Arpanetta

'A large, rather solid instrument, standing on small cross-bar feet. The body has an internal partition and two pine bellies. The right-hand belly has two inset roses and is decorated with a scene of Orpheus and the beasts. The other has one rose and is decorated with strewn flowers reminiscent of the soundboard decoration of Flemish keyboard instruments of the seventeemth century. The right-hand belly is traversed by thirty-seven double and triple courses of wire strings running up to three hitch rails, one located towards the shorter side of the body, the next beyond, and the third below the second and with its surface closer to the belly. On the other side are twenty-three single and double courses, hitched to a single rail.' Anthony Baines, Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum - Part II: Non-keyboard instruments. (London, 1998), pp. 73-74.