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The violin is eminently practical and portable. As well as being functional, it shares many of the attributes of figurines, whether religious or toys. Like a doll or a cult-linked fetish object, its allure, both for the user or viewer, are tied in with its human qualities. It is, if you like, primal, practical, and spiritual.

Let us talk around the instrument’s body, and explore the names of its various parts. All of this will be liked into to our point of view, when we hold, use, and examine the instrument. After all, for the player, for me, I spend most of my time,

The player’s view- foreshortened (VIolin by Girolamo Amati 1629)

with my face close to the body of the violin, and my hands waving about it. Consequently, if I look at the instrument while I am playing, it is foreshortened- the scroll, furthest from my face and eyes, is in the distance, whilst the tail piece and bridge are enlarged. The violin is held closer to the face than it was at the beginning of its history. I play an Amati instrument from the 1620s, from the second generation of violinmaking (Girolamo Amati’s father, Andrea, is widely regarded as the inventor of the instrument): early 17th century players, such as Biagio Marini, held the instrument  lower, and unbraced by the chin, Consequently, the foreshortening was not so exaggerated. However, this view of the ins

The violin in  Orazio Gentilleschi’s exquisite Luteplayer (ca. 1620) at the National Gallery DC.

trument was treasured by painters from the earliest times, and repeatedly explored, not only in the many still-lifes [as in the room here] but also in pictures where performance is represented, such as the 1620 representation of an Amati violin and bow in Orazio Gentileschi’s The Lute Player,

which can be seen in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The National Gallery in London has a  1652 painting  by Carel Fabritius ‘A View of Delft’, which

Fabritius’s foreshortened Viol

explicitly shows a violin-player’s experience of this up-close foreshortening (albeit with a small viola da gamba). It is immediately recognisable to a player. And the instrument is beautiful when seen from this angle – as it is designed to be: it has been factored in, and the outcome has always been attractive to artists and latterly, photographers. But there is something more fundamental about this, which reaches back to the beginnings of classical art, and to the very period where the violin-form first emerges, with all the associations whic

Cycladic figure at the Metropolitan Museum New York

h I am going to explore here. The metropolitan museum shows a wonderful early ‘Cycladic’ figure [1972.118.104], dating from the very end of the Neolithic era ( so it is probably about 6500 years old). At first sight it seems distorted, even grotesque, until you think about it as a self-portrait, a self-portrait made by an artist who did not have daily access to a mirror. Stand up and look down at your body, in front, to the side, behind. This is the human body foreshortened: it is beautiful, as is the body of the violin, which we are going to talk about. We will be talking more about the art of this period later.

But to begin with: the body of the violin, the viola, is clearly related to our body. The naming of its various parts makers that clear. Lets explore, beginning at the top which on most instruments is ornamented with a an ‘Ionic’ scroll. This part of the violin is often

The scroll, the head of the violin

referred to as the ‘head’ of the instrument, and the ‘scroll’ itself is as stand-in for a human, a god, angel, or sometimes animal head. Just a few steps from here, there is 1685 violin by Jacob Tielke. The head of the instrument

Reverse of head of instrument by Tielke 1685

represents a laurel-wreathed god, most likely, the god of music, Apollo, with hair which is not only tied in a bun (to protect the back when the instrument is laid on its back) but also flows down and around the ‘pegbox’ [show], in the leaves and floral motifs found there.

Working down the instrument, the head is joined to the main resonating box of the instrument by the ‘neck’. At this point, the figurative relationship to the human form gets charmingly complicated. Whilst the ‘head’ of the instrument looks ‘forward’ it is clear that the silhouette of the neck is inspired by the shape of the chin and neck [show – compare], but facing the other way. It is almost as if the figure is in motion, the head sweeping around and away from is, showing the shape from mandible to clavicle.

The Jaw, neck and clavicle as represented on the violin

The beauty and aesthetics of this shape have been developed and complicated by history. Whilst this is an early 17th century violin, the neck is a 19th century replacement, dictated by changing performance practices. The neck which was removed approached the main box of the violin at a slightly less offset angle, but more importantly, sloped gently from nut to mortice, perhaps a reflection of the less bony décolletage to be found in the paintings of 1500-1600s, from Bronzino to Guercino. We nearly always talk about this change with relationship to its practical applications, but changing bodily aesthetics, from the Ruben-esque to the age of David and Canova, may have just as much to do with it.

