Giovanni Pistucci

Very little about Giovanni Pistucci's early life can be stated with real confidence — a common problem with Neapolitan makers of his generation. He was born in Naples in 1864. Two things are often said about his training, and neither is confirmed: that he began his career assisting Vincenzo Gagliano, the last, little-documented maker of that once-great dynasty, and that he apprenticed under Vincenzo ...Read More Postiglione. Pistucci's own early labels claim the Postiglione connection, but even that evidence is compromised — the labels could equally have been added later, after Postiglione's death, by Pistucci himself, by his own eventual associate Vittorio Bellarosa, or by dealers with a reason to want the pedigree. Even the date he set out on his own is disputed: some sources put his first independently dated labels at 1885, others closer to a decade later. What's reasonably certain is that by 1902 — when the young Alfredo Contino took over as Postiglione's principal assistant — Pistucci had likely already been working alone for some time, and by 1904 he had formally opened his own workshop.

He won a silver medal at an exhibition in Brussels, and built a real reputation for antiqued, aged-to-order copies of older instruments — his versions of the Gagliano family's own work were good enough that some were later sold, and remain catalogued, under the Gagliano name rather than his own. He died in Naples in 1955, aged ninety-one. Vittorio Bellarosa, who had worked closely with him toward the end of his life, bought the contents of his workshop after his death. Read Less

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