Carlo Antonio Testore

Carlo Antonio Testore (1 September 1693 – c.1765), the fifth of Carlo Giuseppe's nine children, trained as his father's pupil and successor; the influence of Giovanni Grancino, "the father of Milanese violin making," remains visible even in his own work, though generally judged less distinguished than his father's. He married Anna Maria Camistrali, an orphan and neighbour on the Contrada Larga, in ...Read More 1718, and the couple eventually settled in the house of the priest Calvi, from which they never moved. Of his eight children, only his eldest surviving son, Giovanni (b. 13 November 1724), worked alongside him in the shop; Giovanni never married and predeceased his father, dying in 1765, leaving no successor. The wording on Carlo Antonio's own labels — pointedly describing himself as the elder brother — hints at a real rivalry with Paolo Antonio, and by the 1750s the parish census had begun referring to his household as that of the "PRIMO [first/leading] violin maker." Read Less