FROM CREMONA TO MEXICO

Right Three inlaid instruments by Marcello Villa at the exhibition

Designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the Museo Internacional del Barroco stands out strikingly against the volcanic landscape surrounding Puebla, the building’s fascinating white shapes surrounded by pools of water. Inside, the exhibition halls, like all the other rooms, are spacious, wonderfully lit, and modular so as to accommodate any kind of exhibition.

In 2017, just a year after the museum opened, its director Jorge Lozoya, who had visited the successful Museo del Violino (MdV) exhibition at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix in 2016, invited the MdV to produce a similar exhibition for the Mexican public.

The exhibition ‘The Violins of Cremona: Stradivari, the Baroque and Beyond’ opened on 1 June 2019 and runs until 20 October 2019. Once again the choice of the MdV staff, led by general director Virginia Villa and curator Fausto Cacciatori, was to offer a historical pathway through the 500-year Cremonese violin making tradition, adding a special focus on Baroque instruments and the transition to modern ones. This was done as a homage to Puebla and its Baroque heritage, but also to underline the importance of Cremona as a source of Baroque music, having been the birthplace of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643).

The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Amati family, and features the decorated ‘Charles IX’ violin by Andrea Amati, which was made for the eponymous king of France in around 1560; and the ‘Hammerle’ violin from 1658, a beautiful example of Nicolo Amati’s craftsmanship.

The second room hosts Antonio Stradivari’s ‘Marquis de Riviere’ violin of c.1718 and the ‘Prince Doria’ Guarneri ‘del Gesu’ violin of 1734 – two magnificent instruments exhibited courtesy of private owners, through the Friends of Stradivari network. Following these is a series of equally wonderful instruments: a very interesting viola by Lorenzo Storioni (1780), a ‘piccolo violino’ by Giovanni Battista Ceruti (1802) and a viola by Gaetano Antoniazzi (1886), from the MdV collection, as examples of the post-’golden period’ of Cremonese violin making.

The area dedicated to the Baroque features copies of Baroque instruments from the Didactical Museum of the International Violin Making School in Cremona, together with all the necessary information about the modernisation of stringed instruments as well as a beautiful copy of the Stradivari ‘Cipriani Potter’ violin, made by Portuguese maker Joaquim Domingos Capela and donated to the city of Cremona in 2015.

Another attractive corner shows a copy of the ‘Axelrod quartet’, four inlaid Stradivari instruments donated by Herbert Axelrod to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. Axelrod commissioned the copies from the Cremonese luthier Marcello Villa, who did an excellent job. The instruments were subsequently donated to the MdV.

Last but not least, two precious showcases proudly display original artefacts from Stradivari’s workshops, including moulds, templates, writings and tools. Didactical panels, photos, timetables and videos complete the exhibition, giving a real sense of what violin making was and still is in Cremona, and inviting everybody to visit this city, whose tradition has been designated ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ by Unesco.