other, towns. in the Milanese state combined, so economically it was quite important.

John Gagne

Yeah, and it sounds like one of their biggest industries was, textiles. It looks like mostly Fustian, which is a kind of cotton velvet, let's say. And a few other sort of middle range textiles. So they're not, what Cremona produces is not fine textiles like silks and silk velvets and that kind of thing. Those are still produced elsewhere. In fact, in Milan, the city, put up regulations that prevented other cities, even within its own duchy, from, let's say, getting into the silk trade or silk production, which would have meant planting lots of mulberry trees that the silkworms could grow.

That was not Cremona's specialty. They never really got into that. What they were surrounded by was flax and cotton. They had rich territory to grow that kind of crop and so they produced a kind of like hard wearing, sometimes called German style cloth, which they exported, very successfully into northern parts of Europe.

Linda Lespets

Basically it was a town that made a lot of its money through the textile trade. And they also talk a lot about the Moleskine, and I thought they were like... Actual little mole skins and I was imagining all these like farms with tiny little moles and Emily the Fashion historian. She said no, it's a soft cotton. It's not actually a mole So I'm like, where are they getting all these moles from? Because it was a lot.

John Gagne

Yeah, the renaissance mole farming was an intense industry. We won't get into right now, but no I'm joking yes, I mean, It's a city that, it sounds like, you know, Cremona's merchants were, very active on the regional and international scale.

So it seems like more even than the Germans, there were Cremonese merchants active in Venice. So if you're thinking about like the, who would you, whose faces would you see most around Venice, which was of course like an international hub. The Cremonese community was extremely active in Venice, which gave them access to all kinds of, shipments coming from all over the world, really. And then there was an access because the city sits on a pilgrimage route known as the Via Franchesa, which runs from England down to Rome, there would have been a kind of like cross European access, route for traders, travellers, merchants to pass through the city as well. And, uh, so there's a constant passage of merchants from Cremona up into, you know, the Alps, then over into France and through, diagonally through France towards England.

Linda Lespets

In the center of the city of Cremona is the Piazza del Comune, or Town Square. A bustling hub of activity, this grand square was surrounded by some of the city's most impressive buildings, including the Palazzo Comunale, or Town Hall, with its tall arches and elegant columns. It was a symbol of the city's power and wealth, its political center.

It's Loggia De Militi, it's military headquarters, and the cathedral, the religious heart of Cremona, with its impressive terrazzo bell tower standing proudly next to it. Our violin maker Andrea Amati was born in 1505 and as a boy the cathedral was already almost 400 years old. Rising up from the stone paved square, it is one of the most beautiful Romanesque cathedrals in Lombardy.

On its white marble facade is a magnificent central rose window with a two story loggia adorned with stately statues. The sound of bells echoing through the city was a constant reminder of its importance, and at the moment it was undergoing a transformation.

If the young Andrea Amati had wandered into the cathedral, he would have seen walls rising up held by giant stone pillars capped with gilded gold and intricate carvings. Weaving its way around all this was scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding. The painter Boccaccio Boccacino is painting colourful frescoes of the Epiphany and a cycle of the life of Mary in Christ.

These paintings in the cathedral would continue throughout Andrea Amati's lifetime by a variety of artisans, and as the years passed he would see the church filled with vivid artworks bursting with life. Sometimes even seemingly to spill out of the paintings themselves and into the church, thanks to the artist's use of trompe l'oeil and life sized paintings depicting biblical scenes. It is a truly impressive structure. Coming out of the cathedral and walking along a decorative portico, you cannot miss the Torazzo, the highest tower in Italy, made of brick and rising well above the city. Its size and beauty were a source of pride for the people of Cremona. From this tower, which is in fact the bell tower of the cathedral, a lookout could spot approaching armed forces, and the people of the city were not being overcautious.

Cremona had an unfortunate habit of being trampled by invading armies on a regular basis. And yet, it was an exciting time to be alive. The world was changing in unstoppable ways. This was the modern era, John Gagne.

John Gagne

Okay, so, you know, obviously the modern era is contested and many people, accept that it's a fiction of history, you know, when we become modern, but there are some compelling things that we recognize in terms of the transition from what we call the medieval to the modern.

And one of the, say, most, enjoyable ones is a print. Made in the 16th century by the Dutch Flemish artist Jan Straat who went by Jan Stradanus, Johannes Stradanus in Latin, who's worked for the Venetian court. And he produces a print called Nova Ruperta, which means New Discoveries. And it's nine items that he thought represented the modern world.

