Cremona has not always thought itself particularly lucky to have this tradition; in fact for years it didn’t seem to care at all. By the late nineteenth century violins had been largely forgotten: like Stradivari’s varnish, the knowledge had been almost completely lost. And then a fascist dictator stepped in. Perhaps it was one of the few good things he did in his life, and his motives were certainly dubiously nationalistic ones, but in 1937 Benito Mussolini started a school for violin-making—and opened a music museum to celebrate the city’s past.
The Stradivari Museum in Cremona was built at speed, and it shows. With its dry displays of old carpentry tools scattered between bits of instruments (none of them Strads) it must qualify as one of the most boring museums about an interesting subject in the whole of Europe. It houses the unique forms that the master used to make his instruments, but there is little effort to explain them to a non-expert. However, there was one item that for me at least was worth the entrance fee: a letter, in Stradivari’s own hand, talking about the varnish. “Most illustrious, most reverend and worthy Patron,” he had written on August 12, 1708. “I beg you will forgive the delay with the violins occasioned by the varnishing of the large cracks, that the sun may not re-open them.” The handwriting is of a man who was an artisan rather than a scholar; he even, charmingly, decorated his Fs and the tails of the Ps, with curls that are reminiscent of the curved F-hole on the front of every violin. Stradivari’s letter ends with his deliciously cheeky bill: “For my work, please send me a filippo, it is worth more, but for the pleasure of serving you I am satisfied with this sum.”
That sentence about the “varnishing of the large cracks” has been examined and unravelled numerous times over the intervening centuries to see what clues it might reveal about the secret of Stradivari—and of the Amatis before him. The varnish must have been very soft for it to take so long to dry. Was the sun-drying part of the secret? people have wondered. And was Stradivari’s recipe similar to that of Jan van Eyck, who used to put his altarpieces outside to dry in the sunshine—and once left one out so long that the whole painting split apart?3
Stradivari’s “varnish” letter
A student was manning the museum’s front desk. “Why Cremona?” I asked him. He shrugged and said he didn’t know. But he passed me an expensive color book in English about the history of the violin. I flicked through it and suddenly a single paragraph caught my eye. It explained how the instrument-making tradition started in 1499 when a man called Giovanni Leonardo da Martinengo arrived in town. He was a lute-maker and a Sephardic Jew, and many years later he would teach his art to two brothers: Andrea and Giovanni Antonio Amati. In the 1550s Andrea would make some of the first violins, after a musician in nearby Brescia decided to take a bow to the lute-guitar and play it like an Arabic rebab rather than plucking it. And two generations later, Andrea’s grandson Niccolo would teach this new craft to both Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri.
This might, I realized, be the answer to my question. Perhaps it all started in Cremona because one day a man turned up at the gates of the city, a man who had such knowledge that when he passed on his skills to two talented boys they became geniuses. He must also have had a rare knowledge of varnish: nobody knows where the recipe came from, but the Amatis must have learned it from someone, as it is there in their earliest pieces. 4
We know almost nothing about this lute-maker except the year he arrived, the fact that he must have been one of the thousands of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and that by the time of a census in 1526 he had the two Amatis (Andrea would have been twenty-one by then) working in his shop. We don’t even know his real name: Martinengo is a town in Austrian Italy where he may have lived for a while, Leonardo could have been his baptismal name—if he had been one of the thousands of Spanish Jews who turned Christian 5— and Giovanni is an Italian version of Juan. So our luthier’s name was itself a collection of stories. He was a composite man—made up of many different parts, rather like one of his own lutes.
I think of him that first day in Cremona not as a man exhausted after a long journey, but as a storyteller walking proudly along the Via Brescia toward the center of town, surely attracting the attention of local urchins, who would be fascinated by the strange deep-bellied beast that he carried and which they would have pestered him to play. And perhaps he would have sat down and strummed them a ballad. Not for too long: like many instrument-makers he would probably never have thought of himself as a musician; but also he may not have wanted to think too much about the home he had lost. It would hurt too much.
