The top end of the fingerboard terminates in a nut made of bone. Its flat side, which is in the same plane as the soundboard, serves as the instrument’s fingerboard. A neck made of hardwood, rounded on its backside but flat on its front side, is securely joined to the top end of the resonator. A long wooden bridge is glued across the soundboard just above its bottom end. The resonating chamber is covered with a flat soundboard of straight-grained softwood (spruce or pine) that, near its center, has a circular soundhole that is covered with a delicately carved and perforated rosette of wood and bone. The resonator, the sides and flat back of which are made from thinly-shaven boards of maple wood, is figure-eight-shaped like its modern classical guitar descendent but proportioned differently. Since the middle of the 20 th century the number of luthiers making fine replica instruments such as the one pictured here and the number of amateur and professional performers of the guitar has grown considerably as part of the early music movement.
They include unaccompanied solo pieces, song accompaniments, dance music, and mixed ensemble works. This music is written in tablature notations that were published throughout Europe during the 16 th and well into the 17 th centuries. A substantial repertoire of solo works written for the four-course Renaissance guitar survives. Given the number of guitar tutors published for amateur players of varying levels of accomplishment the guitar must have also been a part of the musical life of non-aristocratic social strata. Instrument inventories of royal households from that period include guitars, indicating performances on them were part of the musical culture of European nobility and aristocrats. This guitar is a plucked box-lute chordophone of Renaissance (16 th century) Europe.
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