IS THE fiddle in Oxford鈥檚 Ashmolean Museum a fake? A new study of the wood used to make the instrument says not. That鈥檚 just as well, because the fiddle in question is one of the world鈥檚 most expensive, worth an estimated 拢10 million, and comes with a label stating it was made by the hand of Antonio Stradivari in 1716.
The violin, known as the Messiah, is thought to have remained in Stradivari鈥檚 workshop in northern Italy until he died in 1737 at the age of 94. It later came into the hands of a 19th-century French violin maker and copyist, Jean-Baptise Vuillaume.
That sparked a theory that the fiddle is a 19th-century fake. The idea gained ground when two unpublished studies cited photographs that apparently showed that the last tree ring on the spruce soundboard proved it was made from wood grown in 1738 鈥� a year after Stradivari died.
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But in 2000 John Topham, a British violin restorer, dated the youngest of the 93 rings on the soundboard to 1682 (New 杏吧原创, 8 April 2000, p 20). Now Henri Grissino-Mayer of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and his colleagues have looked again at the Messiah鈥檚 tree rings. By including inaccessible parts of the instrument, such as under the fingerboard, Grissino-Mayer has found 14 previously unnoticed tree rings, and dated the youngest at 1687. The work, which will be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, shows the wood was contemporary with Stradivari鈥檚 lifetime, says Grissino-Mayer.
Topham adds that other features of the violin point to it being genuine. 鈥淚t completely vindicates my point of view,鈥� he says. Grissino-Mayer is more circumspect: 鈥淚t is certainly the last word on tree rings. Whether it鈥檚 the last word on authenticity 鈥� I鈥檒l leave that to the violinists.鈥