Questions & Answers

Egad, A Strad!

Here at Animato we receive calls regularly from people who think they have stumbled across a real Stradivarius violin. Is it a real one? That's the question.

During the last half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries literally hundreds of thousands of cheap student violins were made in southern Germany and Bohemia and supplied with fascsimile Stradivarius labels.

Most of these instruments vaguely followed a Stradivari pattern, and the label was added just to complete the effect. Sometimes the names of other famous masters such as Amati, Guarneri, or Stainer were used as well. There was no intent to defraud, because at the time Antonio Stradivari had been dead at least 150 years, and these were shiny, brand-new violins. The problem is that many of these violins now are well over 100 years old, and what was once an innocent practice can lead many people to believe they represent something of value. 

Indeed, most such violins have little commercial value. They can be fixed up and used by students, but modern student violins are often superior to those made 100 or so years ago and it is sometimes preferable to acquire  a new one, rather than to carry the cost to repair the old one.

Antonio Stradivari lived and worked in Cremona, Italy from 1644 until 1737. During his long life he made more than 1000 violins of which something over half are known to be still in existence. (The exact number depends on who you ask.) The remainder have been destroyed in fires, wars, floods, and other disasters. Only those violins that can be documented as the personal work of Stradivari are genuine, and all of them have been known and zealously guarded at least since the mid-nineteenth century. They have been documented beyond reasonable question. They have always been valuable, even when they were new. Therefore the chance of anyone's discovering a previously unknown one is so remote as to be virtually nil.

Adding to the confusion, there are also in existence a considerable number of copies, replicas, and outright fakes that may be quite decent although not particularly valuable instruments.

If you have an old violin - no matter what quality or condition - you are more than welcome to bring it into Animato for us to look at.