The
Wooden Economy
or
Logistic solutions for Lutemakers
The
very name of the lute comes from the Arabic Al’Ud, or the wood, and this paper
deals with some historic aspects of the supply of the woods necessary and some
ideas about the quantities involved.
It
is evident from iconography and literary references that the lute was widely
used across all of W. Europe very soon after its arrival as the ‘Ud in about
1250. This alone may cast some doubt on a single entry point in Moorish Spain,
undoubtedly important as that was. Here it is in Seville in 1283
Alphonso
el Sabio book of chess endgames 1283
By
1300 it was in England and common enough to be used prominently in this
ecclesiastical cope.
Steeple
Aston Cope c.1310-1340 (Opus Anglicanum) earliest known English representation
of a lute. V&A London
In c. 1340
here it is in the Wenceslas Bible from Bohemia
Wenceslas
IV bible (Czech 1387-1400) Vienna Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek MS
2759/64, fol. 81
At
the same time, c.1340, here it is in Florence.
Andrea
Pisano (c.1290-1348) successor to Giotto on Florence campanile Orpheus as
luteplayer c.1340
Circa
1370 here is another more up-to-date looking lute also in Florence
Agnolo
Gaddi,
The Coronation of the Virgin, probably c. 1370
Samuel
H. Kress Collection 1939.1.203
In
1375 it was in an explicitly Christian context in Spain
Circa
1400 we even have an idealised picture of a lutemaker’s workshop and sales
showroom in France!
Boccaccio,
Des cleres et nobles femmes (French after 1401) Bibliotheque nationale, MS fr.
12420, fol. 119
In
1440 here it is in Italy
And
in 1450 in the Netherlands
Where
were all these medieval lutes being made? We simply don’t know. Perhaps all
locally, certainly there must have been some local lutemaking for Henri Arnault
of Zwolle to find out enough general details to write his manuscript
description in Dijon round about 1440, when he was employed as physician and
astronomer for Phillip The Good, Duke of Burgundy. But it is somewhat surprising that it is not
until 1461 that we get the first mention of a lutemaker, Perchtold, in the
Füssen area and the first lutemaker to acquire citizenship there is a certain
Georg Wolf in 1493, because Füssen was to become such a dominant centre of
lutemaking in the next century. Perhaps it already was, but we don’t know. (The
director of the Museum in Füssen somewhat mischievously suggests the date 1493
and the name Wolf might suggest he was a jewish maker originally called Lopez
expelled from Spain, Lopez-Lupo-Wolf.)
Certainly
moving wood in the past was both difficult and expensive, so industries tended
to grow up near to this natural resource and with onward transport links to a
market. So it is perhaps no surprise that the first recorded major centre of
lutemaking did establish itself in the area round Füssen, right on the edge of
the heavily forested Alps with its abundant supplies of spruce [picea abies]
for soundboards, yew [taxus baccata] and maple [acer platanoides & acer
pseudoplatanus] for the backs and structural parts of lutes. There was also plenty of plum [prunus spp.]
for pegs and bridges.
Matthäus
Merian copperplate 1643
The heavy,
bulky wood needed only to be brought down the mountainsides which begin in the
foreground of this view just across the river Lech from Füssen, while the river
itself afforded easy and gentle transport for the delicate finished instruments
towards their main markets in England, France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Situated on the Via Claudia, a
former Roman road, Füssen was on a route, that until the 1950s, was the major
connection between Augsburg and Venice. Though shallow the River Lech is
navigable by raft and joins the Danube providing a trading route to Vienna and
Budapest. By road or water merchants had easy - for the time - access to
rich markets to the south-west and the north-east.
