ex "Kurtz" Violin

A violin from the workshop that invented the violin. Andrea Amati of Cremona is credited with fixing the instrument's modern proportions, and this example, dated by the Metropolitan Museum to about 1560, is among the small number of his instruments to survive with anything like their original decoration: a gold Latin motto on the ribs, fleurs-de-lis on the back, and the ghost of an effaced coat of arms. The Museum has floated, cautiously, a connection to the 1559 marriage of Philip II of Spain to Elisabeth of Valois, on the strength of a decorated sister instrument in Paris; no document ties this specific violin to that wedding, and the Museum's own language treats the idea as speculation, not fact.

The violin is not the same instrument as any of the surviving pieces from Amati's better documented royal commission, the decorated set made across the 1560s and 1570s for Charles IX of France, several of which survive elsewhere including the celebrated "King" cello in Vermillion, South Dakota. That set carries a different Latin motto and a different history, and the two groups should not be conflated.

Its documented ownership history begins abruptly in nineteenth century England, runs through a chain of London and New York dealers and private owners including the violinist and instrument scholar Edward Heron-Allen, and ends with the New York musician and music educator Arved Kurtz, whose name the violin now carries. The Museum acquired it in 1999, four years after Kurtz's death, through the Robert Alonzo Lehman Bequest. Roughly three centuries between the workshop and the first named nineteenth century owner remain completely undocumented.

What it is

The instrument is a violin of essentially modern proportions and outline: 57.4 centimetres tall overall and 20.2 centimetres across at its widest, built from a one-piece maple back of medium figure sloping left to right, ribs of similarly figured maple, and a two-piece spruce top of fine to medium grain. It is not a plain working instrument. The ribs and back carry painted and gilded decoration, including a Latin motto in gold lettering, fleurs-de-lis in the corners of the back, and a geometric and floral border between the upper bouts. At the center of the back is a small area of loss and overpaint where a coat of arms is presumed to have once been, and has since been effaced or worn away.

The maker's label inside the body is a modern facsimile; the original, if one was ever affixed inside rather than only painted on the exterior, has not survived. Traces of the instrument's original varnish, and of its original oil-gilded and red-painted decoration, remain beneath later coats applied at some undetermined point in its history, most visibly around the pegbox gilding.

One structural fact does the most work in placing the object honestly: the scroll and pegbox, carved from unfigured maple, are original Amati work, but they have been grafted onto a neck that is not original. This is a routine alteration on instruments of this age, discussed below, and it means the violin is best understood as a sixteenth century body carrying a sixteenth century head on a later neck, not as an untouched relic.

Andrea Amati and the invention of the violin's form

Andrea Amati worked as a luthier in Cremona from at least 1526 and was established at a house in the San Faustino district of the city by 1539. Two documented instruments survive from relatively early in his career with dates of 1542 and 1546, though neither is the violin discussed here. Most of the work now attributed to him with confidence dates from later, roughly the 1560s onward, when his sons Antonio (who joined the workshop around 1556) and Girolamo (born 1561) were old enough to have had a hand in production.

What is generally agreed, and is the basis for calling Amati the founder of the Cremonese violin tradition, is that he fixed the proportions, outline, arching, and constructional logic that every later Cremonese maker, including his grandson Nicolo Amati and Nicolo's pupil Antonio Stradivari, continued to work from. Scholars who have studied the scroll design specifically note that the pattern used by essentially every Cremonese maker after Andrea traces back to his own drawing, with only minute differences separating Stradivari's version from the original.

None of this rests on a signed, dated declaration from Amati himself explaining his method. It rests on the surviving instruments, on the few payment and property records that mention him, and on more than a century of connoisseurship building a corpus of accepted works. That is the same evidentiary structure that applies to this particular violin, and it should be read with the same caution.

How old is it: what dendrochronology can and cannot say

Dendrochronology dates a wooden object by matching the pattern of annual growth rings in its wood against a reference chronology built from trees of known felling date and known origin. Applied to a violin's spruce top, it establishes a terminus post quem: the earliest year in which the youngest ring visible in the wood could have been cut, and therefore the earliest year in which the instrument could have been built from that particular piece of wood. It cannot, on its own, prove who built an instrument, and it can be defeated by a maker's use of old, stored timber, so a tree-ring date is a floor, not a fixed birthday.