What could this man have seen in those seven years? Had the terrible times won out, or had the experience of journeying through Europe just as the Renaissance was starting brought him and his art alive? Either way, something happened, because the skills taught by this refugee to those two Italian boys had not been taught before. Half the Jews in Spain went to Portugal. I hope for Martinengo’s sake he wasn’t one of them. A wealthy man had paid a ducat a head to the King of Portugal, which bought him and half his countrymen the right to stay for six months. After their time was up, the Portuguese treated them as cruelly as the Spanish, and the lucky ones left. It was their second sad exodus in a year.
Our luthier would have eventually headed east through the Mediterranean, and as he travelled he would have inevitably collected objects and colors and experiences that would be useful to him later. I imagine he was a creative, experimental and individualistic man. And he was certainly moving inexorably into the kind of world that valued exactly those qualities. Today there is a desire among some artists to rediscover the methods of the past—hence the interest in Stradivari’s orange varnish. But this search for something “authentic” is nothing new; art history is so full of nostalgia that to some extent it has been shaped by it. The search for lost knowledge has been a driving force in many art movements. The Victorians created neo-Gothic, but the creators of what was called Gothic were simply harking back to an imagined time in the Dark Ages. Even Roman style was neo-Greek.
And in the same way it was almost by chance that the end of the fifteenth century was a time of discovery. Because for the people actually living through it, it would have seemed more like a time of rediscovery. Artists and architects were busy trying to regain the spirit of Ancient Rome, while priests were trying to recapture the sense of wonder in the early Church. Even navigators were trying to rediscover rather than discover: Columbus’s original brief was not to find new land, but to investigate an alternative trading route to Asia. So a brilliant young artisan travelling through the Mediterranean would, in the spirit of his time, have been fascinated by the wealth of old materials. And he could well have sampled them all—the woods, the pigments, the oils and the varnishes—in an attempt to try to re-create the best instruments from the past: the Stradivaris of his own time.
BASTARD SAFFRON AND THE BLOOD OF DRAGONS
Jews were more welcome in Muslim North Africa than in Catholic France. So Martinengo’s first stops would probably have been the southern ports—Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli. And in the covered bazaars of those cities this Renaissance refugee would have found the first of many potential coloring ingredients for his portable studio: an orange flower, rather like a marigold.
Safflower is unusual: if you add alkalis to the dye broth it is yellow; with acids it goes a beautiful crimson pink which is the color of the original “red” tape once tied around legal documents in England and now gives its name to any bureaucratic knotty procedures. It would have been known to traders in the busy North African bazaars for more generations than anyone could count: Ancient Egyptians used it to dye mummy wrappings and to turn their ceremonial ointments an oily orange. They valued it so much that they put garlands of safflowers entwined with willow leaves in their relatives’ tombs, to comfort them after death.
It is also a plant to be wary of. Throughout its five thousand years of cultivation, safflower pickers have been easily spotted going to work in the fields—they have been t
he ones with leather chaps from thigh to boot to protect them from its spines. Today, if safflower stems get into the throat of a combine harvester, it is almost impossible to get them out. “Burn the combine” is the joke solution.6 And an American safflower producer in the 1940s had a favorite story of a dog he saw chasing a rabbit: just when it seemed to be caught the rabbit dashed into a safflower field. The dog followed, but a few seconds later was seen sheepishly backing out, one paw at a time.
For buyers of colors, safflower is a dye to be careful of too, especially if you are not looking for it. This plant has been switched so often for another more expensive yellow dye that one of its names is “bastard saffron.” And indeed nobody is actually sure of its parentage—whether it first came from India or North Africa. It is celebrated in both places, and in India and Nepal it has been a holy color, perhaps because it is close to the color of gold. I remember visiting the great Buddhist stupa of Bodhnath just outside Kathmandu and seeing how its pure white body was marked by swirling rust-like stains. At first I thought it was a shame, but then I was told it was a sign that a devotee had given donations to the temple. Washing a few buckets of safflower over such an important stupa is equal to lighting thousands of butter lamps, and is excellent for karma.
