The Varnish

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 20: The Varnish

The varnish is the skin. The varnish is the violin's outermost layer, the surface that the world touches, the surface that the light touches, the surface that the player's chin and collarbone and fingertips and the palm of the left hand touch, the surface that protects the wood from moisture and abrasion and the acids of human sweat, and the protection is the function, but the function is not the whole story, because the varnish is also the beauty, the deep amber-red that glows in the light, the color that the world recognizes as violin, the color that is as much a part of the instrument's identity as the shape, and beyond the function and the beauty there is the acoustic contribution, the varnish affecting the sound, the varnish adding a layer to the top plate that changes the plate's vibrational behavior, the layer adding mass and stiffness and damping, the damping the critical property, the varnish damping the highest frequencies, the harshest overtones, the brightness that a bare wood instrument produces and that is not the brightness that musicians want, the varnish softening the brightness, mellowing the tone, the mellow the maturity, the varnish aging the instrument's voice the way time ages a person's voice, deepening it, darkening it, making it richer.

April. The workshop's windows were open for the first time since October, the spring air entering the workshop, the air carrying the smells of the street, the bakery two doors down, the diesel of the delivery trucks, the green scent of the plane trees that lined the Corso Campi, the trees leafing out, the leaves unfurling in the April warmth, the unfurling a slow process that Nadia watched from the window during the morning coffee, the trees adding a leaf a day, a branch a week, the greening of the city happening at the pace of growth, which was the pace of the workshop, which was the pace of the craft.

Giovanni's varnish. His recipe was his own. He had developed it over fifty years of experimentation, the experimentation not a program or a project but a practice, the practice of trying, of adjusting, of making small changes to the formula and observing the results, the results judged by the eye and the ear and the hand, the three senses that evaluated the varnish: the eye judging the color and the clarity and the depth, the ear judging the acoustic effect, the hand judging the texture and the hardness and the feel of the dried varnish beneath the fingertips.

The recipe was based on the Cremonese tradition. Oil varnish, not spirit varnish. The distinction mattered. Spirit varnish — shellac dissolved in alcohol — dries quickly, produces a hard, brittle surface, and dampens the sound excessively. Oil varnish — natural resins dissolved in drying oils — dries slowly, produces a flexible, resilient surface, and dampens the sound minimally. The Cremonese masters used oil varnish. The recipe for their varnish is not known with certainty, is one of the great debates of violin scholarship, the debate spanning centuries, the scholars and the chemists and the luthiers arguing about the ingredients, the proportions, the techniques, the arguments producing papers and books and theories but no consensus, because the varnish of Stradivari is lost, the recipe died with the maker, the death of the recipe one of the great losses of the craft, and the loss has produced a proliferation of attempts to reconstruct it, each luthier developing their own version, their own interpretation of what the Cremonese varnish might have been, and Giovanni's version was his interpretation, and his interpretation was his life's work within the life's work, the varnish the sub-craft within the craft, the specialization within the specialization.

Linseed oil. Tree resins — colophony, mastic, sandarac. Pigments — iron oxide for the red-brown ground color, madder lake for the deeper red of the color coats. These were the ingredients, the materials that Giovanni combined in proportions he had recorded in a notebook that he kept in the drawer of his workbench, a notebook that was not a cookbook but a journal, a record of every batch of varnish he had made over fifty years, the batches numbered, dated, annotated with observations about the color and the consistency and the drying time and the acoustic effect on the instruments they were applied to, the journal a history of the varnish, a biography of the recipe, the recipe's evolution tracked across decades of entries.

He prepared the varnish in the kitchen. Not in the workshop, because the heating of the oils and the resins produced fumes that were strong and that would permeate the wood in the workshop, the wood absorbing the fumes and carrying their smell, and the smell of the raw varnish ingredients was different from the smell of the finished varnish, the raw smell harsh, chemical, the turpentine and the heated oils producing an acrid atmosphere that the kitchen's ventilation could handle and the workshop's could not.

