Poggio Virginals

A decorated virginals in the Italian tradition, with painted interior landscape and ornamental casework.

The virginals was the most common domestic keyboard instrument of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its decoration was an integral part of its identity. This instrument was made by Francesco Poggio around 1620, in Florence. For the first few centuries of its existence, it was an unadorned wooden box, but sometime in the 19th century, it was painted white. The owner asked me to dress it up a little and adapt two landscapes by the Carracci brothers to the lid, inside and out. The case design is borrowed from an instrument at the Met Museum in NYC. True to Italian fashion, the case and the instrument are two separate pieces of work, hence the absence of the keyboard.