I don't have any personal experience with Cremona. From what I've read they're a middle of the road bigger-name company. Not especially good, but not especially bad, either.

However, if you're planning to get one from someplace like Amazon, be aware of one major gotcha.  They have had no setup done on them, much less a really good setup done to your tastes.

I got a $250 Stentor as my first violin. I discovered quite a few problems, including several that rather severely impacted playability.  There wasn't anything out and out wrong with it - these weren't manufacturing defects - it was just configured very poorly. One of the worst things was that the fingerboard was scooped very deeply and the action was very high. That's extremely common with high-volume, low-price instruments, because they very much don't want them coming back to the factory for something like buzzing.

For me, though, it meant it was hard to play (I didn't know better, I thought building calluses was normal for violin playing), but even I knew that when you can't play a note higher up on the fingerboard because one of the other two strings on either side gets in the way, there's a problem.

So, to make a long story short, $350 later, I had a MUCH better violin. The action is wonderfully easy, I can play as high up on the fingerboard as I like, and a whole host of other minor glitches got fixed also. (Also got Perfect Pegs put it in it.)

If I had taken that $600 and spent it on something from Fiddlerman, I would have a still nicer violin. That Stentor is, at base, still a $250 violin. The Cremona you're looking at will probably not need $250 worth of fingerboard work.  It probably will have a fingerboard that's scooped rather more than it ought to be, but not unbearably so. It will almost certainly have a high action. (That's not a problem if you want that; personally, I hate it with a passion - gives me hand cramps.) In short, you will probably have to pay a luthier $100-$150 to get all the fiddly bits handled so that you're getting everything out of it that you could.  And there's no guarantee that you can put that off for 6 months. It might be something that's bad enough that you need to fix it in the first few weeks (mine were).  (Unfortunately for me, I didn't discover the Fiddlerman site until about 2 months after all of this.)

The same is true for any violin that you buy direct from the manufacturer, through a big retailer.  Violin companies such as Fiddlerman and Shar do setup on the instruments they sell, and it's part of the price.  Places like Amazon, however, you get it just like it came out of the factory, and their number one goal is to not get returns.

So add at least $100 to the price of anything you purchase that doesn't have the setup already done.

Another point - where did you get that the Cremona has better wood than the Artist? They both use spruce and maple in the usual spots, and the Cremona's wood is aged 5+ years, while the Artist's is aged 7+ years.  The early years matter the most, but generally, the longer the wood is aged, the better it is considered to be for violin making, because it will change shape less as it dries out further. I didn't see anything reading up on the two to indicate that there was anything special about the wood on the Cremona. (As far as I know, the only thing that might make wood better would be poor growing conditions, so that you would have tighter grain. (But it has to be poorer conditions that are just right. Not just any poor conditions will do. Only really good poor conditions make good violin wood. )

Actually, if you want some competition to the Artist, take a look at the Scott Cao STV-500. The price is about $700 for an outfit, (which is comparable to the Cremona after the setup work) and I guarantee the Scott Cao will beat the Cremona.  I bought a Scott Cao 017 of shopgoodwill.com  (that's their bottom-end model). Thought I'd gotten a really good deal until it arrived, and I realized I'd overlooked the fact that it was 1/2 size. The physics of things make it hard to make smaller instruments sound good, but this one is quite sweet. Every Scott Cao instrument I've heard has impressed me.

I'll also argue in favor of the Master, if your budget can handle it. For me, the quality of the instrument (by which I mostly mean the sound) is a better bang for the buck than the Artist.  (In other words, not only is it better than the Artist, which you'd expect at a higher price, the increase in quality is greater than the increase in price between the two.  That's based on my personal opinion of them, though. YMMV.)

One bit advice on outfits - talk to them about upgrading from a Brazilwood bow to the FM Carbon Fiber bow. That bow has become the #1 seller on Amazon (by a large margin) for very good reasons. There are better bows, and there are even better CF bows - but you generally have to pay significantly more to get one that's noticeably better. Wood bows are very fragile, and CF bows are semi-indestructible. That alone makes them a vast improvement in my book.

Lessons - I'd definitely recommend getting lessons for the first month or two. A teacher can be a huge help in two important areas - getting the violin fitted to you and making sure you have the basics down so that the time you spend practicing is helping you rather than hurting you.

There are dozens of chinrests, dozens of shoulder rests, dozens of body shapes, and several playing styles.  Sorting through all that to find which chinrest and shoulder rest (if any) suit you best is NOT easy. Having someone who's worked with many different people (and who hopefully has a wide assortment of things for you to try out) will make the process a lot easier. The one rule to remember on this subject: do NOT contort yourself to fit the violin.  You have to contort your left arm and hand somewhat (it gets easier with practice). But if you have to lean your head way down, hunch your shoulders or any other position that's uncomfortable to hold for long periods, you're doing it wrong. Get different gadgets (or a different style) that let you be comfortable.

Learning the basics - if you only plan to take lessons for a month or two, be sure to tell you teacher that, and that you want a solid grounding in the basics. I would expect 80% or so of what they teach you to be about bowing. To start with, you need to know how to hold your hand to finger notes, and which fingers in which places are most commonly used to play which notes. Actually getting your fingers to play the correct note is just going to take practice, and you may have a ways to go when you discontinue lessons (depends on how much practice you put in).  There are lots of exercise books available for training the left hand (my teacher uses Schradiek, which is one of several available for free here on Fiddlerman), so knowing how to hold your hand and a rough idea of where to put your fingers is all you need the teacher for on the left hand.

Bowing, however, is where most of the expressiveness and beauty of tone of a violin comes from. The better your basic bowstroke is, the better off everything else you do with a violin on down the line will be. Make sure that before you discontinue lessons, you know what a good, clean bowstroke that produces a clean, sweet tone is, and can do it, and know what to do when it goes south (which at that stage of things, it will from time to time. In fact, it will probably be doing that for your first year. As long as you can identify the problem, fix it, and go back to learning the new whatever that distracted you from it, it's not really a problem, just a minor annoyance.

Hope you enjoyed the novel, and hope it helps