Michael
Wening copperplate,1696
The
best spruce for soundboards needs tight grain with narrow rings and a sharp
division between summer and winter growth so the best are found at the higher
altitudes. The trees themselves need to be very large to allow for the wide
soundboards of lutes, plus the best time to harvest this wood is in the depths
of winter when the sap is lowest. So the process of extracting these large logs
across and down steep and rugged terrain was a real problem before the modern
mechanical era shown in my first photograph. The system devised, called
Sovenda, was described by a parson Hans
Rudolf Schintz in 1783 in his Beyträge zur näheren Kenntniss des
Schweizerlandes as a series of
timber slides held together not by fastenings but simply by pouring water over
the joints and allowing it to freeze.
J
R Schellenberg 1782
He
describes it as being peculiar to the Italian side of the Alps but it went on
until the late 19th century all over the Alps into the era of photographs, such
this from 1886 in Lower Engadin
And
we have a highly romantic description of the process written by H. Berlepsch, The Alps or Sketches of Life
and Nature in the Mountains. (Trans. Leslie Stephen 1861) pp.372-5
But
there is an even more interesting account of it in the 1884 Centralblatt für
das gesamte Forstwesen, X. Jahrgand, März, p.155 which was quoted by Remy
Gug in his wonderful article in FoHMRI comm 1101 Oct. 1990.
“Anyone
who has ever been near to a timber slide while it is being used has noticed a
remarkable difference in the sound of the sliding timber....There is no doubt
about the fact that this “singing timber” has always been in demand and that it
achieved a good price. .... If for example in Carinthia timber had been
prepared for transport, an Italian gentleman would show up, settle himself
nearby and listen attentively to the sound of the thundering timber. Whenever a
timber passed by that caused the air to vibrate his face lighted and he told
his servant to mark it. He recognised the sound from a great distance. Often he
would sit there and wait for hundreds of timber to pass. As soon as the singing
sound was heard he would be looking for the “singer” and found it at once. The
higher and longer the sound, the more he liked it. Thus he would wait for his
“singers” for many days.”
Remy
Gug notes that all this machinery of transport involved hundreds of experienced
men and would not be possible without well established traders with
considerable capital. Just as today, the lute and other instrument makers
relied on an existing logistical infrastructure designed to provide large quantities of timber for other
uses. Schintz estimates that 12,000 - 20,000 logs would be slid down the
mountainside each winter season, and a later article in Forest History
Today 2002 describes a similar 12
kilometer slide built in Alpnach 1810 which itself used 25,500 logs in its
construction alone.
However
all was not plain sailing for Füssen and its industry. In 1525 the Peasants War
broke out in South Germany and although many were killed in its suppression and
afterwards the survivors harshly taxed
in retribution, Füssen was not too badly affected. Dürer, as usual, has
a humane and ironic eye for the situation.
“If
someone wishes to erect a victory monument after vanquishing rebellious
peasants,.........”
Albrecht
Dürer, Underweysung der Messung, Nürnberg 1525, Monument to Commemorate
a Victory over the Rebellious Peasants, 1525
Later
in 1546 the catholic town of Füssen was
caught on the wrong side of the religious Schmalkaldic War and was sacked by
15000 troops and 100 cartloads of loot was taken off to Augsburg. In addition
there were outbreaks of plague in 1520, 1524, 1536 as well as in 1546 after the
sack of the town. So the attractions of rich, relatively stable, catholic
northern Italy just over the Alps along the well-established old Roman route
Via Claudia Augusta must have been immense.
Certainly
about this time there emerge other important centres of lutemaking in North Italy,
Venice, Verona, Padua and Bologna, and ALL the makers have German names and
strong links back to the Füssen area.
The
most well-known maker is undoubtedly Laux Maler in Bologna and he seems to have
been one of the earliest to arrive probably even as early as 1503 according to
Sandro Pasquale & Roberto Regazzi who have produced a detailed study of the
Bolognese lutemakers (Le radici del successo della liuteria a Bologna,
Florenus Edizioni, 1998) Maler’s inventory taken a few days after his death in
1552 shows that he had an industrial scale workshop with about 1100 lutes of
various sorts in his workshop. The only raw materials noted are 1354 lute
soundboards in various stages of completion and unspecified numbers of lute
ribs. but no large pieces of raw timber. As I have suggested the raw timber is
too bulky for long distance transport so it is better to select higher up the
chain and only transport the selected smaller pieces.
