About the Amati Project

Welcome to the Amati Project: According to our best accounts, the violin originates out of earlier bowed-string traditions in the late fifteenth century, but the very first chapters of its life seem to have been limited to performance of dance music in groups that rarely numbered more than three musicians. The concept of a massed band of violins, violas and celli - the beginnings of a modern orchestra - seem to have emerged suddenly in the 1560s and focus on one famous commission of instruments by Catherine de Medici, for the use of the French Royal Court of her son, Charles IX of France. These instruments were made by a Cremonese craftsman, Andrea Amati and their popularity gave rise to the Cremonese school of violin making out of which four generations of the Amati family, the Guarneri, Ruggeri, Bergonzi and Stradivari families emerged. 

Of the original instruments, decorated with painted arms of King Charles IX, a surprisingly large number survive, seemingly forming the core of the orchestra of the French court through the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were beginning to be dispersed - the English violinist William Corbett owned one in the early 18th-Century, and Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de St Georges is reputed to have purchased one in Paris for an extraordinary sum of money. Surviving examples survive in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Tullie House Museum (Carlisle), Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Music Museum (USA) and the Museo del Violino in Cremona. 

These are beautiful instruments, so impressive that even Antonio Stradivari returned to Andrea Amati's original ideas in order to develop his own instruments in the 1680s, but there is another point to them. From the surviving examples we can see a coherency throughout instruments of all sizes that shows an enormous effort on the part of the maker to create a uniformity of sound. This concept of orchestra would have been compromised as soon as violins of varying designs began to mix together, for even later works by the Andrea Amati and his two sons still made in the sixteenth century witness evolving concepts of design that distance them from Amati's mid-1560s set of instruments. Hence, although it represents a musical ideal that was clearly resident in the mindset of composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it was one that was rarely experienced even in that time. The project offers valuable insight into performance practice of early string ensembles, particularly of Claudio Monteverdi whilst in smaller numbers they corps of instruments offer further insights into smaller ensembles where instruments made as coherent sets did play a documented role. 

As violin makers, there is a further challenge of rigorously examining surviving Andrea Amati instruments and others that help us to create a solid view of his original making practices, producing all twelve instruments as a complete organic entity as the evidence generally pushes towards. This website is here to tell our story as the project develops. 

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