Giuseppe Ornati

Giuseppe Ornati was born in 1887 in Albairate, a village outside Milan, into a family of modest means. He first trained as a carpenter, but by 1901 — around age thirteen — he had moved into Milan itself and begun learning the violin trade under Luigi Montanari. Two years later, in 1903, Leandro Bisiach took him into his workshop, where he worked alongside Gaetano Sgarabotto. Ornati stayed with ...Read More Bisiach on and off for the better part of two decades, long after Sgarabotto had moved on, and his hand is recognisable in a number of the finer Bisiach instruments made before the First World War. Bisiach trusted him enough to put him in charge of training his own sons, and kept using him for restoration work even once Ornati had begun building instruments of his own after 1910.

He set up independently around 1919 and won a first prize at the National Competition in Rome the following year — the first of many awards he collected at competitions over the next four decades, the last in Liège in 1963, when he was seventy-six. His own instruments never copied Stradivari or Amati outright; instead they took the Antoniazzi–Bisiach house style he had learned and simplified it into something more personal, leaning toward an "Amatese" reading of Stradivari's forms rather than Nicolò Amati's own, and steering clear of the Guarneri model altogether.

In 1921 he married Nella Ferrari; their daughter Cornelia, born the next year, died young in 1953 — a 1926 violin of his carries the label inscription "Dono a mia figlia Cornelia" ("a gift to my daughter Cornelia"). During the Second World War, with instrument-making at a standstill, he worked as a carpenter at the Caproni aircraft factory. He was active for years in Italy's violin-making associations, including ANLAI, dealt to some extent in old instruments as a recognised expert, and in 1952 was made a Knight of the Italian Republic. From 1961 he taught at the Cremona School of Violin Making, where Giovanni Battista Morassi was probably his strongest pupil. Remembered as an open and affable man who played the cello for pleasure, Ornati died of a heart attack in 1965, at seventy-eight. Read Less

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