There
is also another inventory of Christofolo Cocho from the really extensive
researches of Stefano Pio whose three volumes of work on the lute and violin
makers of Venice is a major contribution to our knowledge. But this inventory
is from 1664 when lutemakers were beginning to turn over to making violins, in
fact his workshop is called a violin bottega in the inventory.
So
I shall concentrate on the third surviving inventory, that of Moises
Tiefembruker son of Magno Tieffenbrucker, (This is a minefield of
identification and it’s not entirely clear which of the Dieffopruchar labelled
lutes can be attributed to which individual) another German with a name
connecting him back to Tieffenbruck near Füssen. I have worked on this with Francesco Conto
and it is highly revealing of the industrial scale of the trade.
He
lived here in Calle dei Stagneri [alley of the tinsmiths] shown in the Jacopo
de Barbari map of 1500
Jacopo
de’Barbari, Bird’s Eye View of Venice, 1500, British Museum.
And
here it is today, recognisably the same.
Google
image
This
the building with the bridge leading from the calle dei Stagneri
Photo,
David Van Edwards
with
the water entrance, mentioned in the inventory
Photo,
David Van Edwards
His
inventory is dated 1581 There were two versions taken within days of each other
by Loredan one of the most prestigious law firms in Venice, presumably there
was some dispute. This is a summary of the lute related parts of the second
more detailed version, translated by Francesco Contó.
140
lutes of yew and figured maple
12
lutes with ivory lines
100
cheap lutes
110
yew lutes and others
10
ivory and sandalwood lutes
(from
the first inventory I include: 1 lute in black sandalwood and ivory with its
own case.)
4
ivory lutes
Total
376 lutes of which 26 expensive and 100 cheap
36
unfinished lutes
150
yew lute backs
24
cheap lute backs
Total
174 lute backs of which 150 yew
8
guitars
1400
yew ribs
6100
yew ribs
1300
yew ribs
6000
yew ribs
Total
14,800 yew ribs
400
bad yew ribs
400
sandalwood ribs
1400
white wood ribs to be planed (poplar?)
Grand
Total 17,000 ribs
2000
soundboards for lute and guitar
600
lute necks
300
bridges
150
fingerboards
160
ivory pegs
170
lute cases, lined and unlined
10,800
lute and violin strings
480
thin strings
1200
bad strings
Total
12,480 strings
10
cornetti
8
pieces of ebony
19
ivory tusks
40
lute and guitar moulds
90
locks for lute (cases)
Sharpening
stone and some iron tools and some lute moulds
I
want to flag up a few points:
1.
Again a large number of finished lutes but virtually no tools, just the 40+
moulds, suggesting he was employing journeymen, Gazellen, who would have had
their own tools.
2.
The explicit distinction between cheap and expensive lutes.
3.
The colossal number of yew ribs which were clearly already planed, in contrast
to the 1400 white wood ribs which were unplaned. I think this suggests these
were local wood, perhaps maple but perhaps poplar.
4.
Again a huge number of soundboards identified as such, not logs of spruce.
5.
Ivory both as tusks and as ribs. This and the ebony logs probably valuable
enough to import in the lump.
There
are two surviving lutes with his identical printed labels and, neatly, one is
expensive and the other clearly cheap.
I’ll
start at the bottom end of the market. This is the lute in Munich Stadt Museum,
it has been sadly converted into a mandora
Photo,
David Van Edwards
For
the present purpose it is interesting that it is, unusually cheap and is made
of poplar, a cheap white wood readily available in North Italy. It is also of
the slightly older Maler type shape, long and pear shaped.
Photo,
David Van Edwards
Moises
side view
Maler
side view
Now
here is the up-market lute, this has a handwritten addition of HH and fecit
suggesting it was actually made by a senior journeyman who was allowed some
identity.
