Last I knew, the English guitar in question was not on the floor, but in the archived collection. Did you go "behind the scenes" while at the Met or is the piece now on the display floor?
The piece to which I was referring has a tortoise fingerboard edged in engraved mother of pearl with a floral motif, lute-like tuning pegs set in a sickle-shaped pegbox that terminates in a finial decorated like the fingerboard, a bowl shaped back of gloriously figured maple in excellent condition, and an ornate, elevated, almost harpsichord-like rose gilded in gold. Other than the lute-like back and odd rose, the instrument was a stereotypical English guitar complete with that freaky, 10-string/6-course configuration and the typical holes through the neck for the screw-on capotasto. Best, Eugene At 05:48 PM 9/20/2004, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I went to the Met and saw this instrument � I think we�re talking about >the same one. I tried to take a picture but, without flash (which is >forbidden), it was impossible. I made notes � and have mislaid them! > >I thought the instrument might be what J. Carpentier, writing in the >1770s, calls a �cythre en luth�. Cythres were normally wire-strung, with >the top four doubled but Carpentier mentions gut-strung, lute-shaped ones >too. These French instruments were normally tuned in A rather than C and >so have longer string length than an 'English guitar'. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
