Chapter IX: Violin Varnish

When a true chemist enters a laboratory fitted up with the usual mysterious tubes, crucibles, “baths,” and general apparatus for distillation, and his nose scents the aroma of gums, spirits, essential oils, and what not, he experiences an atmospheric sensation which enthuses him for his work. What the odour of stables is to the lover of horses, or the smell of paint to the artist, that is the laboratory aroma to the chemist.

I have no insight into crucibles, and I don’t like smells. The proportion of subtle weights and measures, avoirdupois or troy, are beyond me; the disputations of science and the general incapacity of scientists to agree about mixed problems puzzles and sometimes “impatients” me, as the French say.

In wading through various treatises on Cremona varnish I regret to say I have experienced vague emotions of annoyance and perplexity which I would fain conceal from the reader. I should like to pose as the clear exponent of the famous Cremona secret, or hold some one fixed opinion, buttressed by arguments weighty enough to confound all opponents, and based upon the “triumphs of modern research.” The triumph of modern research seems to me to consist in the discovery that we have as yet failed to discover the Cremona varnish, as, although we may speculate about it and at moments seem to come very near the mark, as yet we cannot make the stuff, or, at all events, apply it in Cremona fashion to our new fiddles.

It may be consoling, but not very satisfactory, to reflect that no one has mixed it or applied it in Cremona fashion since about 1750; but that fact only serves to whet the curious appetite, and each writer braces himself for renewed disquisitions, visits workshops, and scrapes bits off Cremonas when he can, perhaps dabbles himself with gums and alcohol, and pumps fiddle-makers with a view to wringing the secret out of the Cremona sphynx.

So entirely mixed is the whole subject that the violin world can’t even decide in what the proper functions of the varnish consist. One maintains that it is merely for the preservation of the wood, another that it greatly affects the tone, and the third that it is chiefly decorative.

To me it seems almost a truism to say that the varnish is good for all three purposes: that it preserves the wood is certain, though exactly how is open to discussion; that it affects the tone is equally certain, though exactly how is still a moot point; that it is decorative is obvious, though taste in the colouring has varied with each school of makers as much as some makers have varied with themselves.

For my part, after reading a dozen disquisitions on the Cremona varnish, and inspecting hundreds of fiddles for a quarter of a century, I applaud the courage and reticence of Mr George Hart, who, in his valuable book on old violins, gives just five pages on Italian varnish, with an intelligent description of its various appearances, a brief quotation from the inimitable writer Charles Reade, and not a single recipe.

As I am not writing for violin-makers, but only for collectors, I shall certainly not rush in where authorities like Mr Hart fear to tread, and shall content myself with a few probable suppositions and a few more generally descriptive remarks.

Some authorities maintain that the wood should be first saturated with oil before the colouring varnish is applied, a practice which has a tendency to clog the pores, so that until some age has been put on and the wood has become desiccated and shaken free from the grosser oily particles, the vibrations are stifled and the tone consequently dull.

Others declare that the sizing of oil should not penetrate the wood far, but leave it free to desiccate by itself, and merely act as a sort of veneer for the colour varnish which has got to be spread over the transparent oil covering. The wood, in fact, has to be sized first and varnished afterwards. Taking this view, the process would be something of this kind: The white belly is cut from fine pine which has been six or seven years drying in the sun, but never exposed to rain and waits patiently for its anointing. A stick of that resinous gum beloved of artists, gamboge yellow, from Gamboga, Siam, or China, is then powdered and dissolved in pure alcohol; sloes are sometimes added, or when a yellow ground is not desired, sandarak and the long resinous tears of benzoin are treated with pure alcohol. When the back, belly, and ribs are thoroughly dry, the colouring, like a flavouring to taste, is added.

The chief colouring ingredients appear to be of two kinds of sandal-wood, one yielding red orange tints, from Calcutta, and the other a deeper red, from the Coromandel Coast. An alcoholic solution of these is mixed with essential oil of turpentine, freely oxydised (or exposed to the air) and laid on the perfectly dry surface in successive layers, each layer being allowed to dry separately.

The colour coating thus lies like an agate film over the oil sizing, and through the top varnish as through coloured glass may be seen--dyed orange, or red, or brown--all the delicate curls and fibres of the wood, shown up as by a kind of Röntgen rays by the oil size.

We are told that the resins used may be divided into hard and soft, and that of these the soft, such as mastic and dammar, are the best, because the most elastic and friendly to the waves of vibration. The mastic and dammar resins seem to unite, in the greatest perfection, the three essential properties most suitable for varnish--elasticity, solidity, and transparency.

The Cremonese are said to have used nothing but the soft resins. The much-talked-of, old-fashioned dragon’s blood, a resinous gum from the Draconian Draco, does not seem now to be commonly forthcoming. The Calami Draco of Borneo has taken its place. The old dragon’s blood has been much talked about, and credited with giving a certain splendid sanguineous flush to some of the rare Cremonese bellies upon which the judicious amateur dotes.

And now, what is amber varnish? The usual answer is, there is no such thing. Certainly it was never used by Stradivari, for it is said the secret of fusing that hard gum was only discovered by Martin the chemist in 1737, the year of Stradivari’s death. On the other hand, I hear that amber has been found in the varnish of Giuseppe del Gesù--by what analysis I do not know. The usual way of rubbing a violin and smelling the surface has always seemed to me to furnish a most unreliable test. One saith, “I smell benzoin”; or another, “I smell mastic”; and a third, “I smell amber”; and a fourth, “I smell nought”; and this battle of olfactory organs is like to go on, as saith the poet--

“As long as man has passions,
As long as life has woes”;

or, as we may say--

“As long as man has nose.”

So here I desire to take my leave of this thorny subject, and with a sense of relief I abandon crucibles to the expert, and oils and resins to the disputatious, merely reminding our collectors for practical purpose that the Brescian varnish is soft and brown, but without the magical Cremonese transparency; the Cremona is amber-coloured (early) or (later) light red orange, and sometimes velvety brown, and very soft and glossy as it rubs away.

The Venetian varnish of many shades is very clear; the Stainer, yellow-brown, with a subtle roseate flush at times; the normal German, brown and muddy; the French, Cremonese in colour, but glassy and chipping rather than soft and glossy. Some of the English varnish is remarkable, that of Dodd even approximating closely to the Cremona school, etc.

On the whole, the best solution of the Cremona mystery seems to me that it was probably no mystery at all, which also best accounts for the disappearance of the varnish towards the middle of the eighteenth century. It is absurd to suppose that the varnish used by at least one hundred makers for more than one hundred years (for Italian violins from 1550 to 1660 up to 1740 all have it) could have been a secret; it was probably the ordinary varnish of commerce, superseded by the quicker and more convenient spirit-varnishes which came in and thrust it out of the market, and these ready-made compounds proved excellent for furniture which is not prized for its resonant or variously tinted qualities, but they unfortunately put out of court the kind of varnish best suited for violins--the yielding, soft, elastic oil varnish; and the very ingredients, _e.g._ dragon blood (of the liliaceæ trees), ceased to be in demand, and consequently disappeared from the Italian markets.

The materials being now absent, the varnish was differently composed. The trick of mixing it got lost along with the stuff to be mixed, and the Cremonese secret, once an open secret, lapsed and lapsed, as it seems, most irrecoverably.

At one time every one knew how the ancient war-galleys were rowed; how the Pyramids were built; how Stonehenge was poised; how the Medicean poisons were distilled, and how the old masters mixed their colours; now no one knows.

Of the Cremona varnish it must be written, as we have to write of these unexplained disappearances of the lost and missing--

“Gone, and made no sign.”