Knight attributes the “false inner-outer” practice to the Ruckers and, by implication, other northern-style harpsichord makers cutting a cap molding in to the top edges of their case sides to imitate the appearance of the cap moldings on a true inner-outer Italian harpsichord inside its separate outer case.

This is not consistent with the normally-accepted understanding of the term and the practice to which it refers. The consensus, supported by surviving examples of “false inner-outer” Italian harpsichords is, rather, that the Italians made some instruments with slightly thicker case calls (not all THAT much thicker, since the bentsides are little thicker than originally thin Italian case sides), thick enough to support a lid, for one thing, and then lined the upper insides, above the soundboard, with veneers and moldings to give the appearance of a separate instrument in a separate case.

In addition to the inner veneers and moldings (and sometimes, even omitting the cap moldings), they would glue keywell scrolls directly to the insides of spine and cheek at either end of the keyboard, to imitate the look of the front scrolls on that separate Italian harpsichord inside its outer case. Usually paint would be carried down into the keywell around and behind those faux scrolls to enhance the illusion that a more conventional thin-cased Italian harpsichord could be pulled out of its case.

There is so very little in common between Ruckers case construction and that of EITHER two-case or false-inner-outer Italian harpsichords, that I think Knight’s account is mistaken on nearly all counts. 

A discussion of what I have described here can be found in Hubbard’s Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, and in the fossil record of surviving instruments. There is an anonymous false inner-outer Italian harpsichord in the collection of the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota which I saw many years ago, whose trompe-l’oeul illusion of a light-cased Italian in a separate outer case was so effective that I made the museum staffer laugh at my futile attempts to pull the instrument out to look at its outer sides (which didn’t exist) more closely!

I have made a number of Italian harpsichords of the same basic design, in both true two-cased, and false-inner-outer styles. In spite of what Hubbard argues, they sound equally good.

The use of Italian construction, built up on and around the bottom framing, and the application of veneers and molding to suggest a two-cased traditional Italian setup, spread to other traditions, and can be found, on steroids, so to speak, in many instruments from 18h-century Germany, including those by Mietke, Zell and members of the Graebner family.

Has nothing whatever to do with Flemish or French styles of construction and the simple expedient of cutting a molding into the tops of the case sides.

Owen

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