Orient-Archaologie

Band 27

Ricardo Eichmann/FangJianjunl
Lars- Christian Koch (Hrsg.)
Studien zur

Musikarchaologie VIII

Ricardo Eichmann – Fang Jianjun –

Lars-Christian Koch (Hrsg.)

Studien zur Musikarchäologie VIII

DEUTSCHES ARCHÄOLOGISCHES INSTITUT
ORIENT-ABTEILUNG

Orient-Archäologie

Band 27
 Ricardo Eichmann – Fang Jianjun –
Lars-Christian Koch (Hrsg.)

Studien zur Musikarchäologie VIII

Klänge der Vergangenheit

Die Interpretation von musikarchäologischen Artefakten im Kontext

Sound from the Past

The Interpretation of Musical Artifacts in an Archaeological Context

Vorträge des 7. Symposiums der Internationalen Studiengruppe Musikarchäologie

im Tianjin Conservatory of Music, Tianjin, China, 20.–25. September 2010

Papers from the 7th Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology
at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music, Tianjin, China, 20–25 September, 2010

2012

Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH · Rahden/Westf.

 XXVI, 436 Seiten mit 338 Abbildungen, 36 Tabellen zzgl. 1 CD-ROM (mit Text und Musikbeispielen)

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Eichmann, Ricardo / Fang, Jianjun / Koch, Lars-Christian (Hrsg.):

Studien zur Musikarchäologie VIII ; Klänge der Vergangenheit –
Die Interpretation von musikarchäologischen Artefakten im Kontext
[Red.: Orient-Abteilung des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts].
Rahden/Westf.: Leidorf, 2012
(Orient-Archäologie ; Bd. 27)
ISBN 978-3-89646-657-0

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Inhalt/Contents

Ricardo Eichmann In memoriam Werner Bachmann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI

Vorwort der Herausgeber/Preface of the Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV

Lars-Christian Koch Klänge der Vergangenheit. Die Interpretation von musikarchäolo-

gischen Artefakten im Kontext. Einführung/Sound from the Past.
The Interpretation of Musical Artifacts in an Archaeological Context.
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIX

Musikinstrumente und Organologie – Allgemein

Musical Instruments and Organology – General

Fang Jianjun Sound-Producing Instruments, Pre-instruments and Instruments

in the Study of Music Archaeology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Wang Ling Iconographic Study of Bronze Musical Instruments and Their

Images from the Ancient Dian Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Reem F. Shakweer Continuity between Ancient Egyptian Music and Contemporary

Music. Techniques of Playing the Harp and the Flute (Nay) and
Their Indications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Zdravko Blažeković Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music. . . 39

Musikinstrumente und Organologie – Idiophone

Musical Instruments and Organology – Idiophones

Cajsa S. Lund Sound Tools, Symbols or Something Quite Different?

On Possible Percussion Instruments from Bronze-Age Sweden –
Including Methodological Aspects of Music-Archaeological
Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Gao Xisheng The Way Chimes were Assembled during the Western Zhou
Dynasty. A Study Based on Chime Bells Unearthed from Western
Zhou Dynasty Burials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Shao Xiaojie A Musicological Study of Unearthed “Chu Gong Ni Bells”. . . . . . . . . . 83

Musikinstrumente und Organologie – Blasinstrumente

Musical Instruments and Organology – Wind Instruments

Timothy J. Moore An Aulos in Eelde, the Netherlands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

VIII Inhalt/Contents

Stefan Hagel The Pompeii Auloi. Improved Data and a Hitherto Unknown
Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Olga Sutkowska One of Nine Tibiae from a Villa Rustica in the Vesuvian Area
Re-discovered. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

José Pérez de Arce South Andean Iconography of the Antara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Claudio Mercado Muñoz Is the Antara Flute Still in Use in Atacama? Caspana’s El Negro. . . . . . 139

Annemies Tamboer A Medieval Bagpipe Chanter from a Terp in Frisia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Jean-Pierre Van Hees Playing the Blija Bagpipe Again. Reconstruction and Rediscovery
of the Musical Resources of an Early Fourteenth-Century Bagpipe . . . 161

Musikinstrumente und Organologie – Saiteninstrumente

Musical Instruments and Organology – Stringed Instruments

Oliver Vogels Rock Art as Musical Artefact. Prehistoric Representations of

Musical Bows in Southern Africa  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Yang Yuanzheng Inventing the Fuxi Style of Qin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

Chie Arayama Stringed Instruments Excavated in Japan. Various Aspects of the

Stringed Instruments in the Yayoi and Kofun Periods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

Raquel Jiménez Pasalodos The Lyres of the Far West. Chordophones in the Bronze Age
Warrior Stelae of the Southwest Iberian Peninsula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Musiktheorie
Music Theory

Guo Shuqun – Probing Tone Measurement Technology in Ancient China.

Kong Weifeng On a Basic Concept of the Music-Archaeological History of China . . 229

Li Mei Unexpected Resource. Pre-Qin Period Bamboo Slips Lü Shu,

Found in Fangmatan, Gansu Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Musik im Kontext
Music in Context

Anna Gruszczyńska- Equivocal Sound and Image. Activating the Senses in Nasca Art. . . . . . 251
Ziółkowska

Sarah B. Barber – Ancient Aerophones of Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. The Archaeological

Guy David Hepp and Social Context of Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Francisca Gili Music and Psychedelic Substances. A Case Study in Archaeological

­Remains from Northern Chile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Mark Howell Tz’unum Bailes and the Role of Music Instruments in Precolumbian
Highland Guatemala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Zhu Godwin Research on Mingqi Instruments of the Pre-Qin Period. . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

 Inhalt/Contents IX

Ingrid M. Furniss Scenes of Processions, Feasting and “Entertainment” at Helinge’er.

Visualizing Han Cultural Identity in the Northern Border Region
of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

Sylvain Perrot Greek Auloi from Archaic Times in an Archaeological Context . . . . . . 315

Antonietta Provenza The Domestication of the Other. Hermes, the Lyre and the Satyrs
between Violence and Civilization  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Daniela Castaldo – Music on Stage in Red-Figure Vase-Painting of Magna Graecia

Eleonora Rocconi (400 – 320 BC). The Role of Music on So-Called Phlyax Vases  . . . . . . . 343

Roberto Melini The ‘Soundscape’ of Pompeii. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

Riitta Rainio Power, Magic and Bells. A Contextual Analysis of Finnish Late Iron
Age Archaeological Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373

Berichte
Reports

Jean-Loup Ringot Upper Paleolithic Aerophones – Flute or Pipe? An Experimental

Approach. Summary Report  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389

Simon Wyatt Sound Production in Early Aerophones. Short Report on a Work

in Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

Liu Zhengguo An Echo from 9000 Years Ago. A Report on Testing the Tone of
Yue Bone Pipes Unearthed in the Second Lot of Jiahu Relics . . . . . . . . 399

Stefan Hagel How to Shoot an Aulos. Taking Measurements from Photographs. . . . 405

