Three13

I know Charles Beare has some wonderful things ferreted away that I would love to see. I'm a dealer in another discipline and have the collector gene - I've put a lot of things away over the years, but my experience is that I'm in the minority. I wonder whether the violin trade isn't the same way.

Is that an early Gobetti?

I assume that people here understand that a saw is, in fact, a tool.

Those are saw marks.

Here are some details from a violin that was worked quickly, but not (at least in my opinion) carelessly:

That's no fun!

What did you think it was?

In all fairness, split pins are visible on a bunch of Amati instruments and on a fair number of Andrea Guarneri's, too.

My understanding is that most Cremonese makers placed their pins before cutting the purfling channel, so a fair number have pins that are split. Lupot, Pique and Vuillaume imitated this, although their method didn’t require pins on the back.

Is "viola" pejorative or derogatory?

As David Sora pointed out earlier in this thread, "There are many small depressions caused by the cuts of the gouge filled by the varnish, which being in greater thickness appears darker." In this case, it's accented by wear and dirt.

The problem with identifying it in the context of this discussion is that an attribution makes it difficult to make a pure judgement about the aesthetics of the piece. If one doesn't know who made it, one is free to decide whether they think it's good, bad, mediocre, or magnificent.

I'd prefer to let the piece stand on its own merits for the purposes of this discussion.

That's the drunken-chimpanzee-with-a-spoon school.

+1