Tailpiece for the Lady Blunt, Cremona, 1721.
Sometimes the most unexpected things appear before your eyes, as was the case at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, where the collection includes various old fittings gifted to the museum by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in the nineteenth cenutry. A remarkable feature of the Lady Blunt violin of 1721, the second-best preserved Stradivari violin of the Golden Period is the survival of the fingerboard that lives with it, and so I was delighted to see a matching tailpiece amongst the Musée de la Musique’s holdings, complete with the same inscriptions that are found on the underside of the tailpiece. For the first time this gives us a sense of the matching fittings of a Stradivari violin from this period, and significantly extends our understanding of Stradivari’s original aesthetic intentions.
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
