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A Guarneri Violin in the Attic: the Power of Dendrochronology for Analysing Musical Instruments Mauro Bernabei*

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A Guarneri Violin in the Attic: the Power of Dendrochronology for Analysing Musical Instruments Mauro Bernabei* Bernabei Herit Sci (2021) 9:47 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-021-00521-4 RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access A Guarneri violin in the attic: the power of dendrochronology for analysing musical instruments Mauro Bernabei* Abstract Dendrochronology is the science that dates wooden artefacts by measuring annual growth rings visible in the wood. And, in the case of musical instruments, the method is non-invasive. In addition, dendrochronology can also help to identify the wood’s provenance and to supply information on how the soundboard was made, giving details of ring width and regularity. This study also demonstrates the efectiveness of dendrochronology in attributing a musi- cal instrument to an important luthier. It deals with a privately owned violin, whose date and origin had previously remained uncertain, despite various attempts to authenticate, at least, its technical and stylistic characteristics. The outermost tree-ring of the instrument’s soundboard was dendrochronologically dated to the year 1696 and attrib- uted, with certainty, to the Italian luthier Giuseppe Guarneri flius Andreae, father of the famous Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri "del Gesù". Thanks to dendrochronology, in this way, a twin of an already existing violin has been identifed that was made by the same luthier. Both violins are identical in construction, having the same veining and dimen- sions, and the wood from the same tree was used in all parts, including the soundboard. Dendrochronology has, thus, been proven to be an extremely useful method, which has transformed a violin of uncertain value into a museum piece. Keywords: Dendrochronology, Attribution, Musical instrument, Guarneri, Violin, Dating Introduction from the Trentino to Carnia, to Cadore (Friuli Venezia Dendrochronology is a wood-dating technique, based on Giulia) and to Slovenia [5]. Other well-known areas, measuring the growth rings of trees [1] that has found especially for non-Italian luthiers, are the Bavarian for- its ideal application in dating musical instruments [2]. ests, Tyrol and some parts of Switzerland (Obersaxen, In bowed string instruments, the soundboard, which is for example). Further sites are located in Eastern Europe, the front that characterises the instrument’s sound, is including some woodlands in Poland, Romania and most often made of Norway spruce (Picea abies Karst.), southern Russia [6]. a “resonance wood” that is easily dated dendrochrono- Generally, the wood selected by luthiers follows strict logically [3]. In most cases, the wood traditionally used specifcations: it must be without imperfections like by the greatest luthiers came from well-defned locations, knots, reaction wood or fbrous anomalies, and it gener- famous for this use, and generally limited to the central ally comes from high-altitude woodlands. Eastern Alps, with small isolated pockets also in Central In synthesis, the most important aspects in the dendro- Europe [4]. In the Alps, the best-known locations range chronological study of musical instruments are: 1 the species, Norway spruce, which is perfectly suited *Correspondence: [email protected] CNR-IBE, Institute for BioEconomy, National Research Council, via Biasi 75, to dendrochronological analyses; 38010 SanMichele all’Adige, Trento, Italy © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://​creat​iveco​ mmons.​org/​licen​ses/​by/4.​0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://​creat​iveco​mmons.​org/​publi​cdoma​in/​ zero/1.​0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Bernabei Herit Sci (2021) 9:47 Page 2 of 8 2 limited and well-known areas of provenance that Materials and methods facilitate the selection of corresponding reference Te violin is inherited and private property. In order to chronologies; date it dendrochronologically, its annual growth rings 3 wood that is free of defects, with narrow and regular were measured on both sides of the soundboard, directly annual rings typical of high-altitude trees. from the images sent by the owner via WhatsApp. In these early photos, the chinrest and tailpiece are still All these characteristics lend greater reliability to the attached to the violin (Fig. 1). dating of musical instruments, when compared with Dendrochronological measurements were taken where other applications of dendrochronology such as dating the largest number of annual rings could be included, the wooden structure of historical buildings, wooden using two techniques: sculptures or panel paintings. Less well known