Born in Parma around 1680, Andrea Gisalberti was above all known as a musician throughout his life and made a small number of instruments as a second activity. He was however the only luthier worth of mention working in the city before Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, who arrived in 1759, when Gisalberti himself was quite elderly.
His instruments denote the lack of any apprenticeship and, being rather far from the work of his contemporaries from Cremona, they show some echoes from the Brescia style of the previous century. The model has short, rounded and very open C-bouts, which end in small, tapered corners projecting outwards. The F-holes stems are large and elongated in shape, with small wings and oval lower eyes folded towards the stems. The head is rather delicate; the volute ends in the highest point of the central eye and, seen frontally, has the narrowest part strongly displaced forward, with a shape that is repeated in the second turn of the spiral. This form vaguely recalls Tommaso Balestrieri, who probably had nothing to do with the Parma luthier, just as the apprenticeship that Guarneri del Gesù would have completed, according to some authors, with Gisalberti himself is likely the result of invention.