Moises
side view
Florence
Bardini Museum 144 Magno Dieffopruchar, Venice, 1609 side view
Moises front view
Florence
Bardini Museum 144 Magno Dieffopruchar, Venice, 1609 front view
Musée
de la Musique, Paris (E. 1560)
Again
converted to a mandora but this one is made of ivory and Rio rosewood
[Dalbergia nigra] and calls to mind the item:
“1 lute in black
sandalwood and ivory with its own case.”
Now there is no such wood
as black sandalwood. Sandalwood [santalum album] is a light, soft, fragrant
wood rather yellowish. I notice that there are 400 sandalwood ribs in the
inventory and indeed the famous 1566 Fugger inventory of lutes has four lutes of
sandalwood and five lutes made of striped sandalwood and ivory so all these
might indeed be what we know of as sandalwood, even though it does not strike
me as a very suitable wood for a lute back. However the smell might well have
appealed to a rich collector like Raymond Fugger.
But if you are a dealer
or a maker in Venice encountering Rio rosewood [dalbergia nigra] for the first
time you might well notice the smell as well as the colour and put the two
together in the name black sandalwood. Similar things have happened when naming
US woods. In fact there is another name for this wood, Palisander, This word
can’t be traced back further than the 18th century
and it first appears in Dutch. When I consult the etymology it is very much
disputed, with several people suggesting it came from the Spanish, Palo Santo
the holy wood or lignum vitae [Guaiacum] so called because it was widely used
as a cure for the French pox - that is syphilis! However the Dutch knew this
wood very well as pockhoudt or pox wood and were therefore very unlikely to
confuse the two. In support of my supposition I have found that Corominas, Joan
& Jose A Pascual 1980-3 in their Diccionario Critico Etimologico
Castellano e Hispanico. Madrid: Editorial Gredos
(1981:4:354)
suggest it comes from Palo sándal ie.
sandalwood, on account of the smell.
What
is clear both from the inventory and surviving lutes in museums is that South
American woods and other exotica like ivory and ebony were really in
surprisingly common use for lutes, even allowing for the fact that obviously
valuable instruemnts are more likely to survive through periods of disuse. In
the Fugger inventory there are lutes of Indian cane, whalebone, sandalwood,
lignum vitae, ebony, Brazil wood [possibly pernambuco] maple, cypress, and of
course yew, and there are several surviving lutes of snakewood and kingwood. It
is odd therefore that other instruments of the violin family did not seem to
experiment with this huge range of woods. I suggest it is because the violin
family was still mostly the preserve of the professional player whereas the
lute was an aspirational instrument which appealed to rich collectors and
amateurs as well as the few professionals. I very much doubt whether Dowland or
Francesco da Milano played on ebony or snakewood lutes, though Piccinini
reports that Caccini played an ivory lute. Acoustically too the back of a lute
is not so intimately connected to the soundboard as in the violin with its
soundpost, so the influence is more as a reflective surface and for this these
harder, heavier woods do increase the volume without changing the character as
they might in a violin.
But
the vast preponderance of ribs in Moises’ inventory are yew. There are no
surviving yew wood lutes by Moises but plenty by other makers, out of my
database of 800 lutes I have information on the ribs of 539, of these 140 have
yew ribs the second most common wood after the 173 of maple. And many of these
use the contrast betwen the pale sapwood and the orange brown heartwood of yew
to produce a striking striped effect that is not obtainable from any other
wood. This theorbo by Buechenberg, made in 1614, has 41 ribs of
heartwood/sapwood yew with ebony strips between the ribs.
Photo,
David Van Edwards
This
close-up shows the fine grain and you can clearly see how straight and blemish
free such wood must be to have the full effect
Photo,
David Van Edwards
And
this monster by Giovanni Tesler made in 1615 has 65 ribs. They are in fact
heartwood/sapwood but the filthy varnish has obscured the contrast. It is now
in Dresden Museum and has been restored so if you visited the museum you’d be
able to see the true effect.