But no offerings to their own God seemed to help the Jews in those difficult days of the 1490s. As Martinengo may have found, even North Africa was not a reliable refuge. There were stories of the Moors banning Jews from the cities, and forcing them to stay in the countryside—where they starved. So if our refugee had the money he would have continued along the coast, looking for somewhere to live peacefully. And the next major stop—avoiding Sicily, part of the Spanish empire and another place from which Jews had been exiled—would be Alexandria. In that busy port, named after Alexander the Great, a wandering lute-maker would have found a marketplace full of exciting materials.
Dragon’s blood tree seventeenth-century woodcut
One of them was “dragon’s blood,” which had been carried up the Red Sea in ships from Yemen and perhaps even from the islands that today make up Indonesia. If he had taken the time, Martinengo could have sat down in the market and heard the stories of how this brownish-red powder had gained its curious name. For a few coins, people would have told him as many tales of saints and princes and maidens and great angry green beasts as he would have had the time to hear. Perhaps he would have been disappointed to hear eventually that it was simply the sap of a special “dragon’s blood” tree, so called because the resin was so dark it must surely be reptilian. Cennino Cennini, a century earlier, hadn’t liked it. “Leave it alone,” he warned his readers. But the colored resin is highly prized for violins, even today.
The sheer range of oils from nuts and seeds in the bazaars of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean would have been intoxicating. Linseed oil was the new material for artists, and had recently replaced tempera as a binding ingredient. But there would also be oils from cloves and aniseed, walnut and safflower, as well as from the seed of the opium poppy.7 There would have been many gums and resins in these markets for our lute-maker to bind his wood with: sandarac resin from North African pines, gum arabic from Egypt, gum benjamin (now called benzoin) from Sumatra; gum tragacanth from Aleppo, which would be sold as thin and wrinkled worm-like pieces of shrub.8 Gums and resins come from trees—but gums turn to jelly when they are mixed with water, while resins only dissolve in oils, alcohol and the spirit of turpentine.
The tale of how the Ottoman ruler Bezar II had mocked Spain for expelling the Jews is perhaps apocryphal, but news travels fast among beleaguered people, and the legend of how he had said: “You call Ferdinand a wise king, he who impoverished his country and enriched mine” may well have travelled down to the Jewish communities in Egypt within months. They would have found it immensely comforting. And for Martinengo it may have provided the reason to move on from Alexandria: this time to Turkey, home of the lute.
He would take with him red brasilwood from the East Indies— a dye-wood that was so valued that when a few years later the Portuguese found it in the New World, they would name a country after it. Ironically another dye from the Americas would cast it out of favor, and when cochineal had taken over from all the other organic reds, brasilwood was worth next to nothing; it could sometimes just be found rotting at the docks. It was in this cheapened state that violin bow-makers discovered it in the eighteenth century, and pernambucco—the finest brasil from Brazil, so strong it almost resembles iron—became the favored material for good bows. One celebrated English bow-maker called James Tubbs was known for his extraordinary chocolate-colored pernambucco. Some said he stained it with stale urine, although when I tried this—a process I cannot recommend—it made the wood more treacly than chocolatey: a slight shade darker than in its natural state and just a little shinier. Perhaps it made a difference that I hadn’t consumed a bottle of whiskey that day. Tubbs was known to have enjoyed his drink.
Martinengo would have found a ship heading north, bisecting the Mediterranean and then taking him along the Turkish coast. And on the way he would have wanted to stop on the island of Chios, almost within hailing distance of the mainland. For Chios was the home of one of the most important items in a stringed instrument-maker’s workbox: a lemon-colored resin that is so chewy it is called “mastic.” And which was then so highly priced it would have made anyone gulp. But if, arriving at the port, our travelling lute-maker had asked to see the famous Pistacia lentiscus trees for himself, then people in town would have smiled sadly and shaken their heads. And if he had found someone to translate then he would have heard a story that would have reminded him of his own troubles as a man punished for his faith.
The legend tells of how a Roman soldier called Isidore landed there one day in 250 A.D. He was a Christian, and he refused to make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The Governor thought carefully about this odd man, and decided he would first be whipped and then burned alive for his insolence. But when the Roman soldiers tied Isidore to a stake, the flames played over him but they did not burn his flesh. So they tied him to a horse and dragged him over the rocks on the south side of the island; and just in case that hadn’t killed him, they cut off his head.