And they were the Americas, the magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press, clockwork, guayac wood, which was wood from Brazil that was used against syphilis, distillation technology. Silk cultivation and the stirrup and saddle and those were some of these of course are not new to the 16th century Some of the like stirrups have been around since the deep Middle Ages and some of these of course were Asian technologies They were brought to Europe, you know, like printing or silk making and that kind of thing Actually printing was individually established in Europe, but all the rest of it gives you a sense of what people in 16th century thought made their age a new age So syphilis was a big thing Yes, syphilis was completely contemporaneous with the Italian wars that we discussed earlier in terms of the breaking apart of local rule in Cremona.

Syphilis, it's still disputed about whether syphilis was an ancient disease that had recurred, or whether it was a completely new disease that Europeans pinned on the Americans. But, one of the first successful cures after mercury, which is of course a terrible cure because it also kills. Even though it may feel like it's fixing the syphilis, was the guaiac wood from Brazil, which had curative properties.

But maybe the overarching story is one about, an opening up of Europe to things that suggest going places or opening up to ideas whether it's about the magnetic compass and the discovery of the Americas or Travel learning new things to the printing press so it's let's say broadening of the mind of Americans of Europeans I'm sorry, and that I think is a nice distillation Let's say of the idea of modernity in the 16th century is that these things are new discoveries that set Europe on a new path And this modern era with all its new or revised discoveries and ideas would have influenced or been a part of Andrea Amati's life in Northern Italy.

Linda Lespets

Stories of strange and distant lands, cures of diseases, printing, the spread of learning, and music. Incredible clockwork mechanics and more give us a taste of the world he came from.

Looking onto the Piazza del Comune, the centre square of Cremona, on a busy market day. You could run into locals and foreigners alike. Farmers, clergy, members of the civic community, artisans, nobility, peasants, and soldiers. There were always soldiers from somewhere. On campaign passing through the city.

And of course merchants. Merchants of anything and everything, selling all sorts of goods imported into the city from one of the many trading routes leading there. There were spices, herring, honey, oysters, fine wines, pepper, clothes, dyes, cloth, fake gold, iron, leather, paper, soap, hats, sugar, just to name a few of their wares.

Although the city was under the control of the Venetian state, life was precarious. Safety was never assured, and wars between the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, and even neighboring states was a constant danger. The people of Cremona lived in an ever present shadow of war. John Gagne.

John Gagne

Venice also had a claim on Cremona. So, part of it was that it was, Cremona was being tugged in three directions, the French claimed it, Cremona actually broke away from the Duchy of Lombardy in 1499 when the French took over and it gave itself to Venice for nine years or something and then the French captured it back. There was a lot of back and forth.

For strategic reasons, obviously, it was a, for all the reasons we've described, it was a desirable city in terms of its productivity, it's revenue and that kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Moles everywhere. And so, uh, but there was also, interestingly, and maybe this is characteristic of Cremona, there was also a large sort of community of resistors to a lot of the foreign occupation.

There's one great story about. In the 1520s, as the Cremonese were trying to escape from French oversight that 500 rebels against the French entered the city disguised as peasant grocers to lead a revolt from within. So that's the kind of thing that's going on all the time is an attempt to pull the city in one direction or another, often by the residents themselves that are trying to fight against whoever is in control.

Yeah, it's, it's tremendously, um, tumultuous until basically the, French totally withdraw. And it's, as I said, Cremona is the last city other than Milan that the French withdraw from. And so it was really kind of like a war zone.

In the story of the 16th century though, if I can tell big stories for a second, is one of recovery. So through the, let's say up to 1600, uh, there's a lot of recovery going on, economic recovery, you know, a post war boom of some sorts where the city is reestablishing its earlier successes.

And then after 1600, there's a slide downwards that comes as a result of a number of things, including the 1630 plague and the 30 years war, which runs from 1618 to 1648. And that really, Sets most of Italy on an economic decline that's, that it never really recovers from, you know, until the 19th century.

Linda Lespets

One day when Andrea was seven years old, news came of the brutal sacking of the city of Brescia by the French. I speak about this in the very first episode of the Violin Chronicles. Brescia was only 60 kilometres away and also part of the Venetian state. Would Cremona be next? Word came that Bergamo had paid the French 60, 000 ducats to avoid a similar fate. Cremona was not in danger, just now. But after some complicated manoeuvring, the city was now being ruled by the Dukes of Milan, the Sforzas.

Battles were being fought and armies were passing through the city, again. But life went on, and Andrea would grow up in this time of uncertainty, with continual war looming on the horizon. A horizon that could be seen from the top of that really tall bell tower. We were just talking about the terrazzo.

