Good evening everyone, happy New Year, and good health to you all.
I’d like to upload some photos of a mandolin I own.
Unfortunately, it has neither a label inside nor any stamp on the outside. I’m posting it in case someone can identify it or recognise anything about it.
I’m curious to see whether the maker can be identified.
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The making of Italian mandolins at the turn of the 20th century was a workshop-based enterprise, using practices that allowed for mass production and export. As a result, it is not always possible to identify the style of a particular workshop. The decorative motifs, moulds and so on are rarely unique, and you often find instruments with different labels that look alike, or instruments that look very different but came from the same workshop.
I assume that the butterflies and so on were components that were probably not made exclusively in the workshop, but by craftsmen who supplied them to instrument makers.
To make things more complicated, the labels added were often those of the seller/shopkeeper rather than the maker. In other words, an instrument without a label may have allowed the seller to market it as a creation of their own business … perhaps even with the option of custom orders? For example, the shop might have ordered ten instruments from the workshop with a butterfly, a particular type of wood and so on, and then sold them with its own label. Yours, for instance, may have been made as part of an order with specific and unique features.
I believe that some Greek labels we see on mandolins are also placed in Italian instruments, but we will probably never know.
Puglisi was one of the largest workshops, in any case, so it is quite possible that yours came from there.
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Neapolitan mandolin. Around 1899.
Neck and case made of rosewood, inlaid with wood and mother-of-pearl.
This is all the information I have.
Perhaps Sicilian rather than Neapolitan 