Maker Background
Originally from the town of Sesto, Ceruti moved to Cremona in 1786 and only started violin making 10 years later. It is believed that he had been a student of Storioni, as his stylistic successor
, and when his master left the city, he may have taken over his workshop. Ceruti’s work is precise and elegant, surpassing Storioni’s work in terms of refinement.
Giovanni B. Ceruti lived the last decades of the Cremonese classical period on violin making history, and was mainly responsible for keeping this tradition alive from the 18th to the 19th century, by passing the knowledges of the craft to his son, Giuseppe, to be then kept for his grandson, Enrico. At the period, after the absence of Lorenzo Storioni in Cremona, the high demand for cremonese violin was mainly served by Giovanni Ceruti, as there were too few violin makers in town at the time. It is believed that he might have taken over Storioni's workshop in 1802 after he left the city towards the east. Ceruti developed and worked on personal models based on classical cremonese masterpieces, what were already at the time considered instruments of the peak of the classical cremonese tradition golden era. Ceruti had a productive carrer, and his instruments are recognized by its refined carving and quality varnish, and for its deep powerful sound. The maker died in 1817 and his son and grandson were responsible for continuing the family legacy towards the establishment of a modern school of violin making. For a time, his violins were mainly inspired in the style of Amati's big model. Already to be considered a revival of the cremonese legacy of Amati, Stradivari and Guarneri, the Ceruti family work featured the last breaths of the city's tradition through the first half of the 19th century, before Cremona's decay on the violin making scenario that last until the 1900s.
