Q J Med 2004; 97: 247
QJM vol. 97 no. 5 (c) Association of Physicians 2004; all rights reserved.
About the cover |
Lute-maker's workshop
Photograph by Stephen Gottlieb
The cover picture shows a group of instruments in various stages of completion in my workshop in London. In the centre is a magnificent old lute by Sixtus Rauwolf, made around 1580 in Augsburg. Its restoration was recently completed by a trio of lute-makers, including me. Originally made as a six-course instrument (a course is a pair of unison or octave apart strings, plucked as one), it was converted to (probably) a thirteen-course lute in the 1700s, which involved replacing the narrow original neck with the current much wider neck. However, the original soundboard, with much of its original barring beneath, was retained, and it continues its long life in the hands of Jacob Lindberg as an eleven-course lute, the early Baroque form of this great instrument. It is strung entirely in gut (supplied by the principal European manufacturer of surgical gut), and has a sonority and warmth impossible to achieve in a new instrument.
The small golden varnished lute on the left is a treble Renaissance lute, with six courses, in birdseye maple. On the right is a seven-course lute, with maple back and plumwood neck and pegbox, and below it, a similar, but eleven-ribbed, lute. At lower left is the body of a lute in ‘shaded’ yew, using the heart and sapwood of the tree for decorative effect. Yew is a very fine wood for lute-making, as its sonority seems to match that of gut well, and was much used in the high Renaissance. In the early 16th century, yew was an extremely important military material for longbows, and it has been conjectured that the decline of the longbow coincided with the rise in the use of yew for lutes, a pleasing example of swords evolving into ploughshares.
In the background are various workshop bits and pieces; paintings of angels with lutes (their favourite instruments), a photograph (roughly twice life-size) of an original gothic rose design, a piece of satinwood veneer, strips of horn for decoration, ideas for marquetry patterns for fingerboards, varnish samples, a peg design for the Rauwolf, a portion of the splendid lute in the ‘Ambassadors’ painting by Holbein, and plane blades awaiting sharpening.
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