is the fact that, using dendrochronol- 1 Te photos were printed and the rings measured ogy, a musical instrument may be attributed to a particu- using a LINTAB (LINear TABle, Rinn Tech, Ger- lar luthier. Te logic behind this is that modern luthiers, many), with the software TSAP-Win (Rinn Tech, just like their historical counterparts, carefully consider Germany); the characteristics of the timber they use for making their 2 Te rings were measured digitally, using the instruments. When choosing the wood for the sound- CooRecorder program (Cybis, Image Coordinate board, they pay a lot of attention to its acoustic proper- Recording Program, Sweden). ties, any possible defects and aesthetic considerations. Once they have found the right wood, they will continue Ten the principal dendrochronological parameters to use timber of the same provenance, if possible from were calculated such as: mean ring width (MV), stand- the same batch of supply and sometimes even from the ard deviation (SD), mean sensitivity (S) and frst-degree same tree. autocorrelation (A). MV and SD make an instrument Tis is demonstrated in the instruments of many unique because they may infuence sound quality [9, famous luthiers. One of them was Stradivari [7]. Even 10]. Te standard deviation, in particular, indicates the though it is difcult to date his instruments against dispersion of data around the mean and is considered already existing reference chronologies – mainly because, an indication for regular annual growth [11]. Mean sen- as yet, we do not know with certainty, where the wood sitivity, S, shows how the tree reacted to environmental for Stradivari’s instruments came from – the relative dat- changes, whilst frst-degree autocorrelation, A, indicates ing of his instruments is often correct, and the values of to what extent the formation of one ring depends on the the statistical tests are often signifcant. Meaning that his width of the preceding ring [12]. After dating the instru- instruments date very well one against another, but their ment, Δt was calculated, which indicates the diference, absolute dates are sometimes uncertain [8]. For a com- in years, between the date shown on the violin’s label and parison, the dendrochronological time-series of some of Stradivari’s instruments are available on the website of the International Tree-Ring Database: https:// www. ncdc. noaa. gov/ paleo- search. Here, the exceptional case of an unknown instrument is presented, which was precisely dated by dendrochro- nology and attributed to the luthier Giuseppe Guarneri flius Andreae (1666–1740). Te aims of this study are: • to verify the possibility of non-invasive dendrochro- nological analysis by dating a photograph of the vio- lin that was initially supplied through social media; • to attribute the instrument to a luthier’s school or directly to a luthier; and • to verify the instrument’s dendrochronological dat- ing and its attribution to a luthier by the traditional and generally recognised examination of its style, Fig. 1 Initially, the original photos of the violin above, sent by and by consulting relevant documents, relying on WhatsApp, were used for dendrochronological dating. On the right, the resources and experience of one of the greatest in the white rectangles, the rings measured during the frst dating are experts of ancient musical instruments. clearly visible, with the violin still bearing the chinrest and tailpiece Bernabei Herit Sci (2021) 9:47 Page 3 of 8 the dendrochronological date [4]. In fact. the value Δt Dating refers to the number of growth rings lost in trimming the Te results of both dating techniques are analogous soundboard and on account of seasoning the wood. and have produced two time-series, one for each half Te tree-ring series were visualised by PAST4 and of the soundboard, both consisting of 81 tree-rings, TSAP-Win software that was also used for statistical whose dating, however, difers by one year. After hav- tests. Considering the variability of t-values in diferent ing checked their correlation, the two single curves kinds of software, and in order to keep the results homo- resulted in a mean chronology containing 82 annual geneous, the values calculated by the PAST4 program rings. Tis chronology was then compared statistically were adopted. and visually with 129 reference chronologies [13] and 187 time-series of diferent, individual musical instru- Results ments [4, 5]. The instrument As a result, the violin’s last ring dates to 1694. After Te violin’s soundboard was made in the traditional having removed the tailpiece, the dating was extended way, which means that it consists of two identical parts to 1696. Te highest correlation values (Table 2) were of wood that derive from the same tree, with the direc- obtained in comparison with the mean CNR-IBE labo- tion of growth pointing inwards.
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