Chie Arayama Reconstruction Research of Stringed Instruments Excavated

in Japan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Dorota Popławska The Mediaeval Chordophones in Polish Excavations. The Trails of

Reconstructing Their Tailpieces and Strings. Summary Report. . . . . . . 423

Appendix I Inhalt der CD/Contents of the CD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

Appendix II Die Autoren/The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433

Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s
General History of Music
Zdravko Blažeković
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit Charles Burneys im
ausgehenden 18. Jh. publizierten Werk General
History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the
Present Period unter ikonographischen und orga-
nologischen Gesichtspunkten. Den Schwerpunkt
bilden dabei insbesondere die drei Tafeln mit ca. 30
dargestellten Instrumenten des ersten Bandes, da
diese auch später noch als Vorlagen dienten: sowohl
für musikgeschichtliche Literatur (Jean-Benjamin
de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et mo-
dern) als auch für allgemeine Nachschlagewerke
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd to 6th eds.; Abra-
ham Rees’ Cyclopædia, or, Universal Dictionary of
Arts, Science, and Literature). Der Autor beleuchtet
die Entstehung dieser Tafeln und setzt sich kritisch
mit Burneys Art der Dokumentation, Darstellung
und Datierung der Instrumente auseinander.
In April 1773 the English music historian Charles
Burney (1726  – 1814) advertised his forthcoming
General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages
to the Present Period, emphasizing that the book
will be illustrated “with original drawings of an-
cient and modern instruments, engraved by the
best artists”.1 When the edition was completed
and all four volumes published by 1789, only the
first – discussing the music of antiquity – included
­engraved plates showing some thirty ancient in-
struments.2 Considering the bulk of the material,
presenting the entire history of Western music on
over 2,500 pages, this is by all means a modest num-
ber of illustrations. However, Burney financed the
­edition himself and production of the engraved ta-
bles required additional expenditures on his part.
Therefore, his willingness to pay for illustrations
underlines their importance in the presentation of
his narrative.
Burney’s work, written with accomplished lit-
erary skill, was apparently “one of the most fash-
ionable books of the year” when it was published.3
It received a broad reception among its contem-
poraries and exercised a wide influence on genera-
tions of historians and music lovers.4 The pictures
of instruments that he provided to his readers, in
particular several lyres, were repeatedly copied
from his edition into other publications, receiv-
ing along the way the quality of archetypal images.
Table IV reproduces three Greek theatrical masks
and musicians playing a variety of wind, string and
percussion instruments (Fig. 1);5 table V shows a
selection of lyres and kitharas, a sistrum, and cym-
bals (Fig. 2);6 and table VI includes a range of wind
1 he advertisement for the subscription, dated 26 April
T
1773, is printed facing the title page of the second edition of
Burney’s “The Present State of Music in France and Italy”
(Burney 1773).
2 Burney 1776 – 1789. Besides the three tables at the end of the
volume, within the text of the first volume there are includ-
ed sketches of an Egyptian lute (facing p. 206) and Egyptian
harp (facing p. 222); in the second volume pictures of a me-
dieval vielle and fiddle are included (facing p. 264).
3 Lonsdale 1965, 181.
4 The first edition of volume 1 was sold already in subscrip-
tion in 1047 copies, and had to be reprinted in November
1776, and again in 1789. Compare Hunter 2009, 385. The
volume was issued in a German translation in 1781 by Jo-
hann Joachim Eschenburg, as Dr. Karl Burney’s Abhand-
lung über die Musik der Alten.
5
Figure 1: Burney described the Herculaneum-related in-
struments as follows (Burney 1776, vol. 1, 517 – 518): (3)
Antique Mask [No. 3 is taken from the mask held in the
hand of Thalia, the comic muse, one of the most perfect and
beautiful of the ancient paintings in the Musæum at Portici;
it was dug out of Pompeii, Burney 1776, vol. 1, 155]. (5) The
figure of a Cupid playing on two Flutes with Stopples, or
plugs. From an ancient painting in the Museo at Portici. The
use of these stopples seems to have been to stop or open the
holes of a Flute before a piece began, in order to accommo-
date the scale to some particular mode or genus.
6 Figure 2: Burney described the Herculaneum-related in-
struments as follows (Burney 1776, vol. 1, 518 – 521): (3)
The Lyre held by Terpsichore, in the picture of that Muse,
dug out of Herculaneum. (4) The Psaltery, as it is deline-
ated in the ancient picture of the Muse Erato, dug likewise
out of Herculaneum. […] Don Calmet says the Psaltery was
played upon by a Bow, or plectrum: now, besides the al-
most certainly of the bow being unknown to the ancients,
the form of this Psaltery is such as makes it impossible to
be played upon with a bow. The Hebrew Psaltery, how-
ever, must have been an instrument of a different form from
this. It had originally ten strings, and is called frequently the
Ten-stringed Harp, by David in the Psalms. The Hebrew
40 Zdravko Blažeković
instruments and a frame drum (Fig. 3).7 These pic-
tures are interesting to analyze from several per-
spectives: How did Burney make his selection of
instruments? What did he want to demonstrate
with them? What were his sources for present-
ing ancient instruments? Who were the engravers
working for him? How did he graphically present
images in the book? What are the organological
characteristics of the shown instruments? What
was his approach to their dating? What reception
did these images have in later sources? On this oc-
casion I will focus my attention mainly to the ico-
nography originating from the archaeological sites
of the Vesuvian area, only occasionally touching on
other sources.
The engraving work for Burney was done by
Charles Grignion (table IV) and Pierre Maleu-
vre (tables  V and  VI). Charles Grignion, Jr.
(1752/54  – 
1804) was an English painter and
draughtsman who studied in London with Gio-
vanni Battista Cipriani (1727 – 1785). Cipriani was
in turn a close friend of Francesco Bartolozzi
(1725 – 1815), an Italian artist working in London,
whose vignettes executed after Cipriani’s draw-
ings Burney used as frontispieces for his volumes.
The social circle around Cipriani and Bartolozzi,
besides Burney, included the composers Johann
name for it is Nabel, or Nebel Nassor, whence the Greek
Ναβλιου, and Latin Nablium. Vide Bianchini De Tribus
Gen. Inst. Mus. Vet. Org. p. 35. Kircher imagines it to have
been a horizontal Harp, played with a plectrum, and that
it furnished the first idea of a Harpsichord. But there must
have been two kinds of Psaltery in antiquity, as Athenæus,
lib. v. cap. 25 mentions the ψαλτηριον όργιον, the upright
Psaltery, of which kind must have been that under consid-
eration in the hands of the Muse Erato. (5) A Trigonum, or
Triangular Harp. It is taken from an ancient painting in the
Museum of the king of Naples, in which it is placed on the
shoulder of a little dancing Cupid, who supports the instru-
ment with his left hand, and plays upon it with his right.
The Trigonum is mentioned by Athenæus, lib. iv. and by
Julius Pollux, lib. iv. cap. 9. According to Athenæus, Sopho-
cles calls it a Phrygian instrument, and one of his Dipno­
sophists tells us, that a certain musician of the name of Al-
exander Alexandrinus was so admirable a performer upon
it, and had given such proofs of his abilities at Rome, that
he made the inhabitants μουσομανειν, musically mad. It
may not be unworthy to remark, that this little instrument
resembles the Theban Harp, Pl. VIII. in the circumstances
of wanting one side to complete the triangle. The performer
too, being a native of Alexandria, as his name implies, makes
it probable it was an Egyptian instrument upon which he
gained his reputation at Rome. (7) The Cymbalum, or Cro-
talo. This instrument is frequently to be seen in the Bac-
chanalian sacrifices and processions represented in ancient
sculpture. It is still in general use in eastern countries, and
has lately been introduced among the troops of almost all
the princes of Europe, on account of its utility in marking
the steps of the soldiers, with force and precision during
their march. This present engraving was made from an an-
cient painting at Portici, in which it is placed in the hands
of a Baccante, who beats time upon it to her own dancing.