Nadia watched him cook the varnish. The word cook was not Giovanni's word — Giovanni said preparare — but the word was accurate because the preparation was a cooking, a heating and mixing and monitoring, the pot on the stove, the oil warming, the resins added gradually, the stirring continuous, the temperature watched, the temperature critical because too much heat darkened the varnish and too little heat left the resins undissolved, and the critical temperature was the knowledge, the knowledge of fifty years of cooking varnish, the knowledge stored in the hand that held the thermometer and in the nose that smelled the changing chemistry and in the eye that watched the color deepen from the pale gold of the raw linseed oil to the warm amber of the finished varnish.

The cooking took hours. The oil heated slowly. The resins dissolved gradually. The pigments were added last, stirred in, the color blooming in the pot, the amber becoming red-brown, the red-brown deepening with each addition of pigment, each addition measured by eye, by the amount on the tip of the palette knife, the measuring imprecise by any scientific standard and precise by the standard of the workshop, the standard of the hand and the eye, the standard that had produced consistent results for fifty years.

The varnish cooled. Giovanni poured it through a filter, a fine cloth stretched over the mouth of a glass jar, the filtering removing the particles, the undissolved bits of resin, the impurities that would produce bumps and defects in the finished surface, the filtering the last step of the preparation, the preparation complete, the varnish ready.

The ground coat. Before the color coats, the wood received a ground coat, a thin layer of lightly pigmented varnish that sealed the wood's pores and provided a base for the color coats, the base that would glow through the color coats and give the finished varnish its depth, its luminosity, the quality of light coming from within rather than reflecting from the surface, the quality that the Cremonese instruments were famous for, the quality that no photograph could capture, the quality that required the instrument to be seen in person, held in the hand, turned in the light, the quality that was the varnish's greatest gift.

Giovanni applied the ground coat with a brush. A broad, flat brush, the bristles soft, natural hair, the brush held at a low angle to the surface, the varnish spread in thin, even strokes, the strokes following the grain, the grain guiding the brush the way the riverbed guides the water, the direction natural, the direction correct, and the thinness critical, the ground coat thin enough to penetrate the wood's pores without sitting on the surface, the penetration the purpose, the purpose the sealing.

He applied the ground coat to the top plate first. The brush moved over the spruce, over the arching, over the f-holes (the edges of the f-holes coated with extra care, the edges being the most vulnerable points, the points where moisture could enter the wood if the varnish was insufficient), the brush leaving a wet trail that was the color of weak tea, pale amber, nearly transparent, the thinness of the coat allowing the wood's grain to show through, the grain visible beneath the varnish the way the bones are visible beneath the skin, the structure showing through the surface.

He set the plate aside to dry. The drying would take a day, perhaps two, the oil varnish drying through oxidation, the oxygen in the air reacting with the linseed oil, the reaction producing the hard, flexible film that was the dried varnish, and the reaction required time, required air, required the particular quality of light that Giovanni believed in, the natural light that he insisted upon, the light from the windows rather than the artificial light of UV lamps, the natural light because the natural light was the tradition, was the way the Cremonese masters had dried their varnish, and the tradition was not merely a preference but a technique, the natural light drying the varnish at a rate that produced a different film than the UV lamps, a softer film, a more flexible film, a film that Giovanni believed was acoustically superior, and the belief was supported by fifty years of results.

The color coats. After the ground coat dried, the color coats began. The color coats were the layers that built the varnish's color, the amber-red that was Giovanni's signature, the color that he had used for every violin, the color that was recognizable to anyone who knew his work, the color that was his visual identity the way the arching was his acoustic identity, the color the surface and the arching the structure, the visible and the invisible, the two identities combining to produce the instrument.

Twenty to thirty coats. The number was the process. Each coat thin, each coat applied with the brush, each coat dried in natural light, each coat building the color and the depth, the color deepening with each coat, the amber becoming richer, the red becoming warmer, the surface developing the luminosity that was the varnish's purpose, the luminosity that was light trapped inside the layers, the light entering the varnish and bouncing between the layers and returning to the eye with the warm glow that was the Cremonese glow, the glow that five centuries had not dimmed.

Giovanni applied the first color coat. The varnish was darker now, more pigmented, the red-brown of the iron oxide and the deep red of the madder lake combining to produce a warm amber-red, the color of old honey, the color of autumn leaves, the color of the light that comes through a stained-glass window in a church, the light transformed by its passage through the colored glass, the light carrying the color, the color carrying the light.

