![]() Since craftsmen of our age have employed all the traditional know-how of the art and have also been aided increasingly by volumes of acoustical research, their failure is hard to explain. This research should inspire others to analyze more antique violins for their chemical contents.įor centuries, violin-makers have tried in vain to match the high standards of excellence set in the first half of the 18th century by the two legendary masters of the craft, Antonio Stradivari and Joseph Guarneri del Gesù in Cremona, Italy. There are many obvious implications with regard to how the green tone wood should be treated, which chould lead to changes in the practice of violin-making. These findings may provide the answer why all attempts to recreate the Stradivarius from natural wood have failed. only the Cremonese instruments differed from all commercial woods. the difference of the Cremonese instruments from the French and English antiques, and c. a difference among all four Cremona instruments, b. Statistical evaluation of 12 minerals by discriminant analysis revealed: a. In addition to these, there were also changes in the common wood minerals. All four Cremonese instruments showed the unmistakable signs of chemical treatments in the form of chemicals which are not present in natural woods, such as BaSO 4, CaF 2, borate, and ZrSiO 4. The methods of analysis were the following: back-scattered electron imaging, X-ray fluorescence maps for individual elements, wave-length dispersive spectroscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and quantitative microprobe analysis. Jay, one violin by Gand-Bernardel were analyzed and compared with a variety of commercial tone woods. The ashes of wood from one violin and one cello by Stradivari, two violins by Guarneri, one viola by H. The aim of the current work was to identify the minerals from the small samples of the maple wood which were available to us from the antique instruments. In a recent communication (Nature, 2006), we reported about the degradation of the wood polymers in instruments of Stradivari and Guarneri, which could be explained only by chemical manipulations, possibly by preservatives. The long-standing question whether the wood of Stradivari and Guarneri were treated with wood preservative materials could be answered only by the examination of wood specimens from the precious antique instruments. Following the futile efforts of generations to reach the high standard of excellence achieved by the luthiers in Cremona, Italy, by variations of design and plate tuning, current interest is being focused on differences in material properties.
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