bean_fidhleir

Looks like highly skilled vernacular work t'me, but what do I know. Really interesting f-holes, not at all unattractive. The drunken joins of the sides at the corners make me wonder whether it might be a composite.

Okay, I can see how you got that, though in truth it feels as though I'm reading as much into as out of. But Fairy Nuff, since as mentioned I couldn't get a cursëd thing out of it. As to the hedgehog ref, you mustn't be a fan of Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld. "I'll be hedgehogged if..." is an indirect way of saying "I'll be buggered if..." since "The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All" is possibly the favorite song of Nanny Ogg, matriarch of the Ogg clan and member of the tiny Lancre coven that's central to several of the books. Sir T. is truly inspired in his ability to not only insinuate genuine cultural references into his books but also create what appear to be genuine cultural references but aren't...except then someone--or more often many someones (http://www.lspace.org/fandom/songs/hedgehog-song.html)--goes and back-creates the referent! (I was completely certain that "Mrs Widgery's Lodger", a Morris tune, was legitimate until I couldn't find it, wrote him, and was told that it didn't exist yet!) I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that it wasn't also the style in the 19th c. It was. My only point was that people were still being taught it in school through the '30s and using it, to my certain knowledge, well into the '60s.

Out of curiosity, what words are you seeing, Jacob? That style was taught in school all during the Hitlerzeit and was still in common use in the '60s when I lived "up de waterkant", so it's not a problem for me to read. But I'll be hedgehogged if I could spot anything that looked a German word to me in those images.

Those f-hole nicks make the fiddle look like it's about to burst into a round of "Freut Euch des Lebens". Perhaps it was made in north-west Naples.

That he stamped "C.FLANBAU" on his fiddles is quite interesting. I wonder why he didn't use an "M". Perhaps he had access only to a partial set of brass stamp characters? They'd have been hellish expensive to replace, since they would have had to be brass, or copper at a minimum, so perhaps that's the whole explanation: someone lost the last/only "M". His alternative to making up a stamp out of loose chars would have been to get a custom stamp cut, which would also have been hellish expensive, particularly for someone who probably wasn't making much from his fiddle business. What's funny is that this stamp doesn't actually even read "C.FLANBAU", it's "C.FLANBAU#" where the # stands for some other char that I can't see clearly enough to identify. Everyone's been calling it an "X", but it doesn't look in the least like an "X" to me physically. So do we really have a sort of chindogu fraud here, someone going to enormous effort to turn a VSO into an embarrassingly-inaccurate fake copy of a student fiddle by a minor maker?

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that the abbreviation "Ch." conventionally signified the given name Christian, not Charles (which was just "C." -- which is pretty clearly what's on the stamp but definitely not on the label. As to N vs M, count the strokes. You can't get an M out of it because you run out of strokes.

The more I look at it, the more I wonder exactly what's going on. If you look at the photos of the stamp, they're of two different impressions! The smaller ones show the crossbar of the F and a fair bit of each letter, but the largest (bottom photo in the series) isn't even marginally legible. What exactly did the seller photograph?

The label looks a bad joke. The writing style doesn't look good for the time and place, it's been "refreshed" with a modern implement (which is where the edge was overwritten), and very few people mis-write their own family name, nor would leave it uncorrected if they did. I looked more carefully at the stamp: like the name on the label, it's FLANBAUX, not "Flambaux" as everyone here is writing it. Does that make a difference?

The label in the second one might possibly be in Hungarian -- I can't really make out any words, but there's something about the sequences of not-quite-legible characters that looks Magyar to me rather than any other language. The seller says he can't read it, but doesn't say why not. I'm sure the fact that it seems to be written in pre-war "Deutsches Schrift" doesn't help. Both those fiddles are well-supplied with nice, shiny varnish, aren't they.

I broke up laughing at that hokey "Renaudin" label. There's someone who didn't even make an effort.

(This mightn't be as new to others as it is to me, in which case: apologies.) A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings. The strings are said to have a "soft and profound timbre" relative to traditional gut or steel strings. That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a "packing structure" that leaves practically no space between any of the strands. more at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17232058

Village/amateur work from Tirol, early 19th c.? Definitely not a skilled maker.

Strange that it's reckoned to be older than the label inside claims. Is Bergonzi really that much more important than Goffriller? Also, apropos the alleged post crack on the back...doesn't a repaired crack always pick up a wee bit of color? E.g., the cheek patch on that beautiful head. Could that post crack just be a natural ...I can't really say "artifact"... "blemish", perhaps? Cheese Louise, I hate looking at beautiful fiddles like that. Instant lust!

I imagine a number of people have done, and that they'll never tell.

Just the fact that they didn't even know enough to use the proper (southern) spelling of the man's name should be a hint. Na zadne strane for sure.

It certainly looks as though someone enjoyed playing it, for all the fact that it's got a very cheesy-looking scroll

Label's painfully anachronistic. I'd be surprised if it's more than 50 years old.

I can't believe there's any valid question about that at all. I'd bet serious money that it's a real label. Whether it was filled up ca. 90 years ago, that's a valid question by the look of it, but the label itself is almost certainly real. For one thing, you can see that it was printed letterpress not offset, and clamshell presses are quite hard to find these days because they were slow and they tended to use up a lot of fingers. The idea that anyone would go through the trouble and expense of having clichés made and fake 2-color labels printed on an antique clamshell press to convince buyers in the $2-5K range that they're getting a Juzek...nah, that's just not credible.

Funny looking writing on the label. Generally speaking, one didn't find a single-stroke 1 in German-speaking areas until the effects of US cultural imperialism began to bite, ca 1960. Usually they looked more like 7s (2 strokes), which is why German-speakers crossbar their real 7s. I can't imagine why those numerals are so awkwardly written, or what the scribble after "copy of" is meant to mean -- Guarneri? By the look of it, it was either written recently with a nylon tip, as Lyndon suggests, or, if it was really done ca 90 years ago, whoever did it used a "bank pen" nib and high-carbon india ink with some varnish in. That's a lot of care to take for such an ugly result. Perhaps the label was filled up here in the States, as Martin suggested?

Ai is the southern spelling, ei the northern. Cf Steiner / Stainer, Meyer / Mayr Apropos comments about the label: I think it's been 'shopped, 'cos the only other way to get that sort of bright white is to use clay-coated stock which would be anachronistic, also crazy.

eeeeuw...integral-bassbar red. $10

Is that 6% on new fiddles only, Màrtainn? I wonder because I hadn't to pay anything on the old fiddle I got from Bayern a year or two ago.

$25. It looks (insofar as it can be seen) like every other badly-made fiddle that was consigned to closet or attic after the initial burst of enthusiasm evaporated.

Not Tirol? I'm looking at that "goose-neck" head.

I can't imagine what that medium might be -- I'm fairly sure it's not printer's ink or even screener's because it seems to leave quite a deposition! It also doesn't seem to have much coherence as a film, since the "fake" one (if it's fake) has crumbled to bits in the middle and fallen off. Other than that, they look to me like they could be from the same stamp/cliché/whatever. Which isn't saying much, since the area's so small.