Controversies Explained and the Early History of the Violin
The best idea for the origin of the violin in Northern Italy is described in the introduction to Peter Holman's Four and Twenty Fiddlers , where he puts forward the idea of the violin and viol families appearing simultaneously in the 1490s in the Ferrarese court of Isabella d'Este - the first female head of an Italian noble dynasty of the Renaissance, and one of the most significant patrons of the art. He suggests that there were philosophical problems for a female patron with the pre-existing models of court music. The sackbuts and cornets used for dance music evoked imagery of military music, whilst recorder consorts that performed instrumental motets were dangerously phallic (one only needs to read Giorgione and Titian's paintings to see how clear a metaphor it represented to the Renaissance eye). Some of the earliest images of instruments that we identify as violins appear in frescos from around Ferrara, and thus the violin's music and physical form evolved slowly o
