Born near Straourg, Michele Deconet was a profeional violinist before moving to Venice and taking up violin making. It is unclear how he received his training, but he was influenced heavily by Pietro Guarneri of Venice and Domenico Montagnana. His prolific output includes violi made on a quite flat model with high-quality wood and excellent fiery-red varnish. His earlier itruments tend to outrank his later ones. There is considerable debate about whether Michele Deconet was a violin maker at all. Stefano Pio made an exhaustive search of the Venetian archives and found many references to a traveling musician named Michele Deconet, but not once is he referred to as a \'liuteri\'. On the other hand, there are dozens of Venetian instruments with Deconet labels, many of them original. Pio argues that the most likely explanation is that Deconet was also a traveling salesman -- he took with him on his travels unlabeled instruments made by others, and then inserted his own label prior to selling the instruments.But John Dilworth who has studied many of these instruments believes they are all from the same hand. "Who made these instruments, "he asks, "if Deconet did not?". [The Strad, April, 2005]. Dilworth also points out that all the Deconet instruments he has examined have the small pinpoint in the center of the inside of the back, a signature characteristic of instruments from the Amati and Guarneri families. This leads him to conclude that Deconet, or whoever made all these instruments with Deconet labels, must have been trained by Pietro Guarneri of Venice.Despite Pio\'s revelations, the auction houses and virtually all dealers continue to sell instruments "by" Deconet. Consequently, we will continue to categorize these instruments as Deconet instruments until they can be definitively re-categorized, but this does not mean that we are taking one side or the other in the debate.
Born near Straourg, Michele Deconet was a profeional violinist before moving to Venice and taking up violin making. It is unclear how he received his training, but he was influenced heavily by Pietro Guarneri of Venice and Domenico Montagnana. His prolific output includes violi made on a quite flat model with high-quality wood and excellent fiery-red varnish. His earlier itruments tend to outrank his later ones. There is considerable debate about whethe...
Deconet,Michele(1)
