Nothing is known about Martin Voigt beyond a single exceptional quality viola da gamba and a single line of handwritten ink. No dates of birth or death, no guild records, no mention in any dictionary of makers. He exists entirely through a bass viola da gamba in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum , currently on loan to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, London. The label inside it reads :’Martin Voigt in Hamburg me fecit 1726′.
Voigt worked within the tradition of famous Joachim Tielke (1641–1719), Hamburg’s most celebrated maker of bowed and plucked string instruments, whose workshop had produced viols, lutes, guitars, and violins over half a century, distinguished by lavish decorative programmes in ivory, tortoiseshell, and exotic hardwoods. None of Tielke’s children continued the business, and the workshop ceased with his death in 1719. The V&A’s assessment is that Voigt may have been his pupil. The chronology allows it, and the instrument supports it.
The bass viola da gamba is constructed in ebony inlaid with engraved mother-of-pearl, with twenty-five alternating strips of ebony and ivory forming the back. This is work that permits no error. Mother-of-pearl is brittle, fractures unpredictably, and must be cut and engraved with a burin at a scale fine enough for pictorial detail while remaining strong enough to survive as part of a played instrument. A mistake at any stage destroys the material. An instrument of this complexity would have taken months to complete, required mastery across several distinct crafts, and cost a sum that placed it far beyond the reach of ordinary musicians. It was made for someone wealthy, and it was made to be seen.
The iconographic programme on the neck depicts four classical deities in mother-of-pearl: Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and Diana. The musical associations are deliberate. Mercury was credited in Greek tradition 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, so the two figures declare the instrument’s lineage. The presence of Venus and Diana alongside them points to a more considered scheme, almost certainly drawn from one of the printed emblem books that served as pattern sources across the decorative trades of Europe. Tielke’s workshop had relied heavily on such compilations, particularly Daniel de la Feuille’s Devises et emblemes, anciennes et modernes [Devices and Emblems, Ancient and Modern] (Amsterdam, 1691) and Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata [Emblems of Love] (Antwerp, 1608). These volumes offered ready-made pictorial schemes with classical figures and moralising inscriptions, and were used as pattern sources by cabinet-makers, goldsmiths, and engravers as readily as by instrument makers. Whether Voigt drew on the same specific sources cannot be confirmed without direct comparison, but the sophistication of his programme places it firmly within the same 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). The claim has no 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)