For this violin, sources describe the dendrochronology as securely consistent with a mid sixteenth century felling date and note that the instrument's authenticity as an Andrea Amati product has not been seriously challenged. What is not resolved, and what the sources consulted for this record disagree about, is exactly which year within Amati's working life the instrument belongs to. The Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue date is about 1560, with an internal working range of 1558 to 1565. The Cozio Archive, an independent database built by the dealers and historians at Tarisio from certificates, sale records and connoisseurship, dates the same instrument to about 1570, a full decade later. Both institutions are working from the same physical object; neither published source consulted for this record explains the basis for the other's number, and this record does not attempt to adjudicate between them.

The Charles IX set, and why this violin is not part of it

The best documented episode in Andrea Amati's career is a royal commission traditionally linked to Charles IX of France, whose mother and regent, Catherine de Medici, is credited with bringing Italian court music and musicians to France. The earliest written account of the commission, published by Jean Benjamin de la Borde in 1780, describes an order of twelve large violins, twelve small violins, six violas and eight cellos, thirty-eight instruments in total. Contemporary documentation is thin: only a single payment record, from 1572, is known to survive, and the commission's exact scope and dates remain a matter of reconstruction from the instruments themselves and from that later secondary account.

Instruments from this set, where they survive, are decorated with royal arms and a Latin motto reading "Pietate et Iustitia" (with piety and justice), painted and gilded in a style compared to Limoges enamel work. Roughly eight to nine decorated instruments belonging to this group are known to survive out of the original thirty-eight, the rest lost or destroyed, substantially during the French Revolution. The most famous survivor is a bass violin, reduced in size and converted to a modern cello format in 1801 by the Paris maker Sebastien Renault, known today as the "King" and held since 1984 by the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, as part of the Witten-Rawlins Collection. Another survivor, a violin bearing the date 1564 in Roman numerals on its label, the earliest firmly dated instrument in the group, is held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The Metropolitan Museum's ex "Kurtz" violin is a different instrument, decorated with a different Latin motto, "Quo unico propugnaculo stat stabiq[ue] religio" (by this bulwark alone religion stands and will stand), not "Pietate et Iustitia". No source consulted for this record places it within the Charles IX commission, and the difference in motto is the clearest available evidence that it belongs to a separate decorated group. Readers encountering references elsewhere to Amati's royal violins for the French court should not assume they refer to this object.

The Quo Unico group and the Philip II theory

The motto on the Metropolitan's violin belongs to a smaller and less studied group of decorated Amati instruments sometimes called, after its inscription, the "Quo Unico" set. As described in Tarisio's Cozio Archive essay on Amati, this group comprises around five decorated instruments associated with Spanish royal patronage: three violins carrying decoration linked to Philip II of Spain, a viola bearing the monogram of a Princess Marguerite, and a separate, more heavily cut-down viola in Paris whose decoration may predate the group and could conceivably relate to a period before Philip II's 1556 accession.

The Metropolitan Museum connects its violin to this circle cautiously, and specifically to the 1559 marriage of the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de Valois, daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici, to the thirty-two-year-old Philip II of Spain, a marriage negotiated as part of the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis that ended decades of Habsburg-Valois war. The couple married by proxy at Notre-Dame in Paris in the summer of 1559, with the wedding tournament held on 30 June 1559 becoming infamous for the jousting accident that killed Henry II himself days later. The Museum's basis for the connection is decorative: the ornament on its violin resembles that on a small viola, or violetta, by Amati held in the Musee de la Musique in Paris, which is itself associated with this circle of instruments.

This is an argued position, not a documented one. No contract, inventory, or payment record known to the sources consulted names this specific violin as part of a gift for the 1559 wedding. The claim rests on a family resemblance between two decorated instruments made by the same workshop within a few years of each other, which is suggestive but not proof. The fleurs-de-lis on the back point toward a French royal association; the Latin motto's emphasis on the defense of religion reads plausibly as Counter-Reformation Catholic language appropriate to a marriage alliance with Spain's Catholic king; both observations are consistent with the Philip II theory without confirming it. This record states the connection exactly as speculative as the Museum itself states it, and no further.

Condition: what is 1560s work and what is later

Early violins are working objects, and almost none survive four and a half centuries without intervention. This instrument is no exception, and its catalogue description is unusually candid about where the line falls.

