Nothing is known about Martin Voigt beyond a single viola da gamba and a single line of handwritten ink. There are no dates of birth or death, no guild records, and no mention of him in any dictionary of makers. His existence is defined entirely by a bass viola da gamba, currently held in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum and on loan to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, London. The label inside the instrument reads: ‘Martin Voigt in Hamburg me fecit 1726′.
Voigt worked within the tradition established by Joachim Tielke (1641–1719), Hamburg’s most celebrated maker of bowed and plucked string instruments. Tielke’s workshop, which operated for over half a century, produced viols, lutes, guitars, and violins, all distinguished by lavish decorative programmes incorporating ivory, tortoiseshell, and exotic hardwoods. As none of Tielke’s children continued the business, the workshop ceased operations upon his death in 1719. The V&A’s assessment suggests Voigt may have been Tielke’s pupil, a possibility supported by both the chronology and the instrument itself.
The bass viola da gamba is constructed from ebony, inlaid with engraved mother-of-pearl. Its back features twenty-five alternating strips of ebony and ivory. Such intricate work demands absolute precision. Mother-of-pearl is brittle, fractures unpredictably, and requires cutting and engraving with a burin at a scale fine enough for detailed imagery, yet robust enough to endure as part of a playable instrument. A mistake at any stage would destroy the material. An instrument of this complexity would have taken months to complete, demanded mastery across several distinct crafts, and commanded a price far beyond the reach of ordinary musicians. It was clearly made for a wealthy patron and designed to be admired.
The iconographic programme on the neck depicts four classical deities in mother-of-pearl: Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Diana. Their musical associations are deliberate. In Greek tradition, Mercury was credited with inventing the lyre from a tortoiseshell, and Apollo with perfecting its use. Early modern writers understood the lyre as the ancestor of viols and lutes, thus these two figures declare the instrument’s lineage. The inclusion of Venus and Diana alongside them suggests a more considered scheme, almost certainly derived from one of the printed emblem books that served as pattern sources across Europe’s decorative trades. Tielke’s workshop had heavily relied on such compilations, notably Daniel de la Feuille’s Devises et emblemes, anciennes et modernes (Amsterdam, 1691) and Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata (Antwerp, 1608). These volumes provided ready-made pictorial schemes featuring classical figures and moralising inscriptions, and were used as pattern sources by cabinet-makers, goldsmiths, and engravers, as well as instrument makers. While direct comparison is needed to confirm if Voigt drew on the same specific sources, the sophistication of his programme firmly places it within this shared visual culture.
The V&A’s records note that the instrument was purchased in 1871 for sixty pounds and was said to have belonged to Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). However, this claim lacks supporting evidence. Haydn was not a gambist, and by his maturity, the instrument had been largely supplanted by the cello.
What remains is the instrument itself: the sole surviving work of an otherwise unknown maker, produced in Hamburg seven years after the death of the great master whose tradition it continued.
References
Baines, A. (1998) Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Part II: Non-Keyboard Instruments. London: V&A Publications
Hellwig, F. and Hellwig, B. (2011) Joachim Tielke: Kunstvolle Musikinstrumente des Barock [Joachim Tielke: Ornate Musical Instruments of the Baroque]. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag
Victoria & Albert Museum (n.d.) Bass Viol, Martin Voigt, 1726. Accession number 1298 to B-1871. Available at: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O58919/bass-viol-voigt-martin/ (Accessed: 10 May 2026)