Where
were these yew ribs coming from? And here we go back to the Füssen family
connections which so many of these German Venetian lutemakers maintained. Let
us look at the Guild regulations drawn up in 1562 for regulating the Füssen
lutemakers.
The
first of its kind (the second is a Parisian guild of 1599) Amid the many
detailed regulations about who can take apprentices and how long these
apprenticeships shall last [5] and how many years [3] he must be a journeyman
before becoming a master there is this last point:
“Finally, a number of citizens who have not
learned the trade here have dared to buy
lute
staves and to plane them and sell and brand them independently. This, however,
is
not only a burden for us and hinders us in competition with other towns, but
also
damages
our good name; therefore, in the future no one, no matter who, shall be
allowed
to practice this branding. Rather, he shall be put out of business by the guild
and
also punished according to the judgment of the guild, unless he has learned
this
craft
properly and honestly and has become a member of the guild.
Wherewith Your Honors have heard in brief
the summary of our craft customs.
Obediently
requesting, Your Honors shall not only herein graciously approve, but
also
ratify the guild regulations we have drawn up and support us in carrying them
out.
Because we, in contrast to other craftsmen, do not earn money here, but rather
we
spend here what we earn in other places, we do not doubt that it is in Your own
interest—as
an experiment and subject to your revocation—to approve and empower
[
these regulations].
Herewith obediently submitted,
Your Honors' obedient fellow citizens,
Masters of the lute maker's guild here
This
was at a time when there were 20 workshops
in Füssen complete with masters, journeymen and apprentices all in a
town of 2000 inhabitants. Adolf Layer in his book Die Allgäuer Lauten-und
Geigenmacher, Augsburg 1978, even makes the point that these restrictive
practices were another factor pushing some of the most enterprising makers to
move and seek work abroad.
Then
in 1606 these regulations were re-issued in a revised form which added the
stipulation that only legitimate sons of subjects of the Augsburg bishopric
could be taken as apprentices and that journeymen who had trained elsewhere
(Italy??) had to work at least two years for a Füssen master before they could
submit their “masterpiece” for approval.
Otherwise they could apply to become a master if they were able to marry
either a daughter or a widow of a Füssen master. All newly appointed masters had to offer
their lutes for sale to the guild before they could be sold abroad. And finally whoever remained unmarried was
not allowed to sell lute ribs but must instead remain as a journeyman in the
workshop of a master.
It
seems clear that cutting and preparing lute ribs for export was actually a
major part of these Füssen workshop’s activities. It also sounds, reading
between the lines, as if they were becoming increasingly defensive and insular
in relation to other centres of lutemaking that they perceived as a threat.
Confirmation of this might be the regular printed labels of Raphael Mest:
“Raphael Mest in
Fiessen, Imperato // del Misier Michael Hartung in Pa- // dua me fecit, Anno
16[ms]33”
These
make great play of having trained under Michael Hartung in Padua, surely as a
selling point. Further confirmation are the customs duties payable in the port
of London where “Cullen-made” lutes, that is lutes shipped through Cologne,
predominantly Füssen lutes, are shown over a period of nearly 80 years from
1582 - 1660 to be worth a third to a quarter of the price of “Venice-made”
lutes. And that both sorts were commonly shipped and taxed in units of a dozen,
so a considerable trade.
1660
Port of London duty charges
No
wonder the Füssen guild were defensive and Raphael Mest wanted some reflected
Italian glory.