Through Crotalo is the modern Italian name of this instru-
Christian Bach (1735  – 1782) and Carl Friedrich
Abel (1723 – 1787), the violinist and composer Luigi
Borghi (ca. 1745 – ca. 1806), the violinist Felice Gi-
ardini (1716 – 1796), and the castrato Giusto Ferdi-
nando Tenducci (1735 – 1790).8 Therefore, Burney
had easy access to Grignion, who was in his early
twenties when he was asked to produce the plate
with ancient instruments. Grignion also engraved a
number of portraits of composers for John Hawk-
ins’s General History of the Science and Practice of
Music, published in London in the same year as the
first volume of Burney’s work. From 1770 to 1784
he regularly displayed at annual exhibitions at the
Royal Academy, mainly portraits and mythologi-
cal scenes. In 1782 Grignion left London for Rome
and spent the rest of his life in Italy studying an-
cient art, producing large historical and mythologi-
cal scenes.9 The other engraver working for Burney
was the Frenchman Pierre Maleuvre (1740 – 1803).
After being apprentice with the celebrated French
engraver Jacques Firmin Beauvarlet (1731 – 1797)
in Paris, he spent several years in London, where
he met Burney. Returning to France, he became
known as an engraver of portraits, contributing to
the Galerie du Palais Royal and Cabinet Poullain.
Although Grignion and Maleuvre produced
their images on the basis of secondary sources,
ment, θροταλον in Greek, and Crotalum Latin implied one
that was different from the Cymbalum; a kind of Castanet.
Vide Cic. in Pison. 9. (12) A Lyre in the famous ancient pic-
ture dug out of Herculaneum, upon which Chiron is teach-
ing the young Achilles to play.
7 Figure 3: Burney described the Herculaneum- and Pompeii-
related instruments as follows (Burney 1776, vol. 1, 522): (7)
A Tambour de Basque, Tabret, or Timbrel, from a picture
of a Baccante, or female bacchanal, dug out of Herculane-
um. This instrument is of very high antiquity, having been
in use among the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. To the
rim were hung bells or pieces of metal. (8 – 9) Tibiæ pares,
or equal Flutes, placed in the hands of the young Olym-
pus, who in a picture likewise dug out of Herculaneum, is
learning to play upon them of Marsyas. There are only two
holes in each of these instruments; and in another antique
picture upon the same subject, from the same place, each
of the Flutes is represented with two paxilli, or stopples,
instead of foramina, or holes. (10) An ancient instrument,
as yet inedited, among the antiquities of Herculaneum; it
is of a very peculiar kind, lately dug out of Pompeii, a city
that was destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius at the
same time as Herculaneum. It is a Trumpet or large tube of
bronze, surrounded by seven small pipes of bone or ivory,
inserted in as many of metal. These seem all to terminate
in one point, and to have been blown through one mouth-
piece. The small pipes are all of the same length and diame-
ter, and were probably unisons to each other, and octaves to
the great one. There is a ring to fasten a chain to, by which it
was flung over the shoulder of the performer, which chain is
likewise preserved. The instrument was found in the Corps
de Garde of this subterraneous city, and seems to have been
the true military Clangor Tubarum.
8 Bergquist 2007, 177 – 187.
9 Thieme – Willis 1922; Feurer 2009.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music
Burney was probably familiar with most of the
original artworks included in the tables because he
had an opportunity to see and examine them dur-
ing his travels in Italy. In June 1770 he left Lon-
don on a journey leading him from Paris to Ly-
ons, Geneva, and on to Italy from Turin, through
Milan, Padua, Bologna, Venice, Florence, reaching
eventually Rome and Naples. His stay in Naples,
from 16 October to 7 November, was flanked by
stays in Rome from 20 September to 14 October
and again from 11 to 22 November.10 In his travel
journal Burney described that he came to Naples
“impressed with the highest ideas of the perfect
state in which I should find practical music.”11
Then he went on to say that by studying musical
life in the city he was not only attempting to be-
come acquainted with learned men, musicians, and
composers there, but also with relicts of Neapoli-
tan music history which had been freshly extended
back for almost two millennia by the archaeologi-
cal discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii.
The first discoveries of Herculaneum were made
in 1709/10, and systematic excavation through tun-
nels dug along the town’s original streets started
in 1738 on the order of Carlo di Borbone (King
of Naples 1734 – 1759; later Carlos III of Spain,
1759 – 1788). The formal excavations of Pompeii
commenced in 1748, and an inscription identify-
ing the ruins was unearthed in August 1763. The
famous Villa of the Papyri was discovered only
in June 1750. In short, archaeological activities at
the foot of Mount Vesuvius were occurring with-
in some twenty or thirty years prior to Burney’s
visit and the location was a lively archaeological
site when he arrived. The discovery of these an-
cient cities and their archaeological research gen-
erated great excitement throughout Europe since
they coincided with a growing belief that classical
antiquity should form an essential part of the edu-
cation of Europe’s gentlemen.12 Therefore, with
the expansion of archaeological excavations under
Mount Vesuvius, Naples became for young gen-
tlemen traveling on the Grand Tour an important
center to visit.13
On 21 October 1770 Burney visited Posillipo,
where the tomb of Virgil is apparently located. The
next day he went to Pompeii and Herculaneum.
By the time Burney visited Pompeii, archaeolo-
gists had explored only a small portion of the site
around the Stabiae Gate, which includes the thea­
ter, the Triangular Forum with Doric temple, the
temple of Jupiter, and the adjacent area.14 Most of
the town was still covered by lava, which provided
a fertile soil for vineyards through which Burney
and his companions walked to the site. The visit
was memorable for Burney and he described that
“this city, stript as it is of all its best remains, which
are carried to Portici, afforded me more pleasure
41
than any antiquities I ever saw.”15 On 24 October
he sailed to the Neapolitan countryside, again ex-
amining ancient monuments. On several occasions
he visited the British Ambassador to the court of
Naples, William Hamilton, and at his Villa An-
gelica situated under Mount Vesuvius dined with
his family and other Neapolitan intellectuals or at-
tended music performances.16 On 30 October Lord
Hamilton showed Burney his sizable collection of
Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities and signed
a request for him and his friend to be allowed to
see the royal museum at Portici which exhibited
­archaeological artifacts from Pompeii and Hercula-
neum.17 The Museum Herculanense in Portici was
established in 1750 by King Carlo di Borbone as a
repository for the preservation of objects excavated
at the Vesuvian archaeological sites. Burney visited
the museum on 2 October and later reported about
instruments that he encountered there:
This day I visited his Neapolitan majesty’s
museum, at Portici, where I had enquiries
to make concerning ancient instruments
and MSS which were of real importance to
my history. In the third apartment of this
curious repository, where the ancient in-
struments of surgery are placed, I met with
the following musical instruments; three
Systrums, two with four brass bars, and one
with three; several Crotali or cymbals; Tam-
bours de basque; a Syring, with seven pipes;
and a great number of broken bone or ivory
tibiæ.18
After dinner that day Burney visited the apart-
ments in the old royal palace located on the other
side of the street, to see the paintings recovered
from Herculaneum. His “hunt throughout Por-
tici was for ancient instruments” and here he had
a chance to examine a number of their depic-
tions.19 As a consequence of this visit, he included
10
urney’s trip to the Vesuvian area is discussed in Melini
B
2010.
11 Burney 1771, 291.
12 Berry 2007, 46.
13 Just a few months before Burney, in mid-May 1770, Mo-
zart was in Portici admiring excavations from Herculaneum
and in Pompeii looking at the temple of Isis; a year earlier
­Joseph II, the later Holy Roman Emperor, was there.
14 Berry 2007, 8.
15 Burney 1974, 168 – 169.
16 Sir William Hamilton (1730 – 1803) was British minister at
the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800. His collection of
ancient objects subsequently formed the basis of the Greek
