Marco Uccellini’s sonatas and an Andrea Amati of 1572
Precisely four-hundred-and-fifty years after it was made, it was thrilling to make a new discovery of a labelled and dated Andrea Amati violin from 1572. There are slightly less than two dozen Andrea instruments in existence, so whilst it is a battered and compromised example, it is better than no Andrea Amati, and still retains its exceptional tonal qualities. To people like me, it is like finding a fragment of a lost Leonardo painting. Once the instrument was put into playable state, it was a pleasure to loan it to Conor Gricmanis for his debut album of early Italian sonatas by Marco Uccllini. With most of Andrea Amati’s work in museums, I believe that this is the earliest dated Cremonese violin in private hands (although to be truthful I can attest that other privately-owned examples are earlier).
Connoissership at Oxford University.
For the academic world there are deep problems that arise from historic artefacts that are untethered from a record of provenance, and the violin is
