ABSTRACT
The surviving instruments are very few, and the names and workshops of their makers very obscure. The progressive weakening of the old corporations that led, in the course of the eighteenth century, to the emergence from their former anonymity of wind instrument-makers. It is clear that makers of wind instruments, subject to external pressures of this kind, worked under conditions of great disadvantage in comparison with their colleagues producing keyboard and stringed instruments. However, during the whole first half of the eighteenth century the sole maker of wind instruments known to have been active in Venice was Andrea Coin, who made brass instruments, and who is represented in the early part of the century only by a horn dated 1710. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that another maker, Giuseppe Castel, had his workshop in Venice or at least in the Veneto.