and Roman department at the British Museum.
17
Burney visited the Hamiltons at Villa Angelica on 26, 29,
and 30 October, and 3 and 5 November 1770. Burney 1974,
174 – 185. His visit on 30 October is described on page 183.
18 Burney 1771, 331.
19 Burney 1974, 190.
42 Zdravko Blažeković
in his General History of Music pictures of eight
instruments from the Herculaneum wall paint-
ings (counting as one instrument the pair of tibias
which Burney marked with two numbers) and one
mask copied from the Pompeii wall paintings.
To facilitate the dissemination of information
about the excavated objects and their accurate
pictures, the king founded in 1755 the Accademia
Ercolanese di Archeologia which was entrusted
with the scholarly interpretation of the excavated
objects. Between 1757 and 1792 the academy pub-
lished the eight-volume series Le antichità di Er-
colano esposte, which depicted and described these
objects, and this was obviously the source easily
available to Grignion and Maleuvre for copying
images of instruments from Herculaneum.20
However, besides published reproductions
from Herculaneum, Burney supplied his draughts-
men also with drawings of other interesting works
which he collected along his trip. Just as he was
commissioning copies of compositions kept in
Italian libraries, he was also on the lookout for
sketches of relevant visual sources which he him-
self verified for accuracy. On 13 November 1770,
he entered the following note in his diary:
Il Cavalier Piranesi while I was at Naples
had sent his draughtsman all over Rome in
search of ancient instruments – and he made
drawings from several of the most antique
and curious. However as I came here to see
with my own eyes I determined to examine
the originals and compare the copies myself
– for which purpose I set off this morning
as soon as it was light in company with Pi-
ranesi’s young man – and walked about till
I was ready to lye down in the street. How-
ever I was glad I took this method of having
the drawings correct, for several things had
been mistaken and omitted, and others were
very obscure till I had seen the whole fig-
ure who held or played the instrument, and
sometimes even seeing the whole group in a
basso rilievo was necessary to my forming
any conjecture about the occasion and man-
ner of playing it.21
In his tables, Burney did not copy complete
compositions which included a musical scene: in
table IV he showed musicians extracted from their
surroundings and context, in table V instruments
are shown as independent objects, and in table VI
images are mixed showing both isolated instru-
ments and two players of wind instruments. The
method of presenting the instruments as isolated
objects required some artistic imagination be-
cause when part of an instrument was covered by
the musician’s body or missing altogether in the
original, the artists were expected to reconstruct it.
This practice in dealing with musical instruments
or small objects found in archaeological excava-
tions was no different from what artists were do-
ing when drawing views of ancient monuments or
architects when learning their craft by sketching
old buildings. The Italian vedutista famous for his
etchings of Roman views, Giovanni Battista Pi-
ranesi (1720 – 1778), whom Burney mentions in the
above diary entry, was particularly well-known for
showing the surface fabric of original ancient struc-
tures and for augmenting their destroyed parts. Al-
though he acknowledged context to be important
for understanding the artifact, in his Capricci he did
not hesitate to alter their precise location.22
Another significant alteration in Burney’s ta-
bles occurred with instruments shown in the hands
of performing musicians because reversal of image
sides during the engraving process misrepresented
the playing techniques. Burney did include a note
along with the tables that the sides of images were
reversed, but that has not diminished the oddity of
the images’ appearance.
From our present-day perspective, decontextu-
alization of the instrument shown in the original
source might appear odd, because the integral im-
age usually provides more information than just the
extracted detail. However, Burney was neither the
first nor last author to show instruments separated
from their original iconographic context.23 This
manner of presenting instruments was an accepted
practice in organological/iconographic scholar-
ship until the early twentieth century, and even
Georg Kinsky, in his groundbreaking Geschichte
der Musik in Bildern of 1929, presented some in-
struments in the same fashion.24 However, Burney
might have had a specific reason for showing in-
struments in table V as decontextualized objects.
In one paragraph at the end of his General History
of Music he made a comment about the pitfalls of
studying visual sources, which provides us with a
possible key for understanding his editorializing of
images:
20 I n the chapter on the Muses in his General History of Mu-
sic, Burney referenced this collection saying that “among
the capital pictures dug out of Herculaneum, are portraits
of Apollo, and the Muses, his companions: from which en-
gravings have been published in the second volume of Le
Pitture antiche d’Ecolano.” In the continuation he describes
characteristics of each Muse, also making references to im-
ages IV, 3 and V, 3, which originated from these paintings.
Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 293.
21 Burney 1974, 204.
22 Dixon 1999, 189.
23
One such attempt related to the presentation of ancient
lyres that comes to mind are drawings by Pier Leone Ghez-
zi (1674 – 1755) in Codex Ottobonianus Lat. 3109 of the
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Rostirolla 2010.
24 Kinsky 1929.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music
I have seen the Syrinx, which had a regular
series of notes ascending or descending, rep-
resented with seven pipes, four of one length,
and three of another, which of course would
furnish no more than two different sounds.
The Cymbals too, which were to be struck
against each other, are placed in the hands
of some antique figures in such a manner,
that it is impossible to bring them in contact
with the necessary degree of force, without
amputating, or at least violently bruising the
thumbs of the performer. And it is certain
that artists continue to figure instruments
in the most simple and convenient form for
their designs, long after they had been en-
larged, improved, and rendered more com-
plicated. An instance of this in our own
country will confirm the assertion. In the
reign of George the Second a marble statue
was erected to Handel, in Vauxhall gar-
dens. The musician is represented playing
upon a Lyre. Now if this statue should be
preserved from the ravages of time and ac-
cident 12 or 1400 years, the Antiquaries will
naturally conclude that the instrument upon
which Handel acquired his reputation was
the Lyre; though we are at present certain
that he never played on, or even saw a Lyre,
except in wood or stone.25
Although there had been several large-scale
studies of ancient instruments published during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholarship
on this topic was still in its early stages at the time.
In addition, comparative work with iconographic
sources was particularly difficult because the num-
ber of published sources was limited, making it vir-
tually impossible to do any scholarly work outside
of centers with ancient monuments, like Rome or
Naples. Considering that Burney was ambiguous
concerning dating of the sources and their geo-
graphic origin, it would be too easy to dismiss the
question of decontextualization of images on the
grounds of his negligence. His reasons for extract-
ing instruments from pictures were probably more
complex, touching on the issue of realism of visual
sources.
The image of a simple triangular harp (tri­
gōnum), which Burney showed in a horizontal
position (table V, instrument 5), does not reveal
anything about the way the instrument would have
been held or played in ancient times. But the origi-
nal wall painting from Herculaneum, from which
Burney extracted the instrument, does not provide
convincing clues about the playing technique either
because the Cupid represented there was obviously
a product of imagination. It would be ergonomi-
cally unthinkable to play the instrument and con-
43
trol its sound if the musician would hold it on his
shoulder in the way the Cupid does. The figurine
from Myrina, from 100 – 50 BC, at the Musée du
Louvre, showing a female trigōnum player, repre-
sents a different and more plausible playing tech-
nique (Fig. 4).
In a similar way we could analyze Burney’s