The back, ribs, and top are original sixteenth century material, as is the scroll and pegbox, carved from unfigured maple. What is not original is the neck: the scroll and pegbox have been grafted onto a modern neck, the standard alteration applied to nearly all playable early violins to accommodate the longer neck, altered neck angle, and greater string tension that became standard as musical practice and instrument technology changed between the Baroque and modern periods. A violin with its scroll intact but its neck replaced is, in the trade's own terms, in very good condition for its age; an unaltered neck on an instrument this old would be the exception, not the rule, and would usually indicate the instrument had been retired from playing use centuries ago rather than preserved through continuous use.

The decorative surface has also been touched since the sixteenth century. Traces of the original varnish and of the original oil-gilded, red-painted ornament survive beneath later protective coats, with retouching most evident around the pegbox gilding. The maker's label inside the instrument is a modern facsimile, meaning whatever label, if any, was originally present is lost and has been replaced with a reproduction, a common practice among dealers and restorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that this record treats as an alteration, not as evidence in itself of the instrument's date or maker.

The nineteenth century chain: from an unnamed first owner to Heron-Allen

The documented ownership history of this violin, as compiled by the Cozio Archive from dealer certificates and sale records, begins with a name given only as "Oliphant", with no further identification available in the sources consulted for this record; this record treats that name as an open question rather than a verified identity. The violin passed, at an unrecorded date, to a Miss Irene Pellew, who owned it until 1873, when it was sold via the London dealer Edward Withers to Sir Louis Mallet and, separately or subsequently, to a purchaser named Michael Longridge, with the dealer George Withers & Sons also handling the instrument around this period. The Cozio Archive's sequencing of these 1873 transactions is not fully explained in the material consulted, and this record reproduces it as given rather than resolving an order it cannot independently verify.

By 1885 the violin belonged to George Soames, and shortly after to Edward Heron-Allen, who owned it from 1885 to 1890. Heron-Allen is the first owner in this chain who is independently identifiable and significant in his own right: a London-based writer, palmist, science-fiction novelist, and serious amateur violin scholar, whose 1885 book "Violin-Making, As It Was and Is" was a standard reference for decades. That a serious violin historian owned this instrument for five years, in the very years he would have been researching and writing about historic Cremonese work, is a detail this record can state but cannot expand on further without his own papers, which were not consulted.

From Heron-Allen the violin passed to Sidney Courtauld, who held it until 1896, when it entered the stock of W. E. Hill & Sons, the London dealership that was, with the possible exception of its French counterparts, the most authoritative firm of Stradivari and Cremonese-instrument experts of its era; Hill & Sons issued a certificate for the violin and held or handled it until 1923. A Miss Hilda Barry owned it briefly from 1923, after which it passed through the American dealer Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. to Emil Herrmann, a prominent New York violin dealer active from 1927 onward, who also issued a certificate.

The twentieth century chain, and the name Kurtz

After Herrmann, the Cozio Archive's chain records the violin with a Dr. Steiner-Schweizer until 1930, then with Robert L. Dennison until 1940, then with Harry Wahl until 1941. In 1941 the violin passed to Arved Kurtz, a New York-based violinist, conductor, and music educator, whose name it has carried ever since.

Kurtz was born in Saint Petersburg on 29 June 1899 into a professional musical family; his brothers Edmund and Efrem Kurtz became, respectively, a cellist and a conductor of international standing. Arved Kurtz studied violin under Leopold Auer in Saint Petersburg and later in Germany and with Marcel Chailley in Paris. His performing career included leading a symphony orchestra in Stuttgart in 1927 and five years in the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera, followed by appointments as concertmaster at the Bayreuth Festival in 1931 and 1933 and a period teaching at the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide. He settled in New York, where he became director of the New York College of Music in 1945 and its president in 1952, retiring in 1965. He died in New York on 23 March 1995.

Kurtz was, in other words, a working professional violinist and later a conservatory administrator, not a passive investor; a musician of his training and generation would have owned a serious instrument to play, and a Renaissance Amati in a working violinist's hands for close to sixty years is itself part of the object's history, whether or not it was his primary performing instrument throughout that time. The sources consulted for this record do not state whether Kurtz performed on the violin regularly, kept it as a study or reference instrument, or both.

