Ludovico Rastelli

Lodovico Rastelli was born in 1801 in Castelletto Scazzoso, now Castelletto Monferrato, in Piedmont. Little is known of his early life or training, but by 1835 he was established in Genoa, working as a maker and repairer of musical instruments in Piazza Lavagna. Over the following four decades, his workshop occupied several addresses within the city’s historic centre.

Rastelli was long ...Read More regarded primarily as a repairer, but his surviving work reveals a substantial and varied output. He made guitars, violins, violas, cellos and double basses, occasionally decorating his instruments with elaborate geometric purfling. His work is rooted in the eighteenth-century Genoese tradition, although certain features—particularly the modelling of the scroll, the ground and the varnish—suggest an affinity with the early work of Nicolò Bianchi, with whom he may have collaborated.

Some of Rastelli’s later instruments reflect the influence of Guarneri del Gesù’s 1743 “Cannone,” preserved in Genoa as the celebrated violin of Niccolò Paganini. His interpretations are personal rather than literal copies, combining Guarnerian features with local construction methods and a distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic style.

In his later years Rastelli may have been assisted by his daughter Vincenza, an unusual documented example of a woman involved in nineteenth-century Italian violin making. He died in Genoa in 1878, after a long and apparently uninterrupted career. Read Less

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