transformation of the kithara (which he calls “psal-
tery”; V, 4). The instrument is extracted from a pic-
ture showing the muse Erato. She is stylized here;
it is an image not showing a music-making scene,
but Erato placed on a shelf, as if she were being
represented in a sculpture decorating a façade. Er-
ato is depicted as posing rather than performing. If
there has ever been a spontaneous moment of per-
formance, this is certainly not one, and this picture
leaves us uncertain as to how the instrument would
have been supported around the musician’s shoul-
der and kept in balance. The image that Burney has
used is not unique; over time at least two other ex-
amples of this kithara type came to light from the
Vesuvian excavations. The image from a reception
hall of the villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscore-
ale, where the instrument is not presented in a dec-
orative context but held by an important personage
at the court, is particularly illuminating, suggesting
a possible playing position (Fig. 5).26 The same rea-
soning could be applied to the lyre copied from the
wall painting showing Charon teaching Achilles to
play the lyre (V, 12). Neither Charon nor Achil-
les is actually playing the instrument and the whole
composition does not help us significantly in un-
derstanding how it would have been played.
The lyre which Burney copied from the red-
figure vase in the collection of Lord Hamilton is
in the original also held by the musician, but not
played (V, 10), and the same is true for the lyre
copied from the Farnese Bull sculpture, which is
left on the ground (V, 1 and V, 2).
Could we assume that, influenced by the con-
cerns with scientific accuracy which were brought
to the fore precisely by the new research methods
developed from Vesuvian archaeology and the En-
lightenment in general, as well as his own think-
ing about problems with iconographic evidence,
25 urney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 514 (Reflections upon the Con-
B
struction and Use of Some Particular Musical Instruments
of Antiquity).
26 The wall painting showing a seated woman playing kithara
was excavated in 1900 from a villa on private property at
Boscoreale, an area about a mile north of the ancient town
of Pompeii, and it has been at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York since 1903 (Rogers Fund, 1903 [03.14.5]).
A wall painting showing a third instrument of the same type
is reproduced in Coarelli – Foglia – Foglia 2002, 167. In a
combination these images might indicate that this type of
kithara was frequently used in the Vesuvian area, but they
were not yet available to Burney to make such a conclusion.
44 Zdravko Blažeković
Burney made a decision to extract instruments
from their original visual context either in order
to obliterate the artistic mistakes on the original
representation when he decided that an instrument
was depicted in an unconvincing playing position,
or because the instrument on the original image
was not used in actual performance and the whole
composition was irrelevant for demonstrating the
playing technique.
The image of the lyre from the wall painting
showing Charon and Achilles also demonstrates a
problem which Burney faced when working with
copies. His images were twice removed from the
original Herculaneum wall paintings and with each
generation the copy lost some clarity and details.
Achilles’ lyre in Burney appears stylized, consisting
of strangely shaped arms and a crossbar at the top
to which the strings are tied (Fig. 6). But when we
look at the original wall painting, it is clear that the
lyre has a tuning mechanism fixed on the crossbar
and a resonator made of tortoise shell. The tortoise
shell is shown from the bottom, behind the strings,
and it is not clearly visible already on the etching
in Le antichità di Ercolano esposte. Maleuvre obvi-
ously could not understand these two elements on
the picture he was copying and dropped them from
the table, producing for Burney a stylized instru-
ment, which then migrated to other sources.
Since Burney was presenting instruments
shown in the Vesuvian wall paintings without the
musician, at first glance it might seem odd that he
opted to use reproduction of iconographic sources
rather than present pictures of true instruments
(sistra, tibiae) which he had a chance to see at the
royal museum in Portici. However, the museum
policy did not allow visitors to take notes at the
museum or even bring with them any writing uten-
sils. Also, it is important to keep in mind that ex-
cavated instruments were not always in a perfectly
cleaned and preserved condition that would make
easy for him to understand all their details during
a single visit. Therefore, later on, when he was pre-
paring the text of his General History of Music for
publication, borrowing images from the volume Le
pitture antiche d’Ercolano e contorni in the series
Le antichità di Ercolano esposte was for him the
only option. Even the sistrum shown in the table
was not from the Portici museum, which owned
three of them, but from the cabinet of curiosities
at the library of St. Geneviève in Paris (V, 13). The
only instrument actually excavated from the Vesu-
vian sites which Burney has reproduced is the curi-
ous wind instrument which he described already in
his Present State, where he also commented about
his inability to take notes in the museum.
The most extraordinary of all these instru-
ments is a species of trumpets, found in
Pompeia not a year ago; it is a good deal
broken, but not so much so as to render it
difficult to conceive the entire form. There
are still the remains of seven small bone or
ivory pipes, which are inserted in as many
of brass, all of the same length and diameter,
which surround the great tube, and seem to
terminate in one mouth-piece. Several of the
small brazen pipes are broken, by which the
ivory ones are laid bare; but it is natural to
suppose that they were all blown at once,
and that the small pipes were unisons to
each other, and octaves to the great one. It
used to be slung on the shoulder by a chain,
which chain is preserved, and the place
where it used to be fastened to the trumpet,
is still visible. No such instrument as this has
been found before, either in ancient painting
or sculpture, which makes me the more min-
ute in speaking of it. This singular species of
trumpet was found in the Corps de Garde,
and seems to be the true military Clangor
Tubarum. As no person is suffered to use
a pencil in the museum, when the company
with which I had seen it was arrived at the
inn where were dined, Mr. Robertson, an
ingenius young artist of the party, was so
obliging as to make a drawing of it, from
memory, in my tablets; which all the com-
pany, consisting of seven, agreed was very
exact.27
In the three tables showing instruments from
Greco-Roman antiquity, about one third were
items from the Herculaneum wall paintings, which
Burney combined with images from other sources
mostly found in Rome and Naples. Among others,
we have here one lyre and pair of pipes copied from
red-figure vases in the collection of William Ham-
ilton (V, 10 and VI, 4),28 another lyre copied from
the famous Farnese Bull sculpture, originating
from the Caracalla Baths in Rome (212 – 216 AD;
today at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in
Naples; V, 1 and V, 2); a third lyre came from the
27 urney 1771, 331 – 333. In its abbreviated form this text was
B
also included along with the picture of the instrument in:
Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 522. The image is reproduced as
VI, 10. The archaeological, organological and cultural con-
texts of this instrument, discovered in October 1768, are
presented in the manuscript Monumenti antichi rinvenuti
ne reali scavi di Ercolano e Pompej by the museum’s cu-
rator Camillo Paderni (modern edition Paderni 2000) and
recently contextualized in Melini 2007.
28 Burney copied two instruments from Hancarville
1766 – 1767: a lyre (V, 10), originally depicted on a presently
unidentified red-figure vase (vol. 1, fig. cix), and a double-
pipe player (VI, 1) on a red-figure Attic pelike today at
the British Museum, GR 1772.3 – 20.33, vase E 427 (vol. 1,
fig. cxxiv).
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music
first-century AD wall painting known as the Al-
dobrandini wedding (today at the Musei Vaticani;
IV, 7).29 There is picture of a supposedly Abyssin-
ian lyre which was supplied to Burney by the Scot-
tish traveler and writer James Bruce (1730 – 1794),
who spent several years in North Africa and Ethio-
pia (V, 6).30 He included a composition of musi-
cians playing a frame drum and tibia, copied from a
relief at the Villa Albani in Rome (today at Museo
