JAUME  BOSSER LUTHIER ROSES   home

  Here you can see some roses from my catalogue. Most of them are based on original patterns, some on the iconography, and a few are my own design –always following the early style. I make myself all the rose work by hand, both in wood and in parchment.

  There are many other designs to make a choice from; these are just a few samples. If you wish, you can also choose for your own instrument a different design from those offered, without any charge on the price, in most cases.

  Some evidence suggests that, in the early times, roses were made by specialist craftsmen, who sold afterwards to lute makers,  lute bellies completed with a carved rose. The same design appears sometimes in lutes made in different countries and at different centuries. Therefore, the names that appear under the roses depicted here just refer to the maker of the specific instrument from which I took the design, without pretending that such design should be characteristic or exclusive of such maker.

  I don´t pretend  to make exact copies: original roses are often deformed, with visible faults of symmetry, roughly carved, and with some parts missing.   

Click on any picture for an enlarged version. 

LUTE AND  ARCHLUTE ROSES

Carved on the belly wood.

Venere, Padua, 1560 to 1620 (very common design)	Frei, Bologna, middle 16th c.	Koch, Venice, middle 17th c.	Bellini (painting, beginning 16th c.)	Student model (own design)

SINGLE THEORBO ROSES

TRIPLE THEORBO ROSES

VIHUELA ROSES 

 In my humble opinion, taking into account existing evidence, vihuela and guitar roses are a very same thing and can be changed one by the other. Documentary evidence shows that, for example, at the end of the 16th c., the same workshop produced both vihuelas and guitars with sunken roses (a feature that we nowadays tend to associate only with baroque guitars).   

There existed an international trade of instrument parts: in a 1575 inventory of the tools in the shop of a vihuela maker from Toledo, there are “88 bellies from Venice with roses”. The same design may have been used in different centuries: the rose design of the anonymous vihuela (Paris museum, e0748), dated in the 16th c., reappears 200 years later –with the same structure but different ornaments- on an anonymous guitar found in Mallorca.

  Due to the scarcity of the surviving vihuela roses- just one, still under discussion-, my models are also inspired on surviving guitars and the iconography. They are made of several coats of parchment glued together –although other techniques may be used, such as in lute and orpharion roses.  

BAROQUE GUITAR ROSES

Giorgio and Matheo Sellas, Venice c. 1625	Jean Voboam, Paris 1699	Own design, inspired in several originals	Student model

ORPHARION ROSE

Made of pear wood with a coat of parchment beneath.

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