There are some early monuments of Christian art dating from the fourth century in which the lyre is represented. In one of them Christ is depicted as Apollo touching the lyre. This instrument occurs at an early period in western Europe as used in popular pastimes. In an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the ninth century in the British Museum (Cleopatra C. VIII.) are the figures of two gleemen, one playing the lyre and the other a double-pipe. M. de Coussemaker has published in the “Annales Archéologiques” the figure of a crowned personage playing the lyre, which he found in a manuscript of the ninth or tenth century in the library at Angers. The player twangs the strings with his fingers, while the Anglo-Saxon gleeman before mentioned uses a plectrum.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.――CITHARA. From a 9th century MS. formerly in the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest.]
_Cithara_ was a name applied to several stringed instruments greatly varying in form, power of sound, and compass. The illustration (Fig. 23) represents a cithara from a manuscript of the ninth century, formerly in the library of the great monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest. When in the year 1768 the monastery was destroyed by fire, this valuable book perished in the flames; fortunately the celebrated Abbot Gerbert possessed tracings of the illustrations, which were saved from destruction. He published them, in the year 1774, in his work “De cantu et musica sacra.” As the older works on music were generally written in Latin we do not learn from them the popular names of the instruments; the writers merely adopted such Latin names as they thought the most appropriate. Thus, for instance, a very simple stringed instrument of a triangular shape, and a somewhat similar one of a square shape (Fig. 24), were designated by the name of _psalterium_.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.――PSALTERIUM. From a MS. of the 9th century, formerly in the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest.]
[Illustration: FIG. 25.――CITHARA. From a MS. of the 9th century, formerly in the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest.]
The _cithara_ here illustrated (Fig. 25) is evidently an improvement upon the triangular psalterium (Fig. 26), because it has a sort of small sound-board at the top. Scarcely better, with regard to acoustics, appears to have been the instrument designated as _nablum_, which is engraved (Fig. 27) from a manuscript of the ninth century at Angers.