Archeologico Nazionale, Naples; IV, 9 and 10),
and a trumpet player from a destroyed triumphal
arch constructed in honor of Marcus Aurelius
(150 – 200 AD; Palazzo dei Conservatori of I Mu-
sei Capitolini, Rome; IV, 8). Two theatrical masks
were copied from the volume Le maschere sceniche
e le figure comiche d’antichi romani descritte breve-
mente da Francesco de’ Ficoroni (Roma, 1736; IV, 1
and 2). The only instrument Burney borrowed
from an earlier organological study was the triplex
lyra (V, 11), a reconstruction made by Francesco
Bianchini (1662 – 1729) and first published in his De
tribus generibus, in 1742.31
Although Burney was concerned with the pres-
entation of an accurate historical account of music
history and precisely for this reason included im-
ages of ancient instruments along with his narra-
tive, he generally ignored the issue of their precise
dating. Neither in the main text of the volume nor
in descriptions of included images did he mention
when the reproduced artworks were made, and by
extension there is no precise dating of the repre-
sented instruments. Most of his iconography origi-
nated from sources found in southern Italy dated
to the first and second centuries AD, with two im-
ages going back to red-figure vases from the third
to fifth century BC. Hence, leaving specifics about
both their chronology and geography ambiguous,
he presented an assortment of sound-producing
objects from Mediterranean antiquity as a com-
pact group, implicitly suggesting that they had
not changed over a rather long period of time and
throughout the region. In a short chapter on Ro-
man music he claimed that “with respect to the mu-
sical instruments used by the Romans, as they in-
vented none themselves, all that are mentioned by
their writers, can be traced from the Etruscans and
Greeks.”32 This statement indicates that he put sig-
nificance on the invention of instruments, dismiss-
ing their evolution, and explains why he did not
see anything wrong with documenting instruments
described in chapters on Greek music with Roman
organological iconography. It is disputable wheth-
er or not he could have been aware that the sculp-
ture of the Farnese Bull, which he placed among
“the most ancient representations” of the lyre,33
comes from 212 – 216  AD, but as a historian visit-
ing the royal museum in Portici, he must have been
aware of the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, and
45
if he would have been concerned with their cor-
rect dating, he could have at least put instruments
from Herculaneum into their correct chronological
context. Instead, he referenced their images in the
chapter entitled “Of Music in Greece during the
Residence of Pagan Divinities, of the First Order,
upon Earth”, describing the musical involvement
of Pan, Mercury, Apollo, Marsyas, the Muses, and
Bacchus, who were in large part connected with the
mythological invention of instruments. Ironically,
he used Roman iconography to document Greek
instruments, although he was convinced that “it
is well known how ignorant the Romans were in
Painting, Sculpture, and all the fine arts, long af-
ter they were arrived at the highest perfection in
Greece.”34
Burney was certainly familiar with writings by
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717  – 
1768), the
German art historian and archaeologist who was
the first to articulate the difference between Greek,
Greco-Roman and Roman art, and apply the cat-
egories of style on a large, systematic basis to the
history of ancient art. Winckelmann’s Geschichte
der Kunst des Alterthums, published in 1764, was
on Burney’s list of books he intended to consult,
and he made references to Winckelmann also in the
text of his General History of Music.35 It would be
incomprehensible that a historian of such broad in-
tellectual curiosity would not read Winckelmann’s
works, which were translated into French, Ital-
ian and English, and had enormous significance
29 I n his travel journal he describes how he “went to the
­Aldobrandini Palace to see the ancient painting there. The
colour is very much gone and much less fresh than that of
the Heculaneum and Pompeia pictures – but the design of
this and the drawing seem superior. The figure which holds
the lyre is charming. Mengs in his Apollo and the Muses at
the Villa Albani has imitated the form of this lyre, which has
a circular base.” Burney 1974, 205.
30
Burney’s (mis)representation of Egyptian instruments is
discussed in Moorefield 1975.
31 Blažeković 2012. Bianchini based his reconstruction on
the description of the instrument in Deipnosophistae
(Δειπνοσοφισταί XIV, 636 c–f), an anthology of texts com-
piled by Athenaeus of Naukratis (b. about 160 AD), who in
turn quoted from “On the Dionysiac Guild” (Διονυσιακου
Συστήματος) by the historian and grammarian Artemon of
Cassandreia (probably third century BC).This instrument
was possibly constructed as an experiment by Pythagoras
Zacynthos, a musician active in the early to mid-fifth cen-
tury BC, and it never was part of widespread performance
practice in ancient Greece.
32 Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 486.
33 Burney 1776 – 1789, vol.  1, 268 – 269.
34 Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 483.
35 In his journal he noted “See Winckleman’s [sic] History of
Art 2 vols. 8vo in French and inedited antiquities Ital. Fol.”,
Burney 1974, 171. At one place in his General History of
Music he even talks about redating “the little figure of Apol-
lo […] in the Grand Duke’s Tribuna at Florence, which Mr.
Addison and others supported to be antique, [but it] has
been proved to be modern by the Abbé Winckelmann and
Mr. Mings.” Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 515.
46 Zdravko Blažeković
for the late eighteenth-century reception of Greek
art among European intellectuals. Still, he did not
­apply Winckelmann’s ideas to his presentation of
ancient iconography.
Although Burney’s approach does not present
geographically or chronologically the most bal-
anced selection of ancient organology, he made a
true attempt to distance himself from the icono-
graphic material used by earlier music historians
and to present results of his own iconographic
research. At several places in the book he men-
tioned that he was studying sculptures and ancient
artworks in order to learn about instruments. The
discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii were for
all eighteenth-century antiquarians a true dream
come true because excavations brought to light for
the first time items such as furniture, small utensils
used in everyday life, and a variety of the most dif-
ferent kinds of objects. He understood the signifi-
cance of these discoveries and it is natural that he
wanted to use in his book the wealth of the new
information which he had a chance to see at the
royal museum in Portici as well as other images he
examined and collected.
Still, although he obviously had a genuine in-
terest in instruments, in his narrative he did not
dedicate much space to them, and the images are
largely disconnected from the text. At the end of
the volume, immediately before comments about
the instruments in the three tables, he included the
chapter “Reflections upon the Construction and
Use of Some Particular Musical Instruments of An-
tiquity”,36 but he does not give here specifics about
individual instruments or references pointing to the
illustrations. The chapter describes in a very general
way the three families of instruments, basically sum-
marizing the organological survey by Francesco Bi-
anchini. Burney has here even some surprisingly in-
correct statements. Talking about wind instruments,
he said: “In all my researches I have not been able to
discover that the ancients had Reeds for any of their
wind instruments. They had Flutes made of natural
reeds, and canes; but no such artificial reeds as we
use for our Bassoons, Hautbois, and Clarinets.”37
Analysis of Burney’s approaches to ancient or-
ganology and the methodology of his iconographic
research is important for us today because he was
one of the leading minds among European mu-
sic historians, with broad interests in all aspects
of Western music. He was exceptionally well in-
formed about earlier studies, consulting sources of
different kinds, and, still, we find in his writings
ambiguities and errors, all demonstrating how dif-
ficult it was to understand ancient organology.
The only publication which reproduced images
of Hercualenum lyres in a music historical context
prior to Burney was the edition of Giovanni Bat-
tista Doni’s treatise Lyra Barberina issued in 1763
by the Florentine antiquarians Antonio Francesco
Gori (1691 – 1757) and Giovanni Battista Passeri