The Metropolitan Museum acquired the violin in 1999, four years after Kurtz's death, through the Robert Alonzo Lehman Bequest, with the credit line "Purchase, Robert Alonzo Lehman Bequest, 1999". The mechanism of the transfer from Kurtz's estate to the Museum, whether by direct estate sale, through an intermediary dealer, or by another route, is not documented in the sources consulted. Nor is the purchase price, which the Museum has not published in any source consulted for this record; museum purchase prices for instruments of this rarity are frequently withheld from the public record. The purchase fund's namesake, Robert Alonzo Lehman, has not been independently identified in the sources consulted for this record and should not be assumed to be the same person as the banker Robert Lehman (1891-1969), whose separate and far larger bequest of paintings, drawings and decorative arts forms the Robert Lehman Collection housed in its own wing of the Museum; whether the two Lehmans are related has not been established here.

The gap: three centuries with no named owner

Between an instrument made in Cremona around 1560, or around 1570 on the Cozio Archive's dating, and the earliest name in its documented ownership chain, an otherwise unidentified "Oliphant" who is not further dated in the sources consulted, lies a gap of at minimum two and a half centuries and quite possibly closer to three, during which no owner, location, or transaction is recorded in any source consulted for this record. This is not unusual for an instrument of this age and rarity: violins were working tools, passed within families, through teachers and pupils, and through provincial dealers who kept no lasting records, for centuries before the modern trade in historic instruments, anchored by firms like Hill & Sons, began to generate the kind of paper trail visible from the 1870s onward in this violin's own history.

If the violin does belong to the group associated with the 1559 Spanish royal marriage, as the Museum has speculated, then the gap covers the entire distance between a Renaissance European royal court and a Victorian English drawing room, with nothing in between. This record treats that gap as a finding, not as an invitation to bridge it with plausible-sounding guesswork.

The corpus problem: how confident is any Andrea Amati attribution

Every claim in this record about "Andrea Amati's" instruments rests on a reconstructed corpus, not a documented one. Only a small number of instruments carry dates that can be checked against independent evidence, and the reconstruction of Andrea's individual output has been complicated from within the workshop itself: his son Antonio joined the shop around 1556, well before the period from which most surviving instruments date, and scholars who have examined the surviving works in detail have raised, without resolving, the question of how much of the work conventionally given to "Andrea Amati" alone in the 1560s and 1570s in fact involved Antonio's hand. Differences in soundhole design between earlier and later instruments in the accepted corpus, more rounded on some, straighter and smaller on others, have been read by different observers either as Andrea's own stylistic development late in life or as evidence of a second hand at work.

None of the sources consulted for this record argue that the Metropolitan's violin specifically should be reattributed away from Andrea; the point is broader. An attribution to "Andrea Amati" for any instrument from this period is an attribution to a reconstructed workshop hand built up over more than a century of connoisseurship, dealer certification, and, more recently, dendrochronology, rather than to a documented individual act of making. This record treats the Metropolitan's own attribution as sound while flagging that the underlying method, for this maker as for most sixteenth century makers, is inference rather than record.

What is unresolved

Several questions raised by this violin's own catalogue and provenance material have no answer in the sources consulted for this record. They are recorded as open rather than smoothed over.

The identity of "Oliphant", the earliest recorded owner in the Cozio Archive's chain, is unknown, as is the date at which that ownership began or ended. The three-century gap between the workshop and the mid-nineteenth century is undocumented. The Metropolitan Museum's dating of about 1560 and the Cozio Archive's dating of about 1570 for the same instrument are a decade apart, and no source consulted explains the discrepancy or attempts to reconcile it. The connection to the 1559 Philip II and Elisabeth de Valois marriage remains an argued decorative comparison, not a documented fact, and the sources consulted do not identify who first proposed it or in what publication the argument was made in full. The purchase price paid by the Museum in 1999 has not been published in any source consulted. The exact mechanism by which the violin passed from Arved Kurtz's estate, following his death in 1995, to the Museum's 1999 acquisition is not documented in the sources consulted. And the identity of "Robert Alonzo Lehman", the purchase fund's namesake, and his relationship, if any, to the banker Robert Lehman of the Robert Lehman Collection, has not been established here.