Italian wind instrument maker(s) of unknown identity. The maker's marks hie.s, hier.s and hiero.s are found on 31 wind instruments discovered to date: nine cornetts, eight dulcians and 14 recorders, most of them known to have come from the area of Venice. A quartbass dulcian depicted in Praetorius’s Theatrum instrumentorum (Wolfenbüttel, 1620/R) and a bass dulcian in a painting by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (Rome, c1645; see Bassoon, fig.5) are similar in design to the surviving instruments. The marks are presumably contractions of the name Hieronymus (a Latin version of the Venetian Jeronimo), but the identity of the maker(s) has not yet been established. The most favoured suggestion is the Venetian branch of the Bassano family, which was founded by Jeronimo Bassano the elder, whose sons at first used the last name de Jeronimo; the instruments resemble those with the ‘!!’ maker's mark, which probably belonged to the Bassanos. Other suggestions have been Hieronimo da Udine (mentioned in a Venetian letter of 1574) and Hieronymus Geroldi (from whose heirs dulcians were bought by the Ambras court in 1596), as well as Hieronimo de li flauti (mentioned in Venetian documents of the second half of the 16th century), possibly the same man as da Udine or Geroldi.
D. Lasocki: ‘The Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family as Instrument Makers and Repairers’, GSJ, xxxviii (1985), 112–32
M. Lyndon-Jones: ‘The Bassano/HIE(RO).S./!!/Venice Discussion’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.47 (1987), 55–61
D. Lasocki: ‘The Bassanos' Maker's Mark revisited’, GSJ, xlvi (1993), 114–19
D. Lasocki and R. Prior: The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665 (Aldershot, 1995)
M. Lyndon-Jones: ‘Who was HIE.S/HIER.S/HIERO./S?’, FoMRHI Quarterly, no.83 (1996), 10–17
DAVID LASOCKI