(ca. 1694 – 1780). Since Doni’s original illustrations
accompanying his text had been lost by that time,
the editors prepared five new tables reproduc-
ing string instruments which they thought to be
appropriate for supporting the text.38 Both Gori
and Passeri were familiar with the excavations at
Herculaneum and we should not be surprised that
Passeri reproduced four instruments from there
in Tabula I (nos. IV, V, VI, and VIII) (Fig. 7)
and one in Tabula II (no. IV), also copying them
likely from the second volume Le pitture antiche
d’Ercolano e contorni (1760).39 However, the imag-
es are produced schematically here, only in outline.
Burney’s images were readily adopted into the
transmission of organological iconography. The
French music historian Jean-Benjamin de La Borde
(1734 – 1794) was probably the first to use them in
his Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris,
1780). The main reason to mention here his repro-
ductions of instruments is to document his icono-
graphic method, which was diametrically opposite
of what Burney had done. While Burney extracted
instruments out of their original context when he
felt that the context might provide inaccurate or in-
complete information about the playing technique
or did not contribute to the understanding of the
instruments, La Borde presented them in a new and
entirely fictionalized visual context which did not
add anything to their understanding. His artist, Sil-
vestre David Mirys (1742 – 1810), who provided the
drawing for the engraver Pierre Chenu (1718 – after
1780), produced an imaginary scene in which the
Herculaneum instruments were put into the hands
of joyful dancing musicians (Fig. 8). Regardless
of his indication that the instruments came from
paintings in Herculaneum, nothing in this rococo
composition comes close to the Herculaneum wall
paintings. La Borde was likely entirely unaware of
the original Herculaneum compositions, and prob-
ably have not even thought about the presentation
of instruments in their original context. The accu-
racy of the composition was obviously an unim-
portant issue for him.
Burney’s text was so influential that it pro-
vided the basis for further borrowings in general
referential literature, and six lyres from his table V
(nos. 1, 3, 6, 10, 11, and 12) were included in the
36 urney 1776 – 1789, vol.  1, 508 – 516.
B
37 Burney 1776 – 1789, vol. 1, 511.
38 Doni 1763. Gori prepared two plates (printed as Tabu-
lae IV and V) and Passeri later added three more (Tabulae I,
II, and III). Palisca 1981, 15. Instruments nos. I, 5 and I, 8 in
the Doni edition were also reproduced by Burney.
39 Their involvement with the Herculaneum excavations is
documented in an epistolary collection Notizie del memo-
rabile scoprimento dell’antica città Ercolano (Notizie 1748).
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music
broadly disseminated Encyclopaedia Britannica
between its third edition of 1788  – 97 and sixth
edition of 1820 – 23 (Fig. 9).40 We find somewhat
altered plates from the General History of Music
again in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopædia, or, Universal
Dictionary of Arts, Science, and Literature (1820),
to which Burney contributed many articles on mu-
sic,41 and plates from the Encyclopaedia Britannica
are included again in Thomas Dudley Fosbroke,
Encyclopaedia of Antiquities (1825).
Probably during the 1780s the French draughts-
man Jean Hauer (1748 – 1820) produced a set of en-
gravings with objects from Herculaneum, entitled
“Differentes Antiques decouvertes a Herculanum
conserves dans le Museum de Portici pres de Na-
ples” (Fig. 10).42 Sheet 3 includes among other ob-
jects a sistrum, a frame drum, a lyre, a kithara, and
a trigōnum, which are as in Burney decontextual-
ized and shown as isolated objects. But they are
rendered here with the utmost attention to detail,
and the parts of instruments covered with the mu-
sician’s body or garment are reconstructed in the
most imaginative way; Terpsichore’s lyre has an
extra support above the tortoise shell, the element
which is entirely hidden behind her arm.
Each of these artists – Maleuvre for Burney,
Passeri for Doni, Mirys for La Borde, and Hauer
– approached the reconstruction of instruments in
a different way and although the direct or indirect
starting point for all of them was Le antichità di
Ercolano esposte it is worth comparing their plates
in order to learn about the degree of artistic license
which artists allowed themselves even when they
were producing illustrations to support a scholarly
narrative on music history.
We might today wonder about the reasons guid-
ing Burney in making his selection of the instru-
ments, or we might not approve of his disregarding
their dating or geographical origin, but compared
with plates in other general histories of music at
the time, Burney was the most original author
who chose instruments from monuments he him-
self had had an opportunity to examine. He was a
rare exception among eighteenth-century histori-
ans writing general surveys of music history, who
were all using a small and limited group of pictures
borrowed from organological literature going back
to Francesco Bianchini’s 1742 treatise De tribus
Sources
Burney, Ch.
1771 The Present State of Music in France and It-
aly: or, The Journal of a Tour through Those
Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials
for a General History of Music. 1st ed. (Lon-
don).
47
generibus.43 A number of sources he used for his
plates are still today among the iconic images of the
ancient musical world, and several of them were se-
lected for inclusion in the volume on Roman music
in the series Die Musikgeschichte in Bildern, which
testifies that they still have not lost their documen-
tary significance.44 Although music iconography as
a scholarly discipline with its own methodology of
research started only in the twentieth century, indi-
vidual music historians using visual sources before
that time arguably did know how to adequately an-
alyze their content and draw accurate conclusions
on that basis. It is hard to speculate about Burney’s
reasons for giving preferential treatment to ancient
instruments and including tables with images only
in the first volume of his General History of Music,
leaving later historical organology works unillus-
trated. But it seems that the Herculaneum material
and other ancient monuments which he had seen
during his travels in southern Italy – in the 1770s
largely unknown to music historians – must have
made a particularly significant impact on him, and
later on he considered it worth going to the addi-
tional expense for engravers in order to share his
excitement with readers. Although Burney’s meth-
ods of iconographic research were still rudimentary
and the results were marginal to his other achieve-
ments, he should be included among the early pro-
ponents of research on music iconography.
40 Encyclopædia Britannica 1778 – 1797; Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica 1820 – 1823.
41 Rees 1802 – 1820, plates vol. III: Hydraulics – Naval Archi-
tecture, “Ancient musical instruments”, pl. 1 – 4 (1820).
42 The set might have been part of Jean Hauer’s series of en-
gravings entitled Dessins de la mode neuve au goût antique
pour les architects en general, et spécialement pour server à
divers artisans, intended to be used by artists needing deco-
rative objects for copying in their works. Guilmard 1880,
458 – 459. Although some instruments on the sheet are the
same as in Burney, there is no evidence that Hauer copied
them from there.
43 General music histories considered here include: Martini
1757 – 1781; Blainville 1767; Hawkins 1776; La Borde 1780;
and Forkel 1788 – 1801. Besides Bianchini’s images, their
other sources for iconography of ancient instruments were
Pignoria 1613; Mersenne 1636; Bartholin 16771, 16792; Spon
1685; and Bonanni 1722. A dissemination of organological
iconography from Bianchini’s De tribus generibus in the
context of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Museum chartaceum is dis-
cussed in Barker 2007.
44 Fleischhauer 1964.
1773 The Present State of Music in France and It-
aly: or, The Journal of a Tour through Those
Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials
for a General History of Music. 2nd ed.
(London).
48 Zdravko Blažeković
1776 – 1789  A General History of Music, from the
Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols.,
(London) 1776; 1782; 1789; 1789, pages 594.
612. 679. 711.
1781 Dr. Karl Burney’s Abhandlung über die
Musik der Alten, transl. by Johann Joachim
­Eschenburg (Leipzig).
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50 Zdravko Blažeković