The neck of the instrument, of course, has a very physical, practical application. First of all, it is a handle. Here, the left hand of the player holds the violin. Just a reminder, the other end of the violin lies on the collarbone of the player, where here, the neck of the instrument is grasped between the thumb and fingers of the violinist. This handle supports what in English is called the ‘finger board’, in in Italian, ‘tastiera’, in French ‘touche’ (in both cases ‘touching places’), and in German ‘Griff-Brett’. The ‘handle-

The fingers on the ‘fingerboard’

board’. The strings, running from the ‘pegbox’ in the head’ to the ‘bridge’ in the centre of the box of the instrument, run along this (today) ebony fingerboard, and can be ‘stopped’ here, by the fingers of the left hand, to change the pitches of the ‘open strings’.

There are many human associations to the strings, but the simplest of them, pitch, relates to the various pitch ranges to be found in a choir (they are, today, tuned a perfect-fifth interval part). The smallest of these has been named in the past ‘chanterelle’ or ‘cantina’: the little singer. To reiterate, the hand of the violinist holds the neck of the violin, to control the pitches that the instrument produces, by touching very exactly (although there are no guiding ‘frets’ on the violin) strings running along the ‘fingerboard’.

The relationship between the throat of the violin and that of a singer has often been remarked upon. One great Italian ‘baroque’ violinist/composer, Giuseppe Tartini, remarked about another:

“I have,” [Tartini] said…“been asked to work for theatres in Venice,and I have never wanted to, knowing full well that a throat is not the same of the neck of a violin. Vivaldi, who tried to compose in both genres, was always booed in one, while he was remarkably successful in the other.”

Lets get to the body of the violin. We are going to come back to the strings later. Look at the violin from the front or behind, and is it difficult to not see the human form mapped out here; and of course, where the treble and bass sides of the body are morticed to the neck, is known as the shoulders. When you are playing the instrument, and have to ‘shift’

Reaching around and over the shoulders of the soundbox to get to high positions

along, or ‘up’ the fingerboard to reach higher pitches, this marks the furthest point the left hand can move along unobstructed-for really high pitches the left arm has to reach up and around the instrument to make an architectural arch, to avoid the shoulders of the instruments.

One of the reasons for this, is a notion which is intimated tied in with the notion of the body, which is ‘taboo’ most particularly the taboo around human touch. If you watch 90% of violinists, and particularly those trained in Europe, you will notice that that they avoid touching the varnished sound box of the violin. The instrument is nearly always picked up by the ‘handle’, the fingerboard/neck, and, where the other hand is used (because of course, the violin is held one – handed to play) to hold the violin, this will only touch the extreme end of the instrument, round the ‘end button’ and ‘tailpiece’. The practical reason for this is to avoid (invariably) sweaty hands, but there are also varying taboos swirling

The acceptable places to hold the violin

around player’s physical interaction with the instrument. It was Captain James Cook who famously brought the word to Europe from Polynesia in the 1770s. He encountered it and its application with regard to what we would now call ‘totemic’ religious objects (although that word of a similarly non-European origin,  from  the Ojibwa nindoodem ‘my totem’). But whether you interpret the mores of touching the instrument as pertaining to the instrument as a totemic, fetishistic object, or from the lest-fraught notions around physical intimacy, it is fascinating to observe, both in oneself and others.

Whatever the origin of this practice, it feels  as if might be reaching back to the very origin of the violin-form itself, the refined late-Neolithic human figures, made in the Cycladic archipelago, from which the astonishing sculptural achievements of classical Greece would eventually emerge. These certainly have the aura of objects associated with religious practice, with all the associated restrictions.

Resting the hand on the shoulder of the violin

For all this, the shoulder of the violin is one place where you will sometimes see a player, particularly one playing sitting down, in an orchestral setting, resting their hand, during an extended rest, when the violin is balanced on the knee (the violin can never be held this way standing, so it does not apply to soloists – even though they have lots of rests in concertos, and quartet players, as Adolph Busch bitterly observed after a lifetime of chamber music … never get rests anyway).

The two halves of the resonating box of the violin are joined by bent strips of maple known as, the ribs of the violin. It’s interesting how visually different these are for instances, from the ‘ribs’ or a sailing ship, reminding ,e that the violin, is to all intents and purposes,

The Ribs of the violin

almost ecto-skeletal, like a beetle, and that that one of the creation myths of the string instruments, involves a tortoise: the infant Hermes/Mercury made the first lyre by eviscerating a hillside tortoise, and stretching cow-gut strings across it. The ribs of the violin can be seen as separating the memory of the two halves of the tortoise shell: however much the violin evokes human and immortal bodies, it equally calls up animal memories.

