Marco Antonio Cerin

Marco Antonio Cerin was born in Venice on 18 June 1774, the fifth of eight children of Girolamo Cerin, a tailor, and his wife Anna Rattina. All the Cerin children were sent out to trade apprenticeships as soon as they came of age — the family's modest means left no room for further schooling — and Marco Antonio's own path led him into Anselmo Bellosio's workshop, probably around 1785. By 1795 he ...Read More was working there as a "giovane," and in 1796, having completed his training, he left the shop to strike out on his own; his departure was significant enough that Bellosio's workshop dropped from six workers to five. He formally registered as a guild member and shop owner in March 1799, setting up near the clock tower at St Mark's, close enough to the Basilica that the musicians of the Cappella Marciana already knew him by reputation. Business was evidently good — he took on his own apprentice in 1799 and needed to hire additional help by 1806.

He married Elisabeth Brisotti at St Mark's Basilica in 1802, and the couple had two children, Teresa (1803) and Eugenio (1807). Like many Venetians of modest means, the family shared a home with relatives to split the rent — in Cerin's case, his brother Gregorio (a respected carpenter, later commissioned by the La Fenice theatre to remake its pit seating), Gregorio's wife, and their two daughters, eight people under one roof in all. His growing standing in the trade earned him an appointment as tax collector for his guild in 1804. These were not easy years to be a Venetian tradesman, however — the political upheaval following the fall of the Republic and the French administration's heavy taxation strained the whole local economy, and Cerin, like his fellow maker Domenico Molinari, was assessed a special ten-ducat levy in 1806 in connection with Napoleon's own visit to the city, on top of his share of the mandatory nighttime civic patrols the French authorities had imposed against rising crime.

By 1808 the newly established Venetian Chamber of Commerce had him on its rolls as a maker of musical instruments. He died suddenly on 2 February 1810, after barely a day's illness — a real loss to the city's violin trade, cut short in what should still have been the middle of his career. Read Less

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