About 1,116 instruments; roughly 650 still sing
Antonio Stradivari of Cremona (c. 1644–1737) may have built 1,116 instruments—some 960 of them violins—with around 650 surviving. Labels sometimes claim Amati training, yet missing workshop tricks keep scholars arguing how the “Strad” sound was born.
Nobody is sure when Stradivari was born; historians place it between 1644 and 1649. The censuses of 1668 and 1678 even have him getting younger, a muddle blamed on lost records from 1647 to 1649, when fighting between French- and Spanish-backed forces sent refugees, his mother among them, out of the area. His family had been prominent in Cremona for centuries, with a version of the surname turning up in a land grant of 1188.
Whether he trained under Nicola Amati is argued over. A violin from 1666 carries a label calling him Amati’s pupil, yet he rarely repeated the credit, and he never used the small dorsal pin that Amati and all his known students relied on to grade the thickness of the plates. That gap has led some to suggest Francesco Rugeri as his real teacher, while others think he began as a woodworker, since from 1667 to 1680 he lived in a house owned by a carver and inlayer.
His first printed labels date from 1660 to 1665, a sign he was already selling straight to patrons. In 1682 a Venetian banker ordered a full set meant as a gift for King James II of England, and Cosimo III de’ Medici bought another five years later. Around 1680 he paid 7,000 lire for a house on what is now Piazza Roma, a few doors from the Amati and Guarneri families, and cleared the debt by 1684, the year Amati died and his own output jumped. In the early 1690s he enlarged his pattern into the so-called Long Strads and swapped Amati’s yellowish varnish for a darker one; 1700 to 1725 is called his Golden Period.
He married the widow Francesca Ferraboschi in 1667 and, after her death in 1698, wed Antonia Maria Zambelli, then 35, in 1699, fathering five more children by 1708. He died in Cremona in December 1737, aged 93, after about 75 years at the bench, and lies in the Church of San Domenico in a tomb he bought eight years earlier.
Source: Antonio Stradivari