Whilst the design and many of the associations of the violin, such as this one, are Italian, the anatomical names we use to describe it are markedly Germanic: ‘Ribs’ comes from the proto-German, linked to the Norse ‘rif’ and the Saxon ‘ribbi’). There are six of

The C-bouts of the violin

them on the violin – four convex – here, here, here, & here – and two, concave – on the ‘C-bouts’ of the instrument. The cinching of these C bouts results in the effect of a waist on the instrument, and counterpoints the sound holes, known imaginatively as the ‘F-holes by we players. Bout is yet another northern European word, which first found its way into English in the 1500s, the century when

The F Holes

the violin appeared: originally as ‘bought’ from the Low German, meaning ‘bend or loop’.

We should take a moment to consider the viscera of this violin-body: perhaps the most essential elements of the instrument, sonically, are completely invisible. Just under and offset from the feet of the bridge, which sits in the centre of the ‘belly’ of the instrument, a small dowel rod is lightly wedged in between the top and bottom halves, the tortoise shells, of the violin. This does not have any supporting role for the instrument, but serves as a direct vibrational connection between the two largest vibrating elements. In English, we give this modest piece of wood an innocuous, albeit truthful name; the ‘soundpost’. By way of contrast, French string players and makers refer to it as ‘l’Âme’ … ‘The Soul’. Which should be a hint, that we might be approaching the heart of the matter.

The centre line on the front of the violin –

The front of the violin consists of a single piece of spruce, split, and opened, and then joined along the centre line of the instrument, meaning that the yearly growth lines, narrow-to-broad, broad-to-narrow, have the illusion of spreading evening from the centre of the violin to the edges. Some makers, especially Antonio Stradivari, eschewed this method, and did not spit the board, but allowed the growth lines to spread and change across the front of the violin, the ‘belly’ without interruption, untrammelled by symmetry. For the violin, like the human body itself, carries the illusion of symmetry of the order two, more than the actuality: for all its celebrity in the world of human aesthetics, in the notion of traditional beauty, actual symmetry is not only uncommon, but it can also feel unnatural, disturbing even. The heart is not completely in the centre of the human body, the appendix, if you still have it (I don’t), on my right, in the offset position of the aforementioned soundpost, and the ‘bass bar’ which runs the length of the belly (inside the box) is on the ‘G String’ side of the violin, serving a very different acoustic function to the ‘soundpost’ over on the other side.

The shape of the front and reverse of the violin, the ‘belly’ and ‘back’ is at one the most human and the most architecturally subtle parts of the instrument, as well as the largest. The word, ‘belly’ is both descriptive and allusive. Its origin  is ‘base Old German’ the word, ‘Belig’, which can signify as a verb ‘to swell, to be inflated’ of as a noun, a leather bag, a purse. The form of both the belly, and its pendant, the ‘back’, when seen in cross section, is very architectural,

A one-piece back

consisting of three arcs of a circle, convex, concave, convex with the apex midway

Da Vinci-Vitruvian Man ca1490

between the middle strings, the fattest point of the belly, and indeed, the back. Perhaps this is the place where the violin comes closest to the notion of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ most familiar from da Vinci’s rendering, though far from being his innovation; the sheer beauty of these arcs, and the inflection points to the concave segments running to the edges of the instrument, comes closest to the evocation of the human form, extant the shape, the airspace, within the instrument. After all, the sound of a violin, just like any brass or woodwind instrument, is vibrating air. This ‘inflated bag’ the belly, is at once lung, diaphragm, vocal chords — and cathedral. The human is the measure of all things.

And to the back of the instrument, which carries a similar set of arches to the front of the violin, but unobstructed by its necessary playing accoutrements – tailpiece, bridge, fingerboard, strings – so that the beauty of its form and materials can be better appreciated. Interesting, when the surrealist Man Ray, made his photographic joke about amateurism  le Violon d’Ingres,  he sowed no little confusion by showing

Le Violon d’Ingres -Man Ray 1924.

the back of this model, but with the sound holes from the front of the violin stencilled on to her body. Just like the belly of the violin, the back can either be a single, unsplit  piece of wood (like this Amati example here), or with the plank split, and as the luthier Alberto Giordano puts it ‘opened up like a book’. The result is a symmetrical flame along the central line of the back – in every way, the visual representation of a spine.