Fig. 1  a. b. The engravings from Baiardi – Carcani 1760, on which Grignion modeled items copied from the Hercula-
neum wall paintings, are reproduced at the top: double pipes (IV, 3) and a theatrical mask (IV, 5). – c. Charles Grignion,
table IV in: Burney 1776, vol. 1.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music 51

Fig. 2  a–f. The engravings from Baiardi – Carcani 1760, on which Maleuvre modeled items copied from the H ­ erculaneum
wall paintings, are reproduced at the top: a trigōnum (V, 5), cymbals (V, 7), a lyre (V, 3); and at the ­bottom: a kithara
(V, 4) and a lyre (V, 12). – f. Pierre Maleuvre, table V in: Burney 1776, vol. 1.
52 Zdravko Blažeković

Fig.  3  a. b. The engravings from Baiardi – Carcani 1760, on which Maleuvre modeled items copied from the ­Herculaneum
wall paintings, are reproduced at the top: double tibia (VI, 8 and VI, 9) and a tambourin (VI, 7). – c. Pierre Maleuvre,
table VI in: Burney 1776, vol. 1.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music 53

Fig. 4  The figurine from Myrina showing a female trigōnum player

(100 – 50  BC) (Paris, Musée du Louvre).

Fig. 5  Seated woman playing a kithara. Wall painting from a reception hall in the villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Bosco-
reale, about a mile north of the ancient town of Pompeii. Roman, Late Republican period (ca. 50 – 40 BC) (New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1903 [03.14.5]).
54 Zdravko Blažeković

Fig. 6  Chiron teaching young Achilles to play lyre. – a. Wall painting from the Herculaneum Basilica. Naples, Museo
Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 9109. – b. Etching of the composition included in: Baiardi – Carcani 1760, 42. – c. Achil-
les’s lyre rendered by Pierre Maleuvre in: Burney 1776, table V, 12.

Fig. 7  Giovanni Battista Passeri, Tabula I, in: Doni 1763, vol. 1, 12. Instruments from the Herculaneum wall paintings
are reproduced as nos. IV, V, VI, and VIII.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music 55

Fig. 8  Silvestre David Mirys, drawing; Pierre Chenu, engraving, Instruments tires des Tableaux trouves dans
Herculaneum, in: La Borde 1780, vol. 1, 242.
56 Zdravko Blažeković

Fig. 9  Encyclopædia Britannica 1788 – 1797 pl. cclxxv. The six lyres are copied from Burney 1776: (1) lyre shown with
the Farnese Bull, the famous sculpture originally placed at the Caracalla Baths in Rome (212 – 216 AD; today at the
Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples). (2) lyre from a Herculaneum wall painting showing Terpsichore. (3) an
­apparently Abyssinian lyre, the picture supplied to Burney by the Scottish traveler and writer James Bruce (1730 – 1794).
(4) a lyre copied from the red-figure vase which was originally included in the collection of the British ambassador to
the court of Naples, William Hamilton (1730 – 1803). (5) Francesco Bianchini’s triplex lyra. (6) lyre shown with Chiron
teaching young Achilles to play, also from a Herculaneum wall painting.
 Vesuvian Organology in Charles Burney’s General History of Music 57

Fig. 10  Jean Hauer, Autels Trepieds et Instruments de Musique from “Differentes Antiques decouvertes a Herculanum
conserves dans le Museum de Portici pres de Naples” (1780s). Musical instruments include a sistrum, a frame drum, a
lyre, a kithara, and a trigōnum. Engraving, plate 225 × 160 mm (Collection of the author).