LORENZO BELLAFONTANA
LUTHIER IN GENOA
1906 . 1979
YEAR: 1952
SOUNDBOARD: Italian Spruce
BACK and SIDES: Rosewood Indanus
FORK: 650 mm
VARNISH: Shellac
This guitar built by Luigi Mozzani in 1952 is a particularly representative instrument of this important Genoese author, who throughout his professional life has dealt with both plucked instruments and stringed instruments, reaching in both cases highly working professionals.
His guitars (over a hundred), however, are rare. Comes with original custom case.
Lorenzo Bellafontana was born in Genoa on July 15th of 1906; after high school he attended theLigurian Academy of Fine Arts and was perfected in violin at the Camillo Sivori Academy. Encouraged by his father, cabinetmaker amateur, he entered the 1923 as an apprentice in the workshop of Oreste Candi in vico Dritto Ponticello; his own business began in 1935 a Pegli, so after a while he moved to the historic center of Genoa in via Chiossone n°8/9 and in 1937 participates in the competition exhibition on the occasion of the celebrations of Antonio Stradivari a Cremona with a string Quartet, a violin and a viola.
Towards the end of the thirties he was an assistant in the workshop of Cesare Candi. The years of second World War were particularly difficult, his laboratory was set on fire following the allied bombing of 22 October by 1942, and in 1944 he definitively lost the laboratory, again following a bombing. Helped by Joseph Lecchi and gives Cesare Candi, resumed his music studies and worked as a violist in the Carlo Felice Theatre of Genoa.
Towards the end of the 1940s, Bellafontana built a seven-string guitar commissioned by the Genoese composer Federico Orsolino (1918-1993); the latter wrote La Fontanella, retrograde canon for heptachord guitar (1947) dedicating it to Lorenzo Bellafontana.
In October 1951, at the A. Boito Conservatory in Parma, Bellafontana won the Parma National Lutherie Competition with one of his guitars.
In the post-war years he devoted himself assiduously to building violins, violets, cellos and guitars, an instrument for which he had a particular predilection, in his laboratory in Piazza Paolo da Novi; from 1949 to 1958 He works in via Paolo Giacometti, then moves to Corso Torino: here he will suffer substantial damage following the flood of October 1970. From 1967 he took over Joseph Lecchi in the violin storage of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu the "Cannon" belonged to Niccolo Paganini, preserved in Genoa at Doria-Tursi Palace.
He died on holiday in San Michele Mondovi on June 30 1979.
