The Wright Brothers. Edison. Tesla. Amati. We fly. We read at night. We use electric motors everyday. We play violins. Check that. We hear violins, even in some rock music. Anyway, the guys I mentioned all invented something enduring.
Nicholas Amati, a luthier in Cremona, survived that region’s plague in 1630. The other luthiers in his family, the people who taught and supported his violin-making, died in that plague. Amati then went on supposedly to influence Antonio Stradivari, the guy whose surviving violins are worth a bunch of money. His 1716 “Messiah Stradivarius” has an estimated worth of at least $20,000,000. But this is not a history lesson on violins. What Amati, and then Stradivari, did was to set in motion exquisite refinements of the Cremona-style instrument, one with four strings. (That fourth string was introduced by Nicholas Amati’s grandfather, Andrea) The improvements in violins were the product of experimentation.
The rise of the violin paralleled the rise in a kind of thinking that permeates modern society: Humanism. That’s interesting in many ways, but in one that I find particularly curious. One specific violin from the sixteenth century, supposedly the work of Andrea Amati and bearing the coat of arms of Charles IX of France, is highly decorated and bears the motto “Quo unico propugnaculo stat stabiq religio” (“By this defense alone religion shall stand”). Yet, the experimentation and reliance on the individual that resulted in the fashioning of that violin was, in fact, part of what led to a rise in humanism and the downplay on dogmatism. Your sense of who you are and how you should approach understanding the world are related more to the making of that violin than they are to the motto it bears.
As the Renaissance progressed, critical and scientific thinking evolved, much like the violin that began as a three-stringed instrument. The versatility of the instrument increased dramatically, enhanced by changes in width, length, and shape of sound hole, plus the wood craftsmanship of people like the Amatis and Stradivari. All the while the rise of secularism, reliance on human ingenuity, experimentation, and unceasing questioning permeated more segments of society.
We hear violins today in soundtracks from movies, at concerts, and in solo performances. We say the instrument is, like other string instruments, pleasing because it uses “strings,” just as our vocal chords use “strings.” The instrument mimics the human voice. We should note that that instrument also gave rise to voice in another sense, the voice of the individual.
Nicholas Amati, a luthier in Cremona, survived that region’s plague in 1630. The other luthiers in his family, the people who taught and supported his violin-making, died in that plague. Amati then went on supposedly to influence Antonio Stradivari, the guy whose surviving violins are worth a bunch of money. His 1716 “Messiah Stradivarius” has an estimated worth of at least $20,000,000. But this is not a history lesson on violins. What Amati, and then Stradivari, did was to set in motion exquisite refinements of the Cremona-style instrument, one with four strings. (That fourth string was introduced by Nicholas Amati’s grandfather, Andrea) The improvements in violins were the product of experimentation.
The rise of the violin paralleled the rise in a kind of thinking that permeates modern society: Humanism. That’s interesting in many ways, but in one that I find particularly curious. One specific violin from the sixteenth century, supposedly the work of Andrea Amati and bearing the coat of arms of Charles IX of France, is highly decorated and bears the motto “Quo unico propugnaculo stat stabiq religio” (“By this defense alone religion shall stand”). Yet, the experimentation and reliance on the individual that resulted in the fashioning of that violin was, in fact, part of what led to a rise in humanism and the downplay on dogmatism. Your sense of who you are and how you should approach understanding the world are related more to the making of that violin than they are to the motto it bears.
As the Renaissance progressed, critical and scientific thinking evolved, much like the violin that began as a three-stringed instrument. The versatility of the instrument increased dramatically, enhanced by changes in width, length, and shape of sound hole, plus the wood craftsmanship of people like the Amatis and Stradivari. All the while the rise of secularism, reliance on human ingenuity, experimentation, and unceasing questioning permeated more segments of society.
We hear violins today in soundtracks from movies, at concerts, and in solo performances. We say the instrument is, like other string instruments, pleasing because it uses “strings,” just as our vocal chords use “strings.” The instrument mimics the human voice. We should note that that instrument also gave rise to voice in another sense, the voice of the individual.
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