This violin is a commission from a young player whose family have been renting a 3/4 size violin from me. We chatted about what sort of model would suit her – she has quite small hands so we were thinking a slender instrument with a slim neck. One of her musical interests is baroque music, so mulling it over I thought it might be appropriate and fun to pick a Peter Guarneri of Venice model, which would tick all the relevant boxes.
Peter of Venice was the brother of the more famous Giuseppe Guarneri, nicknamed ‘del Gesu’ to distinguish him from his father, also Giuseppe . Peter of Venice instruments have character – slightly squarish scrolls with beautiful toolmarks in the volute, a distinctive outline and quite full high arching which I think will help give us the sound we’re looking for.
Before I started work, I paid a visit to my good friend and colleague William Castle, who is a big Peter of Venice fan, and who lent me lots of information. I decided to use an outline he had, a violin he measured years ago from the 1740s, with a very pretty, slender outline reminiscent of the Amati family. William didn’t have much more information on this one, so for a lot of the rest of the violin I’m taking my inspiration from another Peter of Venice dated 1735.
A new outline means a new mould, and as I’ve been doing recently, I’m using some beautiful walnut, which was traditional for moulds in the 18th century, as it’s easy to work and very stable.
The ribs are made from maple, sawn from the back so that it’s a perfect match. I bend them and glue round the mould. The final picture shows the linings glued in place – these are little strips of spruce that fit against the ribs and increase the eventual gluing surface against the back and front.
While the glue joints of the ribs are drying, I’ve got on with the scroll. There are lots of things I like about this model – the elegant shape of the pegbox and the delicate eye with the tool marks leading up to it like spokes of a wheel.
Then it’s time to move to the back and front. At this stage the violin really feels under way. The wood we chose for the back is a lovely, well figured piece of maple that I bought in France some years ago. I’ve paired it with a high quality piece of spruce for the front, which comes from the Fiemme valley in Northern Italy, where Stradivari also sourced his wood. A few years ago there was a terrible storm that felled a lot of the spruce trees, and I contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to save as many as possible. This piece of wood was from the resulting harvest. Using planes of different sizes, I’ve roughed the shape of the arching from the solid pieces of wood, and finalised the outlines with reference to the finished rib assembly.
The next stage is to fit the purfling, which is made from a sandwich of pear wood dyed black with a central strip of poplar. I cut a groove round the edge of the plates, remove the waste wood from the middle, then bend and trim the purfling strips before gluing in place.
