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oldtimewine - Posted - 03/07/2012: 13:56:08
I was wandering if anyone knows the history or origin of lion head fiddles? I am purchasing an antique lion head that sounds great and wanted to know more about where these came from...
DougD - Posted - 03/07/2012: 15:46:16
I'd say Germany or Bohemia, late 19th to early 20th century, although the models for carved pegheads may be older. Just another form of "fancy" fiddle, some better than others. Nothing to write home about, but if you like it and it sounds great, then enjoy.
Does it still have its red tongue?
fiddlepogo - Posted - 03/07/2012: 18:20:46
I think I heard someone say they were from the Tyrol region, which I think overlaps the border between Austria and Germany.
OTJ (OldTimeJunky) has a lion's head fiddle as his avatar- he may know more about them than some.
KCFiddles - Posted - 03/07/2012: 19:56:37
Jacob Stainer carved lions heads (as well as angels and women) on some of his violins in the late 1600s, and they have been more or less copied from the late 1800s on. Stainer was from Absam, near Innsbruck, which would make him Tyrolean, but he studied in Cremona (Possibly with Amati), and his instruments were extremely prized in Europe during the 18th and 19th Century.
Most of the lions-head fiddles you'll see these days are "Stainer model" trade violins made in Mittenwald or in Bohemia, now part of the Czech republic. They range from awful to pretty decent, and the good ones seem to be pretty popular with old-school fiddlers.
Jaunskots - Posted - 03/07/2012: 19:57:00
Jacob Stainer (c. 1617-1683), from Absam in Tyrol, made many violins with lion heads, among other carvings. And he was well worth imitating, of course. J.S. Bach, among other eminent musicians, played a Stainer, not a Strad or a Guarneri. But I wouldn't think that Stainer was the first; as I recall, viols were carved with various creatures pretty frequently, long before violins were made.
BTW, the 19th-century carvings weren't always lions. My better fiddle has the head of a bearded man, fairly crude and quite asymmetrical, in place of a scroll. At a guess, it's German, 1880 or so.
Harold
Sue B. - Posted - 03/08/2012: 05:19:47
Those fanciful heads harken back to fiedels and viols from the Middle Ages.
DougD - Posted - 03/08/2012: 05:51:25
The Norwegian fiddler Ole Bull owned an instrument supposedly made by Gaspar di Salo, with a peghead carved by Benvenuto Cellini: digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldi...=&e=w
These later lion head fiddles sometimes are decorated in various other ways. We have one with black/white rope binding. There are photos on my homepage here.
carlb - Posted - 03/08/2012: 06:01:19
quote:
Originally posted by oldtimewine
It does still have the tongue in tact and has the same painting/drawing on the back like the one seen on carlb's pictures.
fiddlehangout.com/myhangout/photos2.asp?id=2081&photoID=13650&albumid=0
are backs like this popular amongst lion heads?
I've been following lion's head fiddles on ebay since I bought the one with stencil on the back. It seems that very few of the lion's heads have stencils but many of those that do are in color rather then black and white like mine. There are two varieties of lion's heads. The common one has the mane combed down on each side with a part in the middle and the less common ones have individually carved manes which, while they look similar to each other, are each unique, at least for all the ones I've examined closely. As far as sound goes, the, supposedly, less well built one (no corner blocks and no neck block; the end of the neck serves as the block and the top is completely in tact, i.e. no cut out for insertion of the neck from the top) sounds better to me then the one with the uniquely carved head (corner blocks and neck block).
DougD - Posted - 03/08/2012: 06:44:34
Carl, do you have one with with each style of lion's head? A lot of the ones I've seen look like they could have been carved by the same person - maybe they were copying a model. Also, from your studies on ebay, are the ones with rope binding very common? I've seen that on other fiddles without the lion head too. The one we have came from an antique/junk store that used to be here, but the owner was buying things at an auction up in your neck of the woods, and trucking them down here.
bj - Posted - 03/08/2012: 06:53:46
There are some that have an actual marquetry inlay on the back that look like the castle/village scene, with different types of wood used for the inlay. It's really killer to look at but I was not impressed with the way these sounded, and I've tried a couple. One was owned by a luthier whose work I respect a whole lot, so it wasn't the setup, at least not on that one.
carlb - Posted - 03/09/2012: 06:09:00
quote:
Originally posted by DougD
Carl, do you have one with with each style of lion's head? A lot of the ones I've seen look like they could have been carved by the same person - maybe they were copying a model. Also, from your studies on ebay, are the ones with rope binding very common?
Yes, I have one with each style. While the pictures of the heads (inset in my pictures Lion's Head 1 and Lion's Head 2) are not very large, the differences in the carving of the mane are very apparent. If you'd like a larger picture of the heads, I could upload them as well, as at least one other carved mane from a fiddle that was on ebay. In addition, my friend Barabara Johnson has one that also has a carved mane rather then straight hair with a part in the middle which is found more commonly. Both types may be copying from a model, but the ones with the carved manes seem to have a individual touch of the artist who did it (sort of like, for example, the heel cap bush or the back of the peg head on the early Bacon banjos, each one is different even though the outline is the same; see those pictures at: sugarinthegourd.com/BaconProfe...alBanjos/. Click on BaconInlays.pdf). I think the companies gave their artists a freer hand in those days.
KCFiddles - Posted - 03/09/2012: 07:33:39
After about 1870, most of those lion heads were carved on a machine like this one, called a Spindle carver:
:
A worker would have somewhere around 10 to 100 necks to carve, and would put one cutter on the carver and perform the same operation on all the necks, then put on another quick-change cutter, and perform the next operation on all the necks, etc. A couple of master cravers I know actually did this kind of work in American factories before WWII. There is also a machine called a multi-spindle carver that has multiple carving spindles and traces from a master pattern, and yet another machine called a pattern lathe that was invented in the 1850s and used for carving gunstocks.
On a single spindle carver like the one pictured, there will naturally be some variation from one head to the next, because it's a hand operation, but very little actual craftsmanship. It's a dangerous machine, and takes quite a bit of skill, but I'd guess a good spindle carver could turn out 10 to 20 lion's heads in an hour, only needing sanding and minor detailing to be ready to varnish. Before about 1920, the machines were driven by flat belts off an overhead drive shaft. (I actually saw systems like that still in use in blacksmith shops in Scotland in the 1970s.)
Different factories had different patterns, of course, but they were all loosely based on 17th Century designs. I've seen very few modern heads that I would describe as good or interesting carvings. The ones from the Vuillaume and Derazey shops are notable exceptions. Some of the carvings on them,. such as on Vassar's fiddle, are very nice indeed.
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