At around the age of 14, Andrea would have started learning his trade. He was most likely apprenticed to an instrument maker, or learnt from his father, perfecting his skills and honing his craftsmanship. In the Amati household, after several years, Andrea would have finished his apprenticeship, become a craftsman, and continue to work under a master for many years.

He would live through the turbulent years in his town until he reached the age of 30, when the city changed hands once again and was now controlled by the Spanish. The irony of this war was that the Spanish created relative peace and stability by investing in local infrastructure and injecting money into the region.

They absolutely wanted to keep other powers out, and ended up creating a bubble of stability for the area. John Gagne explains how the Spanish came to rule Lombardy and Cremona.

John Gagne

I should say that the whole century was a bit messy, or the first half of the century was very messy. The first thing to say is that the Spanish and the French had been, in Italy for centuries.

So, the Spanish had ruled, or the House of Aragon had ruled the Kingdom of Naples on and off with the Angevins of France since the 13th century. So, in the south of Italy, there had been a kind of give and take between France and Spain over the rulership of, Italy's largest kingdom since the Middle Ages and this had been going on even earlier in Sicily. So, there's kind of an upward movement of this contest between the crown of France and the crowns of Spain that then breaks out at the end of the 15th century when both the Spanish and the French try to gain more territory in Italy. The fulcrum for their dispute, well, it starts actually in, not surprisingly in Naples, but the Spanish managed to keep Naples after some tumults between the 1490s and the 1510s.

But in the north the French succeed for the first 30 years of the century. So the French establish, they take over the entire duchy of Lombardy. They kick out the Milanese dukes, more or less. I mean, there's a lot of fighting. They come back three times. So there's a lot of in and out of regimes. So the French succeed and in fact, Cremona is in French hands for the longest of any city in the Duchy and is one of the most fought over. There's a lot of violence in Cremona through the 1530s, and there's a lot of tension with the French occupiers through that period as well. In fact, there's a great chronicle in the civic library of Cremona that I've looked at, which is vivid that just in describing the suffering of the people of Cremona in the first 30 years of the 16th century. Then the Spanish crown manages to kick the French out and they say they claim the duchy of Lombardy for themselves, which in truth they did have some claim to because the Spanish crown became soldered to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1500, when the little prince, Charles V, inherited both the Spanish crown and the Holy Roman Empire.

So in one person, you had that trans European claim on a lot of territories. So it's largely thanks to the inheritance of Charles V that he could lay claim to the Duchy of Milan. which finally came into his hands in 1535 when the last of the native Dukes died. And then, it basically remained in Spanish hands until the 18th century.

Much of Italy was under Spanish rule of some kind, until the 18th century. And maybe the key, the last thing to say here about how Cremona became Spanish was that, Emperor Charles V retired. He handed, he broke up this unified dominion over much of Europe and handed off different parts to different people.

His son became, King Philip II of Spain. And in the 1540s, the late 1540s, King Philip established personal rule over the Duchy of Milan. And in that case, you know, he sent a lot more, governors to Italy to take over and make sure that his own orders were being enforced. So by 1550, let's say, by the time Andrea Amati is an adult man, the government he's working under is run by a Spaniard.

Although the, let's say, the city of Cremona is still being overseen by a largely Italian group of magistrates under the rulership of these Spanish representatives. The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza Lodge in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts.

Linda Lespets

This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family.

This brings us to the end of the first episode in this series on Andrea Amati. The picture we have of Cremona in the early 16th century is of a busy commercial hub full of artisans, not particularly many instrument makers, yet things are about to change on that front. Despite the city being battered by wars, the people are particularly resilient, if somewhat warlike, and as you will see in the upcoming episodes, they will have to face even greater odds to survive and thrive. All the while creating some of the most beautiful instruments we have surviving today.

I'd like to thank my guests, Carlo Chiesa, Benjamin Hebbert, and Dr. John Gagne for sharing their knowledge with us today. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and I'll catch you next time on The Violin Chronicles.

Whether you're a seasoned musician, a lover of classical music, or simply curious about the art of violin-making, “The Violin Chronicles” is the perfect podcast for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of one of the greatest craftspeople in history. Join us as we explore the life, work, and legacy of Andrea Amati, and discover the secrets of his enduring genius.

The music you have heard in this episode is by

Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Bloom - Roo Walker, Getting to the bottom of it –, Fernweh Goldfish, Le Magicien- Giulio Fazio, Industrial music box-Kevin Macleod, The penny drops- Ben Mcelroy, Gregorian chant- Kevin Macleod, Make believe-Giuolio Fazio, Casuarinas- Dan Barracuda, ACO live in the studio Baccherini