At that moment, the story goes, every tree on the south side of the island wept for the martyr, and their tears hardened, and became mastic. And it turned out to be not only an excellent golden varnish for paintings and for musical instruments, but also a natural chewing gum. It was, and still is, collected every summer by making cuts in the trunks of the little mastic trees. After a few hours the trees weep for St. Isidore, and the resin falls onto the carefully cleaned ground.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Genoese, Venetians and Pisans fought for possession of the island and of its prized crop. And each time it was the people of Chios who wept. The Genoese were the cruellest, banning anybody from even touching the trees: sometimes they would kill the offenders; sometimes they would remove their right hands or noses. It was ironic to lose your nose for the sake of a breath freshener.
In the late fifteenth century the island was under Ottoman control and punishments were lighter, but the villagers were still weighed down by oppressive taxation. It was the privilege of the Sultan’s mother to take what she wanted for the royal harem. And she wanted a lot—one year Chios had to supply Constantinople with 3,000 kilos. Either she sold it quietly in the bazaar or there were a lot of women in that harem with bad breath or a chewing-gum addiction. In the 1920s a French traveller, Francesco Perilla, wrote about going to dinner with a family on Chios. He was given a lump of mastic at the end of the meal, and put it in his mouth uncertainly. “The old mistress of the house asked me to give it to her. I was not happy, but I had to do it,” Perilla recalled.9 “The lady then took the gum and put it in her own mouth, and gravely told me I was doing it wrong.” To the visitor’s horror she then took the chewed piece out of her mouth and “with a gracious gesture offered it back to me, insisting I learn ‘how to do it.’ I
tried every excuse I could think of, but in the end it was too hard to say no. So with eyes closed I had to accept it and taste it. I even had to smile.”
It was this chewiness which attracted artists to mastic. Cennino used it for pulling the impurities out of lapis lazuli to make it into blue pigment, and for sticking broken pottery back together. And dissolved in turpentine or alcohol it certainly makes a beautiful varnish for paintings. There is just one problem. It doesn’t mix well with oil. Mastic was one of the main culprits in a major misjudgment of materials in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just as, a few decades later, the violin world would be full of questions about Stradivari’s varnish, in the 1760s the art world was full of questions about what the Old Masters could have used to get the incredible glow to their work that is so characteristic of works by Rubens or Rembrandt.
In the 1760s there was tremendous excitement about a substance called “megilp,” which was a combination of mastic and linseed oil. It made a beautiful buttery varnish, which was satisfyingly thick to apply and gave an instant mellow golden quality to the painting. Megilp sounds like an ugly made-up word, and probably is. It was also sometimes called “majellup,” which could well be a shortening of “mastic jelly”—and it was certainly a very jelly-like substance. Joshua Reynolds was one of its greatest fans, despite cautions from the Irish artist James Barry, who warned him about people “who are floating about after Magilphs and mysteries.” 10 Separately both mastic and linseed are wonderful on paintings: it is just their jellified marriage which is so dangerous. In 1789 Reynolds was commissioned by Noel Desenfans, the founder of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, to copy a portrait he had done five years before—of the actress Sarah Siddons as a tragic muse sitting on an armchair so huge it is almost a balcony. He was in a hurry—or perhaps he allowed his dislike of Desenfans to affect his choice of materials—and instead of replicating the twenty or so layers of paint in the original11 he used megilp to give the impression of thickly applied paint. Probably because of this the later picture—now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery—has darkened prematurely, making her a doubly tragic muse. Nearby is another prime example of the degradation of megilp in Reynolds’s work. A Girl with a Baby is thought to be a portrait of the future Lady Hamilton with her first child. “It has, by an interesting irony, degraded disastrously into something that looks like a strikingly modern proto-Renoir,” the curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Ian Dejardin, told me, adding that it was therefore the favorite painting of a “frightening” number of people who leave the Gallery convinced that Reynolds was the first Impressionist, and complaining about the label on the painting, which describes it as “ruinous.”12 Needless to say, J.M.W. Turner, always so careless of his materials, was also an enthusiastic user of this gloriously sticky-textured but deceitful mixture.