A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
A player of a lute-type instrument appears alongside a chess game in the Libro de los juegos, the compendium of games commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile and completed around 1283 — cited in museum accounts as among the first depictions in which the European lute can be distinguished from the Arab ʿūd. The iconographic gap between Ziryāb's arrival and this image is more than four centuries, which is a real limitation on how tightly the oud-to-lute transmission can be dated: instruments of oud type are visible in Iberian art far earlier, but telling the two apart in a picture is not possible until the Western instrument had diverged enough to look different.
Uncertain — sources disagree, or the dating is contested. Stated here, not resolved.
Subjects
- European lute · artefact · Europe · not located
- Oud · artefact · Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean · not located
- Andalusia and al-Andalus · region · Spain · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
The Lute — Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
The medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud, takes its name from the Arabic al-ʿūd, cannot be distinguished from the ʿūd in Western iconography until about the thirteenth century, and appears in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed c. 1283; European players added frets. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary with the substance attributed to this Met essay; the essay page itself was not opened, and no plate, accession number or footnote in it was read.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Partly verified
metmuseum.org, essay on the lute
Recorded on European lute
- A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
- Granada falls and the Andalusi repertoire crosses to the Maghreb
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.