(b Fontaneto d’Agogna, nr Novara, c1790; d Milan, Oct 1854). Italian violin dealer and collector. He was born of humble parents and is said to have trained as a carpenter, with violin playing as a hobby. He developed an interest in violins themselves, and with a natural talent both as a connoisseur and for business he began to acquire and resell some of the many fine instruments that were lying unused in the towns and villages of northern Italy. His first journey to Paris (in 1827) was evidently profitable for him and for the dealers there, who gave him every encouragement. In the same year he made his greatest coup, acquiring a number of violins from Count Cozio di Salabue, including a 1716 Stradivari in unused condition. This violin was Tarisio's treasure, and as he spoke of it on every visit to Paris but never actually brought it with him it came to be known as the ‘Messiah’.
Tarisio searched indefatigably for violins and had a true love of them. The novelist Charles Reade, who knew Tarisio, wrote of him: ‘The man's whole soul was in fiddles. He was a great dealer, but a greater amateur, for he had gems by him no money would buy’. An insatiable demand in northern Europe for what nobody wanted or appreciated in the south, and the absence of much competition, gave him unique opportunities; and by bringing his stock to Paris, the only place where the art of restoration was at all advanced, he rescued many great instruments for posterity. After Tarisio's death it was the turn of Vuillaume, the leading Parisian dealer, to make the greatest purchase of his life: at a small farm near Fontaneto, where Tarisio's relatives lived, were the six finest violins of the collection, including the celebrated ‘Messiah’; and in a dingy attic in Milan, where Tarisio's body had been found, were no fewer than 24 Stradivaris and 120 other Italian masterpieces.
C. Reade: Cremona: Violins and Varnish (Gloucester, 1873/R) [orig. pubd in Pall Mall Gazette (Aug 1872)]
W.E. Hill: The Salabue Stradivari (London, 1891)
F. Farga: Violins and Violinists (London, 1950)
W.A. Silverman: The Violin Hunter: the Life Story of Luigi Tarisio the Great Collector of Violins (London, 1964)
CHARLES BEARE