Catalog entry for the fac-simile

Catalog entry for the original

Sound sample on mimo-international

The mysterious aura of the vihuela de mano stems from the scarcity of the number of known instruments: until the 1970’s, we knew only one instrument that could be considered a vihuela, preserved at the Jacquemart-André museum in Paris.

The practice of mano vihulea in Spain in the 16th ecentury left an unprecedented musical repertoire and its cultural impact is felt in literary and iconographic sources. Despite this obvious importance, the remaining copies are now counted on the fingers of one hand and are all of different sizes and chords. Among these, the instrument possessed by the Royal College of Music in London, manufactured by Belchior Dias, presents a number of obvious analogies with the Vihuela of the Music Museum.