The guitar
was never
one thing.
A familiar instrument with an unfamiliar past
Ten historic guitars reveal how string courses, hidden supports, adjustable necks and repairs shaped a familiar instrument.
A guitar looks easy to recognize: a body with a waist, a neck with frets, and strings running toward a bridge. But recognizing the outline is not the same as understanding the instrument. In a museum collection, a guitar may have ten strings arranged as five pairs, a neck that changes angle with a key, or replacement parts that record a second life. The modern expectation of six individual strings can obscure what is actually in front of us.
Ten instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection make those differences concrete. They span seventeenth-century Venice and Rome, eighteenth-century Spain, nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna, and a Madrid workshop instrument that became associated with Andrés Segovia. It is a close look at decisions about strings, reinforcement, playability, appearance and repair.
The photographs show historical collection objects, not newly manufactured replicas. Dates and technical descriptions follow the museum’s records. Interpretations of their appearance are based on the reproduced images, not an in-person examination or a listening test. A photograph can reveal proportions and decoration; it cannot establish how an instrument sounded in its original condition.
Count courses before counting strings
The word “course” is essential here. A course is a string, or a group of strings, treated as a playing unit. A five-course guitar with paired strings therefore has ten strings; a six-course instrument with pairs has twelve. Neither is equivalent to a familiar six-string guitar simply because its name contains five or six. The arrangement affects how we understand the bridge and tuning head, even when individual strings are difficult to distinguish in a photograph.
The Met’s general history emphasizes that the guitar’s earliest development is uncertain. These surviving examples do not settle that debate. They instead let us ask narrower questions with better evidence: which strings were paired, how a maker supported the soundboard, whether a neck was adjustable, and which parts survive from the instrument’s first construction. Those questions resist the tempting but misleading story of one inevitable march toward today’s standard shape.
Venice: a decorated surface and a complicated afterlife
The guitar attributed to Matteo Sellas, dated about 1630–50, makes decoration part of the instrument’s architecture. Its contrasting light and dark details lead the eye from the body toward the neck, while the elaborate rose transforms the sound opening into a layered visual center. The museum connects its snakewood ribs, bone striping and ornamental vocabulary with Venetian making traditions. Its historical stringing comprised five double courses.
Yet the object is not an untouched message from the seventeenth century. According to the collection record, its rose, bridge and peg block were removed during an alteration, and five single strings were fitted. Older fittings were subsequently reintroduced before it reached the museum. What we see therefore includes both early construction and later decisions about what the instrument should be.
That history changes the purpose of looking. Instead of treating every visible part as equally original, ask how restoration has shaped the present appearance. The instrument is valuable evidence precisely because it has a biography; alteration is not an inconvenience to erase from its story.
Rome: an attribution is evidence, not a signature
A late-seventeenth-century guitar attributed to Giacomo, or Jacob, Ertel offers another route into the same period. Its geometric arrangement of dark and light materials creates a dense surface pattern rather than the relatively open expanse of wood familiar on many modern instruments. The museum describes mosaic work involving bone, ebony and mahogany, with mother-of-pearl on the fingerboard, and identifies five double courses.
The maker’s name requires care. The attribution depends on comparison with another instrument, not a claim that this guitar carries an unambiguous maker’s signature. That distinction is worth retaining in a caption as well as in the main text. “Attributed to” tells the reader what kind of knowledge supports the name.
The record also identifies replacement work, including the bridge and some frets. The surface shows how craftsmanship made the guitar an object to inspect as well as an instrument to play.
Barcelona: old arrangements did not disappear overnight
José Massague’s guitar of about 1755–60 retains five paired courses. Set beside later Spanish examples, it complicates a neat timeline in which one string arrangement simply replaces another. The museum places it near the end of the Baroque guitar tradition and describes a soundboard without strutting below the rose. Its outline and ornament belong to a particular construction history, not an incomplete version of a later instrument.
Its present materials also demand attention to chronology. The museum identifies the top and bridge as replacements and the mother-of-pearl decoration as a later addition. Wear and repairs point to continued use. A photograph of the whole instrument can bring those features into one visual field without telling us that they were all made together.
For a visitor, this is a useful correction to the habit of reading an object label’s date as the date of every visible component. The main date identifies the instrument’s historical origin. Repair, embellishment and reuse may have extended its working life well beyond that moment.
Seville: twelve strings and an unexpected hidden support
The guitar attributed to Joseph de Frías, dated about 1780, has six double courses: twelve strings organized into six playing units. Its pale soundboard and darker ornament give the front a strong visual contrast, but the most revealing construction detail is not visible in this frontal photograph. The museum describes an unusual five-piece soundboard reinforced underneath with woven cloth in an X arrangement rather than wooden bracing.
That information must come from the catalog, not an imagined reading of the photograph. The difference matters because internal reinforcement is part of the relationship between the body and the forces placed on it by strings. A decorative exterior does not tell us which structural solution lies beneath it.
The example also discourages easy assumptions about uniform workshop practice. The museum contrasts this construction with fan-braced six-course guitars of the period. Different solutions could coexist.
Cadiz: compare construction, not a ladder of progress
Joseph Benedid’s guitar, dated 1787, provides a useful comparison. The Met describes two internal fan braces reinforcing the soundboard and relates that design to accommodating a wider body under the tension of six double courses. Here again, the crucial technical detail is documented by the collection record rather than visible through the front surface.
Beside the Frías-attributed instrument, the Benedid guitar makes a productive pair: similar broad questions about strings and body support, different documented answers. The comparison is more informative than announcing a winner.
