This is the second part of the gallery of the early keyboard instruments collection from the Museum of Musical Instruments in Milan. See the previous page for an introduction.
All the images are thumbnails; click on them to enlarge the picture.
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A pentagonal virginal built in Tuscany in the second half of the 17th
century.
The maker is unknown. |
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This instrument was built in Piedmont by Giovanni Francesco Franco in
1750.
The museum put a tag saying "harpsichord turned into a fortepiano". The mechanism is not really visible from outside. It looks like some sort of tangent, although I can't tell if it's more like a fortepiano or rather like a clavichord. The following are two details of the side paintings. |
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| This harpsichord was formerly
attributed to Vito Trasuntino (1522-1606), probably the most famous
Italian harpsichord maker of the 16th century. The attribution was
driven by a signature by "Vidus Traseuntinus F(ecit)." The
restoration work of A. Bonza in 1993 found a number of changes to the
original design, like a modification of the registers from 8' and 4' to a
double 8'.
All the other known signatures by Trasuntino are in the form "Viti (or Vito) de Trasuntinis" and the abbreviation F. for Fecit was at least infrequent in the 17th century. For example, the famous enharmonic harpsichord of 1606 is signed "Vito de Trasuntinis Auctore". The signature was considered then counterfeited and the attribution to Trasuntino rejected. The instrument was build in Venice or nearby during the 16th century, its maker is unknown. |
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An Arnold Dolmetsch clavichord with triple choirs, built in 1892. The cover says "ut rosa flos florum ita hoc clavile clavilium". That should stay for (I lost my Latin dictionary moving from a house to another) "as the rose is the flower among the flowers, so this is the keyboard among the keyboards". The damping cloths are completely missing. |
| A Per Lindholm (1741-1813)
clavichord from 1794, that is a typical 3-choirs large Swedish
clavichord by "the most productive clavichord maker in Sweden"
(B. Brauchli, The Clavichord, pg. 182).
The damping cloths are pretty new, therefore I assume that it was restored recently. |
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Virginal build in Venice by an anonymous maker around the first half of the 17th century. |
| An harpsichord by Antonio
Scotti, Milan, 1753.On this harpsichord W.A. Mozart allegedly composed
the opera "Mithridates king of Pontus". Indeed the first
representation of this opera happened in Milan, December 26, 1770 during
the Italian trip of the 14 years old Wolfie.
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A bentside spinette built in Milan in 1753. The nameboard says "F.B.F." - F.B. Fecit. |
| This virginal was built in 1836 in Bergamo, where I was born and bred, by Alessandro Riva. | 
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A double virginal by Joannes Ruckers, built in Antwerp around 1600. This is a virginal plus an ottavino, in the typical "mother and child" Flemish configuration. That is, the small ottavino can be played separately or can be coupled onto the larger virginal to make them sound at the same time. Not really much to say about the Ruckers family, everything is in the music dictionaries - see G. Grant O' Brien on Flanders in the New Grove Dictionary. |
