Alfonso Della Corte

Violin maker
(c. 1834 – 1884)

Alfonso della Corte worked in Naples from around 1859 until his death in 1884, one of the generation of makers who came up in the shadow of the city's older Gagliano and Jorio dynasties. He was a contemporary of Vincenzo Postiglione — the two effectively competed for the same clientele through the 1860s and 70s — but was considerably less productive, and his death in 1884 (the same year as Vincenzo ...Read More Gagliano's) coincided with the point at which Postiglione's own career really took off, leaving Della Corte without much of a lasting foothold in accounts of the period. His surviving instruments are correspondingly scarce, ranging in quality from fairly rustic work to more genuinely refined pieces, and finished in a clear golden-yellow varnish.

His real specialty was Gagliano-style copies, made competently enough that some have been mistaken for the genuine article — a skill later echoed, with considerably more notoriety, by Giovanni Pistucci, who began systematically faking older Neapolitan makers' work in the early 20th century, Della Corte's own name among them. He kept a workshop in the cloister of Santa Chiara in Naples, where at least one of his labels from the year of his death survives: "Alfonso della Corte / Fabbricante di Violini / Napoli, Chiostro S. Chiara, 1884." Read Less

Price History

- The auction record for this maker is $68,750 in May 2000, for a violin.
- 22 auction price results.

View all auction prices for Alfonso Della Corte

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