But
there was a further, perhaps surprising, threat to the Füssen trade in lute
ribs. That very contrast between yew sapwood and heartwood which was so
attractive for the lutemakers had also a structural significance for making
powerful longbows. The sapwood is very resistant to tension while the heartwood
is very resistant to compression, so using the wood with the sapwood on the
outer face of the bow effectively produces the equivalent of a modern composite
bow. A bow of enormous power and rapid firepower that was still greatly
superior to the available muskets at the time we are concerned with. The trouble
was that Europe was running out of good straight yew, the Bavarian yew was
renowned to be some of the best and so the wealthy arms trade was in direct
competition with our lutemakers. England had been a major importer of yew bow
staves for several centuries: in the time of Richard III no wine could be
imported from Spain unless the ships also brought 10 staves of yew for every
barrel of wine, and in 1514 HenryVIII “sent men of science into Spain who chose
10,000 yew staves which were marked with the Crown and Rose, and were the
goodliest ever brought into England”
(Latham, Wood from Forest to Man 1964 p. 74). This demand created
a market and the wood dealers had to put in bids to the various authorities in
Bavaria, Tyrol and Austria for an Eibenmonopol, the yew monopoly.
From
Fred Hageneder, Yew a History, Stroud 2011
It
was a huge and lucrative trade, in 1510 Henry VIII, again, agreed to buy 40,000
bow staves from the Doge of Venice at £16 per hundred, and in 1521 the Austrian
monarchy demanded 5 Rhineland guilders per 1000 staves and Balthasar Lurtsch
bought 20,000 staves. The Nürnberg Fürer company, who held yew privileges in
South Germany and Austria, are calculated to have exported 1,600,000 staves in
the period 1512-1592. This map of the export transport routes for yew bowstaves
reminds us of the infrastructure needed, and of course that it would be almost
identical to the routes used for finished lutes.
However
what it conspicuously left out was the Via Claudia Augusta route carrying
finished lute ribs. So I have added this in green.
From
Fred Hageneder, Yew a History, Stroud 2011
So
it is not surprising that this rival, well-funded, demand should pose a threat
to the Füssen lutemakers who were selling prepared lute ribs to their relatives
in Venice. It came to a recorded head in the years 1609-12 with a long and
complicated exchange of letters and pleas from the Füssen guild to the Duke of
Bavaria and the Archduke of Tyrol and
the Prince Bishop of Augsburg, trying to prevent a Dutch dealer, Walthauser von
Mühlheim, from repeating his felling and export of a large quantity of yew from
the Ettal mountains for sale to England and even to the infidel Turks (who had
a recent treaty with the Netherlands). They also complained of the sly dealings
of two who had picked out the finest and longest of the lute ribs which had
been made by the official day-workers in the previous years, and sent these to
Venice, Verona and Padua, and then had sent the shorter ones to Füssen and even
sold these at a higher price. One of the prime movers of the initial plea was a
prominent Füssen maker Mang Hellmer, two of whose lutes have survived, both
made of striped yew. This is the one in Darmstadt Museum
Lute
by Mang Hellmer, 1609 Füssen Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum (Kg 67:104)
Photo, David Van Edwards
In
brief the injunction was successful, but then Mang Hellmer himself went behind
the backs of the other makers and paid 100 guilders to Duke Maximilian for a
monopoly of yew felling for himself and in 1612 took 5 cartloads of yew
bowstaves to the market in Frankfurt. He was betrayed by his own brother and
the makers complained again, including the significant words “not only for us
poor craftspeople and our children’s children, not only here in Füssen but also
all the lute makers in Italy, where one sends the lute ribs...” (Layer, op cit.
p.23)
The
depredations of the arms trade and the lutemakers mean that there are now no
significant stands of yew in the whole of Europe and it is a protected species
over much of the continent.
Although
I am happy to blame most of this on the arms trade, the numbers of lutes
produced must have been quite staggering when we consider that just a one day
snapshot of Laux Maler’s workshop shows over a thousand lutes while only six
have survived and 360 Moises Tiefembruker lutes have come down to two. And these are only two of hundreds of
workshops producing lutes for at least 150 years. One would have to make far
too many assumptions to calculate anything like a reliable figure, but just a
back of envelope guess, using very conservative assumptions, suggest over 15
million lutes and, if the ratio of surviving lutes is applied, that makes
3,896,103 yew lutes, say 77 million yew ribs.