ancois Tourte as long
ago as between 1775 and 1780 according to Fetis,[5] or between 1785
and 1790 according to Vidal,[6] has not since been surpassed.

That the violin and the bow form one inseparable whole becomes evident
when we consider the history of the forerunners of the viol family:
without the bow the ancestor of the violin would have remained a guitar;
the bow would not have reached its present state of perfection had it
been required only for instruments of the _rebec_ and _vielle_ type. As
soon as the possibilities of the violin were realized, as a solo
instrument capable, through the agency of the bow, of expressing the
emotions of the performer, the perfecting of the bow was prosecuted in
earnest until it was capable of responding to every shade of delicate
thought and feeling. This accounts in a measure for the protracted
development of the bow, which, although used long before the violin had
been evolved, did not reach a state of perfection at the hands of Tourte
until more than a century and a half after the Cremona master had given
us the violin.

The question of the origin of the bow still remains a matter of
conjecture. Its appearance in western Europe seems to have coincided
with the conquest of Spain by the Moors in the 8th century, and the
consequent impetus their superior culture gave to arts and sciences in
the south-west of Europe. We have, however, no well-authenticated
representation of the bow before the 9th century in Europe; the earliest
is the bow illustrated along with the Lyra Teutonica by Martin
Gerbert[7], the representation being taken from a MS. at the monastery
of St Blaise, dating in his opinion from the 9th century. On the other
hand, Byzantine art of the 9th and 11th centuries[8] reveals
acquaintance with a bow far in advance of most of the crude contemporary
specimens of western Europe. The bow undoubtedly came from the East, and
was obviously borrowed by the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Arabs from a
common source--probably India, by way of Persia. The earliest
representation of a bow yet discovered is to be found among the fine
frescoes in one of the chapels of the monastery of Bawit[9] in Egypt.
The mural paintings in question were the work of many artists, covering
a considerable period of time. The only non-religious subject depicted
is a picture of a youthful Orpheus, assigned by Jean Cledat to some date
not later than the 8th century A.D., but more probably the wor