Its ornament also prevents a false division between practical engineering and visual display. A maker could address structural demands while giving the instrument an elaborate face. Looking carefully means holding both activities in view, rather than assuming that decoration is irrelevant or that a finely embellished body automatically guarantees a particular musical result.
Madrid: proportions belong to a playing system
Benito Sanchez de Aguilera’s guitar is dated 1797. The museum describes a comparatively short body relative to its neck and scale, with accentuated curves associated with Madrid making around the turn of the nineteenth century. In the photograph, the narrow waist and the relationship between neck and body create a silhouette quite different from a broad modern concert instrument.
The record identifies twelve strings in six pairs and notes that the head and bridge are replacements. It also cautions that the neck is probably not original. These qualifications make it unsafe to treat the photograph as a clean diagram of the maker’s first design. The surviving object combines evidence of an earlier format with changes made during its life.
Comparison should therefore use recorded dimensions where available, not the apparent size of objects displayed in separate images. A photograph scaled to fill a page can make a smaller guitar look as large as a bigger one. Proportion within an instrument is visible; absolute size requires measurements.
Paris: a tuning mechanism and a performer’s name
Pierre-René Lacôte’s guitar of about 1835 brings us to six single strings. The collection record describes tuning mechanisms housed within the headstock, a design associated with Lacôte. Compared with earlier instruments, the head becomes a place to examine a specific mechanical solution rather than merely count pegs. The rosewood back and sides and the metal frets also belong to the museum’s technical description.
A label bearing Fernando Sor’s signature adds another layer. The museum notes similar signed examples and presents the signature as suggesting endorsement. That is a more precise claim than asserting a formal arrangement whose terms we do not have. The guitar was later owned and used by Julian Bream, connecting its nineteenth-century construction to a much later performer.
The object consequently speaks to more than manufacture. Instruments move among musicians, acquire associations and remain useful beyond the period in which they were made. A famous name can illuminate that movement, provided it does not replace attention to the instrument’s actual construction.
Vienna: adjustment is part of design
Johann Anton Stauffer’s guitar, dated about 1835–40, makes playability an explicit mechanical concern. Its label refers to a Luigi Legnani model. The museum connects Legnani, a virtuoso and amateur instrument maker, with a design that Stauffer emulated. The guitar’s small, narrow-waisted body and its maple and spruce construction give it a distinct place among these examples.
Most importantly, a key-operated mechanism changes the neck angle and therefore the height of the strings above the fingerboard, commonly called the action. That is not simply a stylistic flourish. It addresses the relationship between a player’s fingers, the strings and the fretted surface.
A front photograph cannot demonstrate the mechanism in operation, so the explanation depends on the catalog. But knowing it exists changes how the image is read: the neck-to-body relationship becomes an adjustable system rather than a fixed join. Historical design could include accommodation for use, not just a finished shape established once in the workshop.
For another way to connect an instrument’s mechanism with a performer’s actions, our guide to the physical gestures behind unusual instruments follows rubbing, turning, bowing and blowing rather than judging sound from appearance.
Zaragoza: ornament and modernization can share a body
The museum dates Pedro Fuentes’s guitar to before 1858. Its unusually elaborate decoration invites slow looking: patterned borders, contrasting materials and a prominent bridge make the surface visually active. The collection description points out a squirrel holding an acorn in the border ornament and interprets asymmetry in the body profile in relation to small-scale production.
At the same time, the instrument has a raised fingerboard and a bridge design the museum discusses as modernizing features. Elaborate ornament therefore does not place it outside technical change. The object combines choices about appearance with choices about the relationship between the strings, fingerboard and soundboard.
This is a useful antidote to evaluating historic instruments solely through a minimalist modern taste. A richly decorated guitar need not be dismissed as furniture, and a plain one need not be assumed more serious. The relevant questions concern how particular features work together, and which claims the surviving instrument and its documentation can actually support.
A Madrid workshop guitar becomes Segovia’s instrument
The 1912 guitar associated with Manuel Ramírez and Santos Hernández brings workshop work and a performer’s career into the same story. The museum recounts, drawing on Segovia’s account, a visit to Ramírez’s shop before his 1913 Madrid debut. The instrument had been made as an eleven-string commission, then rebuilt for six strings after that commission was rejected. Changes included the soundboard, bridge and tuning arrangement.
It subsequently served Segovia for roughly twenty-five years of his early career. A repair by Hernández in 1922 left another documented stage in its history. Its significance is therefore not that it emerged from a workshop in an eternally final state. Conversion, use and repair helped make it the instrument preserved today.
The guitar also resists a story centered on a performer alone. Naming the workshop and the craftsmen keeps construction visible alongside musical celebrity. Its spruce soundboard, rosewood body components and ebony fingerboard are material facts, while its association with Segovia adds a documented human history. Neither should erase the other.
What these ten objects can—and cannot—tell us
Taken together, the instruments reveal several histories rather than one straight line. Paired courses and single strings are different arrangements, not interchangeable labels. Braces, cloth reinforcement and adjustable necks address different practical questions. Ornament can coexist with mechanical innovation. Replacement parts may be central evidence of an instrument’s use rather than a reason to ignore it.
The photographs also establish limits. They do not let us compare original volume, tone or comfort under controlled conditions. They do not prove that every musician in a city used the same design, or that an example in a museum was typical of an entire market. Survivors reflect use and collecting choices.
A useful next museum visit begins with four questions: How are the strings grouped? Which features are original? Which construction details are documented but hidden? And what changed as musicians continued to use the instrument? Those questions turn a familiar outline into a record of decisions, without requiring the object to sound like—or lead inevitably toward—the guitar we already know.
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