He brushed the varnish onto the top plate. The brush strokes were slow, deliberate, the varnish spread evenly, the strokes overlapping slightly to prevent gaps, the gaps being the enemy, gaps in the varnish allowing moisture to reach the wood and moisture in the wood changing the acoustic properties and the changed properties changing the sound and the changed sound the failure, the failure of the varnish's protective function, the function that the even coating fulfilled and the gaps compromised.

Nadia applied varnish to her practice plate. Giovanni had given her a small jar of varnish, a portion of the batch he had prepared, and a brush, and the brush was in her right hand and the practice plate was on a support on her bench and she brushed, she spread the varnish, she followed Giovanni's technique, the low angle, the grain direction, the thin coat, the even strokes, and the technique was learnable, was not as demanding as the carving or the bending, the varnishing a meditative act, the brush moving over the surface in long, even strokes, the strokes rhythmic, the rhythm calming, the calming the varnishing's gift, the gift that made the varnishing stage the most peaceful stage of the construction.

The days of varnishing. Each morning, a new coat. Each coat applied and dried and assessed. The assessment was the looking, Giovanni holding the plate to the window, holding it in the natural light, tilting it, turning it, watching the way the light moved across the surface, the light revealing the evenness or unevenness of the coat, the thickness or thinness, the color's consistency, the assessment a reading, the reading of the varnish's surface the way a musician reads a score, the reading translating the visual into the evaluative, the seen into the judged.

The color built. Each coat added depth. The amber-red deepened. The luminosity increased. The plate's appearance changed from bare wood to something else, something that was more than wood, something that the varnish transformed the wood into, the transformation visible, the transformation the beauty, the beauty emerging coat by coat, layer by layer, the beauty not sudden but accumulated, not dramatic but gradual, the gradual the pace, the pace the craft.

Nadia watched the transformation. She watched the bare spruce become the varnished spruce, the pale wood becoming the amber-red surface, the grain showing through the varnish, the grain more visible than before, the varnish acting as a lens, a magnifier, the varnish making the grain more vivid, more present, the wood's character revealed by the coating rather than hidden by it, the varnish not a mask but a frame.

She watched and she thought about surfaces. She thought about the surface that the world sees and the interior that the world does not see and the relationship between them, the relationship that the varnish embodied: the surface as protection, the surface as beauty, the surface as the interface between the interior and the exterior, the surface that mediates, that presents, that reveals and conceals simultaneously. The varnish revealed the wood's beauty and concealed the wood's rawness. The varnish presented the instrument to the world in a form that was more than the instrument's bare state, a form that was the instrument's dressed state, the finished state.

She thought about her own surfaces. The surface she presented to the workshop, the surface of the apprentice, the calm surface, the working surface, the surface that showed competence and effort and learning and that concealed the grief and the loss and the emails from Cleveland and the hand held in the other hand in the dark of the room above the workshop. Her surface was her varnish, her protection, her beauty, her mediation between the interior and the exterior, and the varnish was necessary, was functional, was the thing that allowed her to exist in the workshop without the interior overwhelming the exterior, without the grief overwhelming the work.

Twenty coats. Twenty-two. Twenty-five. The coats accumulated. The color deepened. The violin's body transformed from bare wood to varnished wood, the transformation complete when Giovanni held the body to the light and the light entered the varnish and the varnish glowed and the glowing was the color and the color was the amber-red and the amber-red was the skin and the skin was the instrument and the instrument was the thing, the thing that the varnish had completed, the thing that the varnish had made visible, the thing that the world would see.

Giovanni set down the brush. He set the body on the drying rack, the rack being a wooden frame with pegs from which the instrument hung by the scroll, the hanging keeping the varnish from touching any surface while it dried, the hanging necessary, the hanging the patience, the patience the drying, the drying the curing, the curing the hardening, the hardening the permanence.

The instrument hung from the rack. The varnish glowed. The amber-red caught the April light from the open windows. The light and the varnish met and the meeting was the beauty and the beauty was the thing.

The varnish was the skin.

And the skin was complete.

And the instrument glowed.