If we step back from the violin for a minute or two, we find that the way that we treat a violin, offers yet more clues as to its meaning, its significance for us. If I open my violin case, you are confronted with this, a swaddled bundle. It was my mother, my first violin teacher, who impressed on me the imperative of the ritual of wrapping my violin, in finer, more expensive fabric, than we ever wore, and placing it gently on its back in a case, in which it was lightly braced, before closing the lid for transport.

The violin, swaddled, shrouded, in its case

Simple modern cases such as this one are held sideways or vertically, wooden and leather cases up to the twentieth century were carried with the violin lying on its back, with a handle on the top. They were, and are, known, charmingly as ‘coffin cases’. The ritual and reference of packing, unpacking, and storing a violin, coupled with the strictures I mentioned earlier, is clearly related to burial practice. Wrapped up, with the box ready to close, it is not so far away from one of the Egyptian mummies, in its layered sarcophagus, a few metres from here.

Which brings us to the most overt link to the ancient world; best represented here, by this exquisite sculpture from Cyclades, dating from the third millennium BCE. When I was 16 years old, and quite by accident, I saw the Goulandris Collection of Cycladic Art at the British Museum. It was a two-fold shock. The first thing that hit me was that figures such as this exquisite example offered a direct link between the classical statuary and architecture which I had grown up, and the Neolithic world, which, viewing pieces such as this, was verry far from primitive. Suddenly I saw where the work of Praxiteles and Phidias, as well as the ionic scroll on this, and my violin, came from. But at the same time, I was even more staggered to understand, for the first time, that the form, the shape, that I had in my hand for many hours everyday was an ancient one, and that it was quite obviously human. The night after seeing that exhibition, putting my violin back in its case, at the end of my rehearsal, felt quite different from before: when I had my own child, I recognised what I had been shown.

Early Cycladic ‘violin’ figurines in marble, 3200-2800 BCE. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens).

I remember the quote from the great British sculptor, Henry Moore, which was written on the wall of the British Museum exhibit, and on the back cover of its catalogue:

‘I love and admire Cycladic sculpture. It has such great elemental simplicity.’

Perhaps this is a clue as to the persistence of this ‘violin form’  representation of the body, of us, in this exquisite sculpture, and in every bowed string instrument. In it we see, touch, and set ringing, the essence of what makes us human, corporeal, but at its most elemental rendering, the essence of body.

Apollo playing a violin-shaped object (as seen by Raphael at the Vatican Stanzas)

But, if this violin, us a body, a human body, then where is its heart? The answer is looking at us – we just need to make another detour, a digression, one more to the classical world, to Olympus, to get there. After Hermes/Mercury had made his tortoise-shell lyre, it found its way into the hands of the god Apollo. He became one of the gods of music – holding his cithara, his lyre.

Earlier we looked at the euphoniously-named ‘F Holes’, these give us a visual access to this lyre of the god, depicted in the form of the violin – but only when it is held upside down (in today’s understanding) – thus [invert the instrument]. Of course, the

Titian’s ‘Flaying Of Marsyas’,

upside-down string instrument was how the musician Apollo cruelly defeated the wind-played satyr, Marsyas, who could ?not play his aulos backwards and was punished, hung upside down himself from a tree and flayed alive. The making of music has always been associated with savagery, no doubt partially in remembrance of the relics of animals – guts and skin, which are often used in the construction of musical instruments.

But look, held upside down, the ‘F holes’ the ‘bridge’ seen this way represent Apollo’s lyre  – look, there it is (its under the piano there, and there and there – he and it, are all around us. And on the violin, it is the four strings, GDAE, complete the picture. In museum parlance, a string instrument is listed as a ‘chordophone’ – ‘singing or speaking strings’, from the Greek ‘Khorda’, which can mean string or gut. It shares the same Proto-Indo-European etymology, is cognate with ‘Hernia’ and ‘Yarn’.

In English, we use the word ‘heart strings’: this tautology is a clue as to the cardiac location – they were thought to be tendons that braced the heart. One of its earliest appearances in literature is roughly contemporary to this violin, in Richard Burton’s 1624 Anatomy of Melancholy:

‘The midriff and heartstrings do burn and beat very fearfully’

This reaches back to Ancient Rome, in Latin ‘ex cored’ (from the cords) means ‘from the heart’. And whether they are made from animal guts in the 17th century, or metal in the 21st, they are what sets this humble box, this corpus, vibrating, singing, and beating: they are its strings, its cords. The heart of the matter.

PSS playing the ‘Kreisler’ Del Gesu. Library of Congress, May 